Lóránt Stőhr: Wong Kar-wai and the genre of melodrama

The author suggests that treating Wong Kar-wai’s films as melodramas may help us to discover some features of them that would otherwise remain uncovered. He starts with the observation that while Wong Kar-wai’s films are in some sense genre films, they always challenge the usual limits of the genre they are supposed to belong to. His main claim is that regardless of what traditional genre they belong to, all of these films are in fact melodramas. More precisely, to quote the author, they are masochistic melodramas, by which he means that they use a circular narrative structure that is based on repetition and that their characters are incapable of acting. He traces these properties of masochistic melodrama in all the Wong Kar-wai films, focusing mainly on the last works. Finally he compares the melodramatic character of Wong Kar-wai’s films with some classics of modernist cinema (Antonioni, Fellini), which can also be described as intellectual melodramas.