A Hong Kong crime drama with style

Andy Lau and Maggie Cheung in "As Tears Go By." (Bam/Kino International)

Wong Kar-wai was about 30 when he introduced himself in 1988 with "As Tears Go By," and while he was obviously working to become the king of lush movie atmospherics, he was also apparently a student of both John Woo and Martin Scorsese's "Mean Streets." Which is to say before Wong cast spells with "Chungking Express," "Fallen Angels," "Happy Together," and "In the Mood for Love," he was under somebody else's spell. The wild fight sequences, the hellishly lit brotherly angst: He was mortal once.

"As Tears Go By," which starts a run at the Museum of Fine Arts today, is a lot less narratively grand than anything in Woo and less spiritually tormented than Scorsese's film. (A shouting match over a spiteful abortion is like "Mean Streets" with only a quarter of the guilt.) Hong Kong movie star and future Cantopop softie Andy Lau plays Wah, a junior gangster. He's one of the sexier hotheads ever to laze about his apartment and smash bottles on the heads of underworld thugs. If this guy walks into your noodle shop, duck.

The story revolves around Wah's efforts to keep his disastrously incompetent little brother Fly (a not-yet-hunky Jacky Cheung) out of trouble. There are easier jobs. Fly has managed to dig himself a number of holes in pursuit of loans and street cred. A stint selling fishballs off a cart is a last insult. The arrival of Maggie Cheung as a distant cousin spending a few nights on Wah's sofa provides him some romantic distraction. No matter what, though, his time is mostly spent sleeping, smoking (most of the budget appears to have gone to cigarettes), and putting out Fly's fires.

This sounds like a fairly standard debut. But Wong smothers the story with tremendous style. Some directors give you a healthy ratio of mashed potatoes to gravy. Wong seems not at all to care for the potatoes. Whenever he can, he bathes his shots in red and blue light deep and rich enough to pass for paint. The camera is restless. It grazes the felt of a pool table like a Panavision cow and swings down corridors and around corners as an ecstatic dog might.

Viewed 20 years later, a certain cheesiness blunts the film's hard edges. The synthesizer score suggests an early-'80s action-horror relic. As for the Cantopop repurposing of "Take My Breath Away," the Berlin love ballad from "Top Gun," it's nice to think of the song as Wong's showing his sense of humor. Maggie Cheung's character introduces herself to Wah wearing a medical oxygen mask (there's something up with her lungs). Otherwise, most of the laughs go right to Jacky Cheung.

"As Tears Go By" began Wong's exploration of the balance between achieving control and losing it. Characters try to rein in their tempers and their hormones, while a director tries to control the gush of his talent. Wong still has trouble with excess and lack - the too-muchness and not-enoughness in even some of his great later work. But now those struggles meticulously unfold atop a different, more astounding filmmaking mountain. In 1988 Wong was merely scaling its peak.

Wesley Morris can be reached at wmorris@globe.com. For more on movies, go to www.boston.com/ae/ movienation.