my problem with his films...

Are the characters, they never feel like real people to me. Despite his attempts to explore some truly human themes in his work (heartbreak, longing, unrequited love), the way he writes and creates his characters never feels authentic to me. They always seem to represent ideas more than anything, and are not as flesh and blood as they should be.

His characters always just have one or two traits assigned to them. They're either brooding loners longing for human connection they can't possibly achieve, or happy-go-lucky dreamers completely addicted to love. That's it. He rarely creates characters that are three-dimensional in the way they behave. Instead, he wants us to observe them from afar as walking mannequins for his clothes, but not real people who actually change what they wear from time to time.

This approach of his works well when he's dealing with genre and archetypes (assassins, swordsmen, film noir criminal types etc) but whenever he tries settling down to make movies about seemingly ordinary people, it always falls short for me, as he seems to not be able to give them any more than just one set of clothes. All they have are a singular goal, a singular interest, and a singular personality. He does not make movies about real people, he makes movies about ideas of real people.

Don't get me wrong, Wong is quite talented in many ways, but his inability to transcend beyond creating mere archetypes and walking mannequins in his films tends to always create something of a disconnect for me. It's like he can't make his mind sometimes whether he wants to be a filmmaker of style or a filmmaker of substance. Chungking Express (love the first half, hated the second) is the perfect embodiment of this for me.

Who else feels this way?