“As Tears Go By” is a beautifully-shot tragedy about a tough kid from the streets, whose loyalty to a self-destructive childhood friend becomes his undoing.

Current Hong Kong superstar Andy Lau plays the main character. His daily schedule consists of bailing his pal (Played by versatile character actor Jacky Cheung) out of debts to various petty gangsters. Lau will not hesitate to resort to violence; his life in the grimy slums of Hong Kong is one where violence is a necessary means of survival. Lau slaps around an ex-girlfriend, goes on an alcohol-fueled rampage, and smashes one of his “little brother” Cheung’s enemies’ head open with a beer bottle. However, it soon becomes clear that Lau’s boorish behavior masks deep-rooted self-loathing, and that he is tired of constantly having to come to Cheung’s aid. Unfortunately, even after Cheung puts his life at risk by getting in deep with a big-time gangster, Lau cannot bring himself to abandon his friend.

Making things even more complicated, Lau falls in love with his cousin, who comes to stay from the mainland. She plays beauty to his beast, and her vulnerability draws Lau’s more sensitive side out. Through her, he begins to recognize a way out of his violent life. Unfortunately, the night they get all dressed up for an evening on the town, Cheung arrives unexpectedly to their apartment, bloodied up from a pool hall fight. Lau kills the other gangsters in a vicious kitchen brawl. However, when he returns home, he finds that his cousin has gone back to the mainland, unable to deal with the violent nature of his life.

Lau soon regrets choosing loyalty over love, and he leaves Hong Kong for the mainland. While he is gone, Cheung continues picking fights with gangsters. One night, he does something that makes him a veritable “walking dead man.” Word eventually reaches Lau, who has married the cousin and has put his hoodlum past behind. For Lau, the choice is loyalty vs. love again; there is the old friend whom he cannot save, no matter how many times he bails him out, versus the idyllic life he now enjoys. Lau makes his choice, and while he chooses what he feels is right, one could argue that he chooses wrong.

“As Tears Go By” was released in 1986, and was the first film directed by brilliant Hong Kong director Wong Kar-Wai. It has often been compared to Martin Scorcese’s debut film, “Mean Streets.” Both are about low-level thugs who want to rise above the murky worlds they were born into, but are constantly dragged back down by crazy childhood pals. While Kar-Wai’s movie seemingly shares a general template with its predecessor, it has a look and a feel that are uniquely its own. “Mean Streets” always struck me as having a monochromal palate. However, the Hong Kong backdrops of “As Tears Go By” are emblazoned with pink, blue, and yellow neon lights. Also, Kar-Wai has a kind of dreamy optimism often missing in Scorcese’s work. The mainland China where Lau imagines his love has gone is suggested in the brief image of two buses passing each other on a highway, surrounded by green foliage and blue sky. And the amazing opening shot of the film, a wall of television monitors projecting a perfect day along the side of a building, suggests escape from the urban hellhole to be the most perfect kind of dream.

Wong Kar-Wai’s later works are often highly-stylized, and the handheld camerawork of “As Tears Go By” is closely reproduced in his 1995 film “Fallen Angels.” Other traits that show up again in “Fallen Angels” include use of wide-angle lenses, and jerky-looking fight scenes. I found the strobe-like effect of the fights to be especially interesting. At first, it seems as if the characters are moving in slow-motion, but actually, they’re moving fast, and it is the camera which cannot keep up. As a result, the knifefight in a busy restaurant has a chaotic kind of energy. Meanwhile, the viewer, while drawn in, remains confused and disoriented, as if he/she were in the middle of the centrifuge.

The acting in the movie is uniformly very good. Andy Lau, Jacky Cheung, and Maggie Cheung—who plays the adorable cousin—all appear in Kar-Wai’s sophomore flick, the superior “Days of Being Wild.” (1990) Both Cheungs also have parts in “Ashes of Time,” (1994) and Maggie had minor clashes with Kar-Wai during the filming of “In the Mood for Love,” (2000) which she co-headlined. As for Andy Lau, he has carved out a durable career as a leading man, playing everything from action hero (Ringo Lam’s “The Adventurer”) to prosthetic-wearing clown (Johnny To’s “Love on a Diet) to sleek villain (To’s “Fulltime Killer,” Andrew Lau’s “Infernal Affairs I and III.”) He sort of resembles a Chinese John Travolta, though the “Pulp Fiction” star never had to wear a fat suit like the kind Lau wore in “…Diet.” Lau is currently considered one of the Hong Kong film industry’s true movie stars. Clearly, he makes wiser choices for his life than his “As Tears Go By” on-screen counterpart.