As Tears Go By 4K 1988 CHINESE Ultra HD 2160p

Story Movie

A medium-sized gangster has to make a choice between love for a woman and loyalty to the ideals of male friendship. In the first case, a long happiness in the family union in the second - death as payback for valor.

Review 4K Movie

It happens sometimes, when you see so many beautiful images from a movie, you want to watch it without even reading the plot. You just realize: this is it, it resonates! I turn it on! My eyes, of course, scream something about fierce Hong Kong showdown, male friendship and women in the passage, but the feeling of beauty inside is not deceived.

Long ago, a film by Chinese director Wong Kar-Wai with the tender title Till the Tears Are Dry (1988) languished on my mast-si list. Remembering his canvases "Love Mood" and "Chungking Express," I was expecting a love drama, but got a picturesque action movie about brotherly honor.

The gangster brothers, who have no sense of humor, roam the city, getting involved in a crime spree here and there. The main character - the older brother, swift and clever, constantly pulls his ungainly younger brother out of trouble. But can anything in the life of the protagonist change with the appearance of a beautiful girl?

Wong Kar-wai paints '80s Hong Kong in neon colors: dreary shades of blue, pungent red and suffocating purple. The city is maddening with teeming life, yet you feel the loneliness pervading in your heart and bones. There is little eroticism here, but the tension between the characters is throat-clenching, and the single kiss in the phone booth proves to be the most explicit scene.

The camera lives with the characters every movement, loves to slide vertically and be the protagonist's eyes in the street skirmishes. Not inside, no, it leaves you around, but physically you participate in scathing fights and then you can't come to your senses for a long time on the wet night pavement.

The unfamiliar Asian environment blows the brains out of a sissy like me. You want to get your fingers inside the movie and touch every character, to rub elbows in a mafia café, to stand in the rain at an empty market, to eat a stupid fish cutlet right on the street. And also to smoke, to smoke incessantly in every shot from morning to night, even if you have to spit out your lungs in the credits afterwards.

It's cramped, humid, and dangerous. There's no room for love here. And at the same time, the film is woven out of love. A love passionately desired but criminally elusive.

To watch Kar-Wai is to try to go beyond your established feelings and measured life. It's a huge step toward comprehending a living art that doesn't hide behind a cardboard polished script, but exposes a torn heart somewhere in the alleys between blood debt and bed with the woman you love.