Chungking Express
You can
really hate Wong Kar-wai’s movies – or you can really
love them. But for whatever reason, Chungking Express is the exception. You will fall in love with it even if you
don’t quite get it. There are very few
movies that are as likeable and as fresh as Chungking
Express with or without the Wong Kar-wai sticker
attached to it. The movie’s themes are
unbelievably personal: you somehow feel as if you experience the emotions along
with the characters. Perhaps that’s what
Wong tries to do with this movie: make the viewer play along with the heart
ache and recovery of the main character, Cop # 663 (played by Tony Leung) as he
is courted by the vivaciously eccentric Faye (Faye Wong).
What’s even
more unique about this Wong Kar-wai flick is that it
was shot in only three weeks during his shooting of his other feature during
1993 called Ashes of Time (which is the farthest thing from the offbeat
comedic flavour of Chungking Express). Although the former pulled in the most time,
effort, and resources (as well as box office anticipation), it was in fact the
latter which did even better in terms of quality and depth. Wong intentionally chose to make the movie
with a paltry budget and did most of the takes with a hand-held camera. To give
himself a break from the heavy and controversial making of Ashes of Time,
Wong wanted to go back to the archaic way of making movies, where he would only
rely on his creativity and instinct.
Thus, in having most of the action taking place at night, this gave Wong
the opportunity to write during the day and to shoot at night. In fact, as the brilliant but eccentric
director explains, “Sometimes, I had the feeling to be a student in cinema
again, and it was a really refreshing, thrilling and revealing experience. I
realized that I came closer to the Hong-Kong pulse by working at such
pace.” What’s even more intriguing is
that only 45 minutes of the movie is captivating; the 1st half (involving
Takeshi Kaneshiro and Brigette
Lin) seems pointless and strangely motionless.
So why am I only interested in is solely the 2nd half of
the movie, the mini story involving Faye and Cop # 663? It’s so dazzingly entertaining and intimate. It’s hard to believe that Chungking
Express was Faye’s first foray
into the movie industry: but it certainly revealed that she can act as well as
she can sing. In fact, it was because of
Wong Kar-wai’s directorial style that allowed Faye to
shine in the movie. Wong is infamous for
his hands-off approach, permitting his actors to experiment and improvise to
their heart’s content; in fact, so much so that he irritates his actors (like
Leon Lai) who find his informal and eccentric method directionless and careless. Perhaps that’s the reason why Wong carefully
selects his actors for each movie: his systematic recycling of Leslie Cheung,
Tony Leung, and Maggie Cheung is due to their suitability to Wong’s style.
Love Lost and Heart Ache
Who hasn’t
suffered the slings and arrows of heart ache?
The pain throbs in you like a knife slicing through your skin and right into
your organs and finally stopping at the tip of your beating heart. You love someone, but the love is not
reciprocal; you feel like you really know someone, but that someone doesn’t
know you at all. #663 suffers this as he
loses his girlfriend (the lovely Valerie Chow), but what can he do? He’s helpless to his own heart. At the Midnight Express fastfood
stand, coffee is represented as the elixir to curing #663’s pain. Yet, the more he drinks it to drown his pain,
the less he is able to sleep (and hence, able to forget about her). His switch in the style of his food orders is
also intimately personal: each and everyone of us try
to forget our past loves through small changes of our lifestyles. We want to forget the past by changing the
present. Wong Kar-wai
discloses this point ever so subtly, using food as his symbol.
On a more
conscious level, #663 “humanizes” his apartment. Losing his girlfriend, he is lonely and has
no one to relate to anymore. At least
anyone that he feels he can talk to. So
quirkily, he begins forming a bond with his household items. In what has become a legendary scene analyzed
by film critics almost never fail to gloss over, #663 notices that his soap his
getting thin over time, so his tells his inanimate friend, “Look at you, you’re
depressed so you’re not eating. You’ve
become skinny now. You have to take good
care of yourself.” Poignantly, #663 is really
talking to himself through the soap, telling himself
to forget about her; there’s no point in abusing yourself for something you’ve
never done wrong in the first place.
Hidden Love
Love comes
from the strangest places and corners of the earth. Just as #663 is suffering from the breakup of his relationship with his stewardess girlfriend,
another female unbeknownst to him charmingly slides into his life. We can never forecast where this relationship
is heading: Faye plays it cool as she “acts” ever so casually and unaware of
#663 but in fact is obsessed about him while #63 doesn’t seem to know (nor does
her care) about his secret admirer, for he’s simply too depressed and dejected
to notice the anything around him anymore.
In fact, what #663 suffers is something we all go through in heart
aches, but Tony Leung does it with such subtlety that it’s like watching a home
video or documentary.
Faye has
fallen in love with #663 to the point of being obsessed. Keeping the key that #663’s girlfriend has
left for him, Faye sneaks into #663’s apartment each afternoon (a motif that
Wong uses in his later movies, “Fallen Angels,” and “In the Mood For Love”) to
clean up after him. Noticing how
slovenly he has become, how deteriorated his lifestyle has become due to his depression, she tries to fill his void. Extraordinarily, he never detects what’s
happening to his life, how gradually his slippers are replaced with new ones,
how his food is being more nutritious, how he’s getting more sleep (thanks to
Faye’s slipping sleeping pills into his water), how much he’s being really
loved – without ever even knowing it. At
this point, the movie has become personal to us: we wish we too have someone
that looks after us and loves us this way.
Then Wong makes us think even more: maybe there is this special someone
after all. Only we’ve never noticed it
or thought about it before.
Meanings! Meanings!
Meanings!
What would
a movie be without some deep metaphysical and metaphorical meaning? Watching a Wong Kar-wai
piece can be as disorienting as reading Paradise Lost without Coles
Notes. Meaning you really don’t understand what’s going on if you don’t pay close
attention. There’s so just much
symbolism oozing out of the movie that you may have an entirely different
interpretation from another person’s. So
is Chungking Express an art film or
simply a commercial feature dressed in postmodernism and directed by a avante-garde director? It’s probably both, but as one film critic
subtly puts it: “What is amusing when
watching Chungking Express is that you
realise that THIS is the movie that all Godard's fans
and followers have dreamt to make but somehow never did. So it's quite strange to realise that in HK,
they manage to make films that we should be doing in
Wong Kar-wai deliberately created his two main characters based
on Ouyang Feng and Huang Yaoshi from Ashes Of Times. He wanted to cast first as cop 663 Leslie
Cheung Kwok Wing, who had to decline the proposition due to a heavy schedule.
Wong cast then Tony Leung Chiu Wai who has, according
to Wong, "a natural copper look" and "he beautifully wears the
uniform". In Chungking Express the two cops
don't have a name but two id numbers. Wong Kar Wai gave them numbers the way Kafka gave his heroes simplified
names. There were originally going to be
three main stories in the film, but only two were used; the third one became
This Mamas
and Papas song is the main track played throughout the movie. If you’re not familiar with Wong’s style of auteurism, you’d think he was pretentious and
unoriginal. But hidden deep beneath the
almost endless playing of this song lies a deeper
message of love and love’s lost. Both
are trapped in
The Background to the Making of the
Movie:
The
Cantonese title literally translates as “Forests Of Chungking.” As Wong Kar-wai explains, Chungking Mansions are buildings in the Tsim
Sha Tsui area that
correspond to a microcosm equivalent to a miniature Hong-Kong. By spending his youth in such tight and humid
quarters of the city, where Chinese were mixed with westerners, Wong Kar-wai chose the
Originally,
Wong Kar Wai wanted to make
a road movie with Ashes Of Time. Swordsmen were supposed
to move from the
