Wayne Wang on his seductive film mystery While the Women Are Sleeping
Hong Kong-born filmmaker talks about working with Japanese screen icon Takeshi Kitano, and a potential TV adaptation of his hit The Joy Luck Club, possibly involving other Hong Kong directors
It had been nearly five years since Wayne Wang last had a fiction feature to promote. But the Chinese-American director of Chinese Box (1997) and Maid in Manhattan (2002) was certainly in his element when I found him chatting with a small group of journalists at February’s Berlin Film Festival, where his latest effort, While the Women Are Sleeping, received its international premiere.
As Wang’s first fiction feature since 2011’s Snow Flower and the Secret Fan , the new film arrived with heightened expectations: it is his first Japanese production, and features legendary actor-director Takeshi Kitano’s first starring role in 12 years outside of his own directing efforts.
“Well, Berlin is getting really big,” reflects Wang, 67, when we meet up again on a far more relaxing afternoon in Hong Kong last month. “When I went to Berlin before, it was a smaller festival and it was more personal. You could get a more direct feedback [about your film] from everyone.”
Wang won the Silver Berlin Bear for the very talky Smoke in 1995, and there’s a case to be made that While the Women Are Sleeping could use some of its director’s intellectual candour in its marketing endeavour. In the film’s Berlin reviews, the trade papers Variety and Hollywood Reporter have both described it as an unsatisfying “thriller”.
Takeshi Kitano (right) and Shiori Kutsuna in a scene from While the Women Are Sleeping.
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The genre categorisation, which is sure to instil disappointment, troubles Wang. “I don’t agree with the label as a thriller,” he says. “It’s actually more a love story and mystery. It doesn’t have the traditional thriller elements.”
The film has since been released – and “played well” – in big Japanese cities, but “not in the countryside. They were expecting Takeshi to kill a lot of people and have a lot of sex,” Wang says, laughing. “Some critics have said, ‘Oh, nothing happens in this film.’ The violence is off-screen, and everything is actually off-screen.”
Jeremy Irons (right) and Maggie Cheung in a scene from Chinese Box.
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To be fair to Wang, While the Women Are Sleeping has already shown significantly more than the eponymous short story by Spanish novelist Javier Marías, on which the film is tenuously based. The original text consists almost entirely of a late-night conversation between a writer and his fellow hotel guest, an older man who reveals his daily ritual of taping his teenage girlfriend when she sleeps.
In the film, the story is stretched across several days, during which a frustrated writer (played by Hidetoshi Nishijima) sinks deep into the indecipherable relationship between the mysterious guest (Kitano) and his much younger companion (Shiori Kutsuna). The writer’s editor wife (Sayuri Oyamada), a neighbourhood izakaya owner (Lily Franky) and a police investigator (Hirofumi Arai) contribute to the puzzle.
Hidetoshi Nishijima (left) plays an author who encounters a strange hotel guest, played by Kitano in While the Women Are Sleeping.
