Chungking Express
Towers of iron, concrete and neon stretch high into the sky like the canopies of an old forest. Hong Kong appears taller than it is wide; people live in the skies. With a total land area of 427 square miles and a population of over 7.3 million of various nationalities, it ranks as the world’s fourth most densely populated sovereign state. People — and their structures — appropriate all space, crowds streaming through the narrow streets and alleyways that are carved out of the concrete jungle. It is these spaces that Wong Kar-wai sets his 1994 film Chungking Express.
The title — derived from the Chungking Mansions, a great labyrinth of a building in Tsim Sha Stui in the Kowloon Peninsula of Hong Kong, and a hotbed of enterprise, crime, bars, restaurants, and travelling backpackers; and the Midnight Express, a modest takeaway stand in Lan Kwai Fong, in the central district of Hong Kong — is a two-part title for a two-part story. But it is the Midnight Express snack bar that acts as a focal point within the film, being frequented by the two policeman protagonists of the film, and also where the two strands of the film momentarily intersect at its midpoint, and the focus switches.
Perhaps Wong Kar-wai felt that a self-enclosed diptych was the best way of immersing himself and his audience within this polyglot city. The film shows Hong Kong as the global metropolis that it is. Coca-Cola is often drunk, and its branding and advertisements loom in the background of various shots and scenes. Another of the global giants, McDonald’s, also makes a customary appearance. And the criminal enterprise of the film’s first part is shown to be an accumulative band of different nationalities — many of them originating from the other side of Asia. Mandarin, Cantonese, Japanese and English are all spoken in the film, and most impressively, all four are spoken by Kaneshiro Takeshi’s Cop 223 in one conversation with veteran actor Brigitte Lin’s nameless character.
Wong is a director as cosmopolitan as the city he depicts. David Bordwell writes in Planet Hong Kong:
“At last Hong Kong found its exportable festival filmmaker, the one director no intellectual need be ashamed to like. Wong is cosmopolitan.”
He is a director compared to the bestselling Japanese writer Haruki Murakami, and has himself admitted a fondness for literature, and the greater influence it has over him than cinema. And he is a filmmaker promoted in the United States by Quentin Tarantino no less, and compared to the legendary new-wave French filmmaker Jean-Luc Godard. It are these comparisons to Godard — comparisons made due to Wong’s emphasis on visual and stylistic innovations over content — that I wish to focus on.
Bordwell has also described Wong as the most artistically adventurous, and perhaps most important, of contemporary Hong Kong filmmakers. His style is something he terms “avant-pop”. This is to say that a film like Chungking Express falls somewhere between mainstream entertainment cinema and the experimental avant-garde cinema of the French new-wave. It’s interesting to note that not only does Wong Kar-wai have a background in mass entertainment (writing soap operas and suspense serials), but also in graphic design. French director Cocteau has been quoted as saying that “cinema is still a form of graphic art”. Like this French avant-garde sensibility, Wong Kar-wai writes in pictures, and his work is indebted to French new-wave cinema such as 1960’s Breathless. Despite being heavily idiosyncratic, Wong’s films take popular norms as points of departure, in the same way that Godard drew upon the Hollywood noirs in his production of Breathless. Though it may be a intimate and seductive love story, Chungking Express also borrows ingredients from the film noir genre: the city, policemen and criminals, and bittersweet love stories. Wong uses these popular forms of cinematic entertainment as jumping off points to launch his film into experimentation.
Take for instance, the coffee drinking scene. Cop 663 drinks in slow-motion, whilst Faye motionlessly watches, but the people on the streets still swarm past at speed. Wong achieved this by shooting at 8 frames a second, with Tony Leung lifting his cup of coffee extra slow whist Faye Wong remained stationary. This allowed the moving crowd in the foreground to move quickly when the shot was projected at the normal rate of 24 frames a second. In post-production, the shot was further slowed down by printing multiple copies of single frames creating a sense of slow motion, and enhancing the distinction between the fast foreground and the slow background in the finished product. It is this beautiful and innovative shot that perfectly captures the moment time appears to slow down in comparison to the rest of the world during a moment of intimacy. For Wong, style is substance.
It is his heavily stylised films that have often led to Wong being described as an MTV director by other jealous Chinese directors. Though the correlations can be seen — an emphasis on music and style — it is in fact truer to say that music videos have been inspired by Wong’s films, as opposed to the other way round. Despite being a heavily stylised and narratively simple film, a featuring a fantastic breakout performance from pop-star Faye Wong, Chungking Express provides a lot more emotional depth than one of her music videos. Much of the film’s simplicity and experimentalism equally comes from its unusual production. It was shot in 23 days without a written script, Wong effectively making it up as he went along, often only writing scenes the night before, or on the day of shooting. As is the case for many of Wong’s films (take In the Mood for Love for instance), the film is made up of ideas assimilated from his own cast and crew, as well as his own memories and experiences. There is nostalgia here, both collective and personal. Thus, not only does this allow the film to appear organically spontaneous but gives the film a fresh sense of intimacy.
It is this spontaneous style that gives the film its content. Wong and his cinematographers, Wai-Keung Lau and Christopher Doyle (each cinematographer shot the first and second story respectively), often choose to shoot their characters and scenes obscured by the mise-en-scène of theirs spaces: through doorways and windows, and in the reflections of mirror. It is this framing technique that not only displays and transforms the confined spaces of the metropolis, but offers up new perspectives and ways of looking at things, creating a polyphony that is enhanced by the film’s numerous voice-overs. The vibrant colours and blaring tunes create a texture to the city, as if Wong is looking at the city through a kaleidoscope. And the film’s multiple narratives has ambitions of capturing this multifarious texture. Wong Kar-wai says:
“The two stories are quite independent. What puts them together is that they are both love stories. I think a lot of city people have a lot of emotions but sometimes they can’t find the people to express them to.”
Through doubled motifs, webbed parallels and echoic time structures, is able to bring the independent stories together as a panorama of Hong Kong and city-living. In a kaleidoscope, “the fragments usually tumble into a coherent pattern,” writes Bordwell.
“If memories could be canned, would they also have expiration dates? If so, I hope they last for centuries,” intones the voice-over of the pineapple-loving Cop 223. He is a character obsessed with expiration dates: the expiration dates of tinned pineapple bought at a corner-shop and the ‘expiration date’ of relationships. And the general critical consensus is that Wong is equally obsessed with time. However, Wong uses time rather as a way of exploring memory. Our protagonists insist on living their lives in relation and accordance to past relationships — relationships that we, the viewer, knows are over and will always remain that way. But in accordance to Wong’s intimate and irresistible style, the film’s pace slows down as it progresses: shots become longer and more drawn-out. The second story of the film is the most accomplished, perhaps due to the perfect collaboration between Wong and his second DP Christopher Doyle. The second half displays a more expressive and confident way of shooting the film. As time progresses, memories become more fragmented and incoherent, and the future appears to become an open-ended vista for the central characters. Instead of tightening up the plot, Wong slackens it. Hong Kong’s city-dwellers are trying to master the unbearable lightness of the present moment: to possess what can’t be possessed. Perhaps Wong is suggesting that in the city, emotional expression, intimate connection, or even love, provides a release from this.
Twenty-two years later, Chungking Express perhaps still remains a film best known for its stylistic innovation. Roger Ebert wrote in his review of the film:
“It needs to be said, in any event, that a film like this is largely a cerebral experience: You enjoy it because of what you know about film, not because of what it knows about life.”
I believe this statement is somewhat reductive. Though it is a film attentive to its own style, and invites the audience to be equally attentive, the beauty and the magic flows from it. There is a lot to be said here, and through his seductive style, Wong is able to say a lot without much at all. This is cinema about falling in love, but it also cinema falling in love.
