WONG Kar-wai, the Hong Kong cult filmmaker famous for his lust for perfection, has taken a martial-arts thriller he released in 1994, tinkered around with this and that, and released it as “Ashes of Time Redux.”
It has an all-star Asian cast – Leslie Cheung, Maggie Cheung, Brigitte Lin, Tony Leung Chui-wai among them – but they take a back seat to the mesmerizing lensing by Christopher Doyle, the Australian who has worked on nearly every Wong film.
The script is very loosely based on a 1957 martial-arts novel, “The Legend of the Condor Heroes,” and deals with unrequited love, a subject Wong often tackles. (“In the Mood for Love” and “Chungking Express” are good examples.)
The film has all the visual flourishes we expect of Doyle and Wong, and they’re reason enough to see “Ashes of Time Redux.” Just don’t expect to make sense of the plot.
In Cantonese and Mandarin, with English subtitles. Running time: 93 minutes. Rated R (violence). At the Angelika and the Lincoln Plaza.