Ashes Of Time

Wong Kar-Wai's recent critical and box-office success, In The Mood For Love, showed how Hong Kong/Chinese filmmakers have been adapting their material to Western tastes.

Odd how few critics spotted (or noted) that the film was a clever take on Brief Encounter, telling the story of marital infidelity from the viewpoint of the injured parties rather than the lovers.

Ashes Of Time is a more indigenous product of Hong Kong, telling what appears to be a series of vignettes - a man discovers that wine drinking causes memory loss and a tangled love life, a blind swordsman is recruited to foil a gang of horse rustlers - and then gradually pulling them together into a tapestry of Cantonese society.

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