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Torn between a tender new love and the violent demands of street life, Wah tries to build something more human for himself while being pulled back by his reckless friend Fly.
As Tears Go By was Wong Kar-wai’s feature directing debut, and even in this early film you can already feel the style that would later define him: bruised romanticism, nocturnal cityscapes, and sudden bursts of intimacy inside violent worlds. It arrived in 1988, when Hong Kong crime cinema was booming, but Wong pushed the material toward mood and longing rather than straight genre mechanics.
The film is often linked to Martin Scorsese’s Mean Streets, but it is not simply an imitation. What makes it memorable is the way Wong folds gangster material into something more fragile and melancholic, turning Mong Kok into less a battleground than an emotional pressure cooker.
Wong was also given unusually strong creative freedom for a first-time director, thanks in part to producer Alan Tang. That freedom mattered. Instead of following the muscular rhythm of many late-1980s Hong Kong crime films, Wong leaned toward atmosphere, hesitation, and emotional drift — qualities that would later become central to Days of Being Wild, Chungking Express, and In the Mood for Love.
The casting now looks almost unreal in retrospect: Andy Lau, Maggie Cheung, and Jacky Cheung were all major young stars, and the film caught them at a fascinating moment, before Wong Kar-wai became an international auteur brand. Jacky Cheung in particular won major praise for his volatile supporting turn.
Although it was a commercial Hong Kong release, the film later gained an important afterlife abroad. It was screened at the 1989 Cannes Film Festival, an early sign that Wong’s work would travel far beyond local genre expectations.
One more striking footnote: for years, As Tears Go By remained Wong Kar-wai’s highest-grossing film in Hong Kong, which is a reminder that his career did not begin as rarefied art-house myth. It began with a street film that connected with audiences before the legend fully formed.
