The Hand (Wong Kar-Wai, 2004)

 Cast: Chang Chen, Gong Li, Feng Tien, Chun-Luk Chan, Jian-Jun Zhou. Screenplay: Wong Kar-Wai. Cinematography: Christopher Doyle. Production design: William Chang. Film editing: William Chang. Music: Peer Raben. 

Wong Kar-Wai’s The Hand was made as a segment for an anthology film called Eros, which also included films by Michelangelo Antonioni and Steven Soderbergh, neither of which were critically well-received. But The Hand has since been released by itself in an extended version, although it remains somewhere between the length of a feature and that of a short subject, just under an hour, so it’s rarely shown except to film classes or at festivals – or in my case, on the Criterion Channel. It should be better known, because it’s an exquisite sample of the director’s art, a languorously beautiful exploration of a relationship. It’s at the other end of the spectrum of Wong’s work from his raucous excursions into the world of Hong Kong youth, As Tears Go By (1988) and Chungking Express (1994). It has more in common with what some think is his masterpiece, In the Mood for Love (2000), the intensely poignant study of a doomed love affair. There is hardly even an affair in The Hand, the story of a courtesan and the tailor who makes her dresses. When Zhang (Chang Chen) first meets Miss Hua (Gong Li), she is at the peak of her success at attracting wealthy clients. Amused by the diffident young tailor’s apprentice, she imperiously orders him to take off his trousers and gives him a hand job. Over the years, her fortunes decline, but Zhang continues to make her dresses and eventually pays the rent for her room in a fleabag hotel. The film is framed by their last meeting, in which it’s clear that Miss Hua is dying, possibly from an STD. We see part of this final encounter at the start of the film, in which the camera focuses only on Zhang’s face – we don’t see her until the film flashes back to that first meeting and begins its story of their intertwined careers. Beautifully shot by Wong’s frequent collaborator, Christopher Doyle, the film also benefits from a score by Peer Raben, who had a similarly productive collaboration with Rainer Werner Fassbinder. 

Coming Home (Zhang Yimou, 2014)

Coming Home is a story of post-traumatic stress, in which the PTSD is not just manifest in particular people but in a whole society. The immense trauma of the Cultural Revolution of the 1960s and '70s was shared by an entire people, though it's embodied in Zhang Yimou's film in a single family: Lu Yanshi (Chen Daoming), his wife, Feng Wanyu (Gong Li), and their daughter, Dandan (Zhang Huiwen). Like many intellectuals, Lu, a professor, is sent during the Cultural Revolution to the countryside to work as a laborer, but he escapes and returns to his family, which has been warned by the authorities to turn him in. When he shows up at their home, Feng wants to hide him, but Dandan, an ambitious young ballet student, betrays him on the promise that she will get the lead role in a production of The Red Detachment of Women. When Lu is finally released and returns home, he finds that Dandan has given up her ballet career -- the promised lead role is denied her anyway -- and is estranged from her mother, who has never forgiven her. But Feng has suffered another trauma, which affects her memory: Not only does she forget mundane daily tasks, she also fails to recognize Lu when he appears. Because she has been told that he will be returning on the fifth of the month, she goes to the train station once every month to wait for him, returning in disappointment. Lu tries everything he can to restore his wife's memory: He pretends to be a piano tuner so he can play a song they once shared, and when a cache of letters he wrote to her on scraps of paper while in prison shows up, he reads them to her, becoming a familiar figure in her life and engineering a rapprochement between her and Dandan, but never quite breaking through the bloc in her memory. It's a somewhat conventional and sentimental story, but Zhang makes it work, with the special help of three exceptional actors. Gong Li gives one of her finest performances as the deeply damaged Feng Wanyu, her face revealing the exact moment when her flickering hopes of reunion with her husband are extinguished by doubt or disappointment or fear. Chen Daoming makes Lu's patient, dogged attempts to cope with his wife's disorder credible, even when the script by Zou Jingzhi sags occasionally into predictability. And Zhang Huiwen, discovered by Zhang Yimou at the Beijing Dance Academy, is both a fine dancer and an actress capable of evoking Dandan's adolescent petulance. The cinematography is by Xiaoding Zhao and the music by Qigong Chen.