My Heart Is That Eternal Rose

Patrick Tam, perhaps the Hong Kong New Wave’s most daring modernist and a crucial influence on Wong Kar Wai, teams with cinematographer Christopher Doyle, a regular Wong collaborator, for a stylish “heroic bloodshed” melodrama starring Tony Leung Chiu-wai, Kenny Bee, and Joey Wong as three friends bound together by ties both criminal and romantic. With deliriously pulpy plotting, a synth-heavy score, luxuriously expressionistic imagery, and a climactic bloodbath for the ages, MY HEART IS THAT ETERNAL ROSE exists somewhere at the intersection of Wong’s cinema of longing and John Woo’s cinema of wrathful vengeance, standing as one of the high-water marks of Hong Kong crime cinema.