You've watched In the Mood for Love, or Chungking Express, or Happy Together. Something happened. You don't quite have the vocabulary for what. You want more of it and you don't know where to look.
Here is where to look.
START WITH THE REST OF THE CATALOGUE
The Wong Kar-wai filmography is small - seven feature films - and they are all in conversation with each other. The order that makes the conversation most legible: Days of Being Wild (1990) first, to see the foundation vocabulary and meet the performers who will return. Then Chungking Express (1994) and Fallen Angels (1995) together - the fast mode and its darker companion, made simultaneously from the same material. Then Happy Together (1997) - the rawest, most politically explicit film, the one where the 1997 handover is closest to the surface. Then In the Mood for Love (2000) - the formal summation. Then 2046 (2004) as the aftermath.
Don't skip Days of Being Wild. It is less immediately accessible than the later films and more formally important. The vocabulary of the later films is established here in its first form.
THE FILMMAKERS IN CONVERSATION
Hou Hsiao-hsien worked in the same period and in some of the same thematic territory, and the two filmmakers are in implicit formal conversation about what Hong Kong and Taiwanese cinema could do in the 1980s and 90s. City of Sadness (1989) for the political weight that runs underneath the Wong Kar-wai films. Dust in the Wind (1986) for the specific quality of yearning that Wong Kar-wai is doing something with in his films.
Edward Yang's Yi Yi (2000) was made in the same year as In the Mood for Love and shares its formal patience and its specific relationship to time and family. The two films are the twin peaks of Taiwanese and Hong Kong cinema at the turn of the century. Watching them within a week of each other is one of the best comparative exercises in world cinema.
THE HONG KONG CONTEXT
Understanding the 1997 handover - the transfer of Hong Kong from British to Chinese sovereignty on July 1, 1997 - makes every Wong Kar-wai film more legible. The specific anxiety about identity that runs through his work is the anxiety of a culture that knows its distinctiveness is time-limited. Days of Being Wild is set in 1960 - a specific year chosen to be before the period when the handover became imaginable. Chungking Express is set in a present-tense Hong Kong that is always about to become something else. Happy Together is set in Buenos Aires in 1997, on the other side of the world from where the handover is happening.
The Wong Kar-wai films are about longing for things that cannot be kept. The 1997 context explains why that specific emotional register was available to him at that specific historical moment. He was making films about temporal loss in a city that was facing the end of its specific cultural moment. The emotional precision of the films is inseparable from the historical pressure they were made under.
WHAT COMES AFTER WONG KAR-WAI
If the formal vocabulary of Wong Kar-wai's films is what drew you in - the relationship to time, the specific way longing is made visible - the next filmmaker is Hou Hsiao-hsien for the more formally patient version and Johnnie To for the Hong Kong film that works at a different speed with different genre conventions but the same underlying relationship to the city's specific texture. The Thai filmmaker Apichatpong Weerasethakul inherits the slow-cinema relationship to time and emotion that the Wong Kar-wai films belong to, applied to a different geography and mythology.
Watching them within a week of each other is one of the best comparative exercises in world cinema.