Missed Connections – “In the Mood for Love” (2000)
As the most celebrated film from one of the greatest director-cinematographer pairings in the history of cinema, “In the Mood for Love” is miraculous in how it captures Wong’s grand themes of loneliness, longing and love. So deeply felt are these emotions, that almost every composition and flow of action feels serendipitous. Music, acting, mise en scène, framing, dialogue, the sumptuous and never-garish reds and blues, Doyle’s observant camera; everything syncs to create something timeless and extraordinary. This shot, lasting just over 30 seconds on screen, sees our central characters Mr. Chow (Tony Leung) and Mrs. Chan (Maggie Cheung) at the peak of their happiness together, working together on Chow’s story. In one of the film’s iconic slo-mo montages while ‘Yumeji’s Theme‘ seduces us through the speakers, the camera is positioned behind Chow and starts to pan right, captures her looking at him, continues to move behind her, and lingers for a beat or two while framing him in deep concentration. Lingering for a beat, it returns the same way, behind her, capturing her fixated focus at work now, before ending back on his left side, and him – his concentration briefly broken – glancing up at her. Crucially, both are reflected in a mirror, so while the camera glides to the music (or the music follows the camera’s movements) the two of them are doubled, so that we are, in a way, looking at four people. It’s a masterful shot because in 30 seconds it captures the essence of Wong’s themes; the duplicitous nature of their connection (their respective spouses, whom we never see, are having an affair with each other), the missed connection symbolized in the longing gaze while the other is not looking, and the half-circular tender swing of the camera movement returning to where it came (a signature motion that’s everywhere in the film) reminding us how retracting steps and mirrored movements are integral to understanding the nature of the film’s emotional flow. This fantastic video essay goes into greater depth regarding the frames-within-frames construction in the film. With Ping Bin Lee & Pung-Leung Kwan
“Why didn’t you block my sword?” – “Hero” (2002)
Director Zhang Yimou comes from a cinematographic background, so when he paired up with Christopher Doyle for his martial arts epic “Hero,” visual beauty was a given. Every frame, every composition, in this film is lush, wondrous, and awesome in the true sense of the word. Each version of the central story is unabashedly adorned by a single color – red, blue and white – while the present is bedecked in black, and flashback scenes are as green as evergreen. Doyle shoots the colors in a way that devours the screen, so that key fight sequences – the one in the forest or the one on the lake, for example – resonate in our minds in shades of red and blue. The beauty contained in every shot is impressive even for masters like Doyle and Yimou, but it’s in the white version where I’ve found my favorite shot. Shooting in the desert must be one of the greatest challenges a cinematographer can face, and in an interview with filmdetail, he calls it “finding the sculpture in the stone.” When Broken Sword (Tony Leung) gives his life so that the woman he loves, Flying Snow (Maggie Cheung), can understand that letting the King live is more important – it’s the most heartbreakingly pure and essentially heroic moment of the film. She lets out a primal scream, and it cuts to this incredible wide shot of the elemental desert landscape, with the sky and its pinkish hue above them, and a powerful gust of wind – nature’s silent symbolizer – blowing their corporal connection away. At once dreamlike, emotional and primeval; the shot goes to show that, in the hands of a master DP, a stunning film like “Hero” can contain scenes with the least amount of flashy color and still visualize intense emotion, on a cosmic scale.
Twisted Nutrition – “Three… Extremes: Dumplings” (2004)
There was no way of talking about one of Doyle’s more brilliantly twisted shots without completely spoiling “Dumplings.” Originally shot as a short for director Fruit Chen as part of a horror anthology “Three…Extremes” (the other two shorts are directed by Park Chan-Wook and Takashi Miike, by the way, so the whole thing is well worth checking out), “Dumplings” is about desperate Mrs. Li (Miriam Yeung) who seeks the help from an unsettling medicine woman (Bai Ling), known for her special, youth-restoring dumplings recipe. During the film’s pivotal moment, Li finds out what the special ingredient is (aborted fetuses!), runs away, tries to vomit it all out of her mind, but is suddenly compelled to return. What follows is a discombobulated sequence of blurred cuts, distorted angles and lopsided framing before the shot in question makes us simultaneously recoil in horror and marvel at its genial composition. Shot underneath Mei’s glass table, the two women stare at the red speck in the center, the tiny humanoid form that goes ever-so-slightly in and out of focus and acts like a branding iron that burns the moment into our retinas. “Nothing in the world can beat this nutrition,” extols Mei, as she leans for a closer look at one point and her face gets contorted through the fetal blood. It’s truly horrific stuff, and Doyle compliments the disturbing themes with an appropriately disturbing angle, confirming that the colour red can provoke revulsion just as easily as passion.
