Although wholly original story, Wong Kar Wai's “Ashes of Time “ is loosely based on the famous novel “The Eagle Shooting Heroes” by Jin Yong (Louis Cha). Specifically, it is about the early life of the three characters from the book , Hong Qigong (who later becomes the North Beggar/ founder of the Beggar Sect), Huang Yaoshi (who later becomes the Eastern Heretic/ Master of Peach Blossom Island) and Ouyang Feng (who later becomes the Western Venom/ Lord of White Camel Mountain).
Wong Kar Wai has recut and restored his 1994 epic “Ashes of Time”, much as Francis Coppola did with “Apocalypse Now: Redux”, resulting in “Ashes of Time: Redux”, after discovering that not only were there several different versions of the film in circulation, some approved by him, some not, but the original negative and sound materials were in danger of rapid deterioration, after the lab in which they were stored in Hong Kong was suddenly shut down. Several changes were made and some new materials were added. “Ashes of Time: Redux” was premiered at the 2008 Cannes Film Festival.



The film is set in five parts, five seasons that are part of the Chinese almanac. The story takes place in the jianghu, the world of the martial arts. Ouyang Feng (Leslie Cheung) has lived in the western desert for some years. He left his home in White Camel Mountain when the woman he loved chose to marry his elder brother rather than him. Instead of seeking glory, he ends up as an agent. When people come to him with a wish to eliminate someone who has wronged them, he puts them in touch with a swordsman who can do the job.

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Jonathan Rosenbaum rightly described Jim Jarmusch's 1995 film Dead Man as an "acid western," but I wonder if he had known that Wong Kar-wai beat Jarmusch to the punch in 1994 with his acid wuxia, Ashes of Time. Re-cut and restored finally in a Redux re-release, Wong's film is his most singular statement and is finally available in a beautiful print, properly subtitled for the first time for Western audiences.
At once a mirage that vaporizes in undulated waves of saturated color and stuttered movement before you can grasp it, and a definitive version of the filmmaker's paeans to lost love and resigned memory, Ashes of Time Redux is Wong's most important film and his first masterpiece. Known so much for rooting his love stories in constrictive urban spaces, Wong's epic is as abstract as a love story, let alone a chivalric martial arts film, can be. Structured into sections named after the four seasons, each rhymed with the greatest swordsmen from the four points of the compass, Ashes of Time doubles, triples its lost memories. Swordsmen see one woman in another, a wandering fighter sees the second woman in the first, a woman (the fantastic Brigitte Lin, in the film's best performance) plays twin brother and sisters, both obsessed with each other and both obsessed with the same sword-fighter. With the land nothing but a vast desert ("Beyond the desert? More desert") the martial heroes and their memories of love cross one another not in space but in time, spinning shadows of a whirling birdcage carving a sense of criss-crossing, looping time rather than casting shadows to carve out space in Leslie Cheung's inn at the crossroads of time .
In the film's most glorious gesture, an epilogue tangent says that Brigitte Lin's twin sister would later duel only her own reflection in water, as there was no greater match for her skills. Wong has never taken his stories of lost love to such hallucinatory, oneiric heights, grounded, if only just barely, not by an urban Hong Kong setting but by conventions of the wuxia world and dialog pulled from the film's source novel. Here is the matrix of melancholy, before it is rooted in society, before it becomes associated with the 1960s, or Shanghai, of pre-1997 Hong Kong, or the future. Here it is closest to Alain Resnais, a filmmaker Wong has always had a great deal in common with thematically but only in Ashes of Time and its crypto-remake 2046 has the filmmaker challenged film form to tackle memory and longing through pure neo-expressionism. Messy, intoxicatingly insular and obsessive, and painfully tortured by a kind of ecstatic regret, Ashes of Time has re-emerged as one of cinema's greatest films. - - ~ Cannes Film Festival, 2008 – Daniel Kasman