Chungking Express (1994, Dir. Wong Kar-Wai)
Man in my dreams
Faye Wong, “Dream Lover”
I want you to be real
My heart can no longer resist
Searching in my dreams
At this minute I’m waiting
To be ecstatic, to be ecstatic
My films are never about what Hong Kong is like, or anything approaching a realistic portrait, but what I think about Hong Kong and what I want it to be.
Wong Kar-Wai
Thirty years ago this month I was a fresh grad teaching English to Renmin University first-years in Beijing. Five years past Tiananmen Square, the students were wary yet optimistic—the future unknown, but clear skies back in play—and I was just a little older than they were, and feeling the same. Without Internet or access to international TV, the only contact we had with the rest of the world came through scrubbed headlines in the local China Daily and movie nights at the campus cinema. One September Friday, my fellow teachers and I hit a double feature. First came Demolition Man, Sylvester Stallone and company dubbed into roughhouse Mandarin, even the sound effects ADR-ed with boops, whistles and clicks that might have come straight from a vintage Dr. Who episode. The student audience ate it up, especially when Wesley Snipes’ frozen head hit the ground and burst into smithereens.
And then came the second film: Chungking Express. It had English subtitles but the title wasn’t translated; I stared at the literal Chinese title (Chungking Forest) and pondered. (Later I would learn that the title was an offhand tribute to Haruki Murakami’s Norwegian Wood). As the film unfolded, my pondering transitioned to wonderment, and finally delight. The students were having none of it. Nonplussed by the offbeat characters and pacing, so unlike Demolition Man (and typical Hong Kong pictures), flummoxed by a plot that gestured towards noir and comedy and romance but never embraced them, they started streaming out of the theater about fifteen minutes in. The handful of us who stayed to the end were bonded by Chungking’s spell; we exited the theater into deep night, dazed, thoughtful and giddy. Looking back, that evening, that point of time in our lives, and that movie were made for each other. Like Chungking‘s characters, we were all twentysomething, quixotic, and intoxicated by possibilities. All these years later, the magic of the movie is that it still engenders those feelings.
At the time, we didn’t know who Wong Kar Wai was, or that he’d already gained a reputation as an auteur. His first film As Tears Go By (1988) was a modest gangster drama infused with artsy flourishes, but his lush, fatalistic follow-up Days of Being Wild (1990), a tale of lost lovers in sixties Hong Kong, codified his aesthetic: a vaporous atmosphere equal parts nostalgic and melancholic, relentless internal monologues, musings on the fleeting nature of time and the permanence of memory, straightforward plot replaced by comings and goings, love as close as a whispered confidence or as far away as two people sharing a moment but not each other. Critics lauded it; audiences used to action flicks and comedies were bewildered. Never mind just walking out during the show—in Korea, audiences “threw things at the screen,” according to Wong. Still, Days of Being Wild set his course: since then, for better or worse, he’s been free to pursue his idiosyncratic visions.
Befitting a hotshot genius, Wong’s next project, the hallucinatory martial arts classic Ashes of Time (1994), took all of Days’ idiosyncracies to the next level, going way over budget and schedule. (Most of his subsequent movies would follow a similar pattern: shoot mounds of footage, wrestle with the results, strain to piece together an emotionally if not logically coherent final product, with major characters and plotlines sacrificed along the way.) Weary of the chaos he had created on Ashes, Wong needed a palate cleanser, and took advantage of a break during post-production to shoot and edit Chungking Express in two months, composing the story as it was being filmed.
The result is the most ingratiating movie in his filmography, a meditation on love and urban alienation that stays light on its feet. Like the characters in a Murakami novel, Chungking‘s protagonists yearn to break out of their solitude but struggle to break out of their own heads. Their occupations—drug runner, cop, food stand worker—matter less than the totems they use to get through life, be they a blond wig, soon-to-expire pineapple cans, a “boarding pass” for a date scribbled on a napkin, or a favorite song played over and over and over. But if the characters recall Murakami, the film’s vibe is all its own; how could it not be, considering the time and place? Few cities in film history are as distinctive as mid-nineties Hong Kong, with its multinational jumble of cultures, its grunge and neon glory, the inescapable sensation that change is imminent (the colony’s 1997 handover to China was looming large). It’s the perfect setting for characters who run themselves in circles, daydreaming of better while losing track of the present, and Christopher Doyle’s cinematography, restless even in contemplative moments, captures them in smeary bursts of action, fugitive glimpses through doorways and between shelves, and within tight spaces, emphasizing the point: these are caged birds longing to fly (sometimes literally—planes and air travel are a running motif throughout).
Chungking Express bolts together two narratives that are encapsulated in its title: the first takes place around Chungking Mansions, a hive of chop shops, scum and villainy in congested Kowloon, while the second revolves around the Midnight Express food stand, located in the more upscale but no less bustling Lan Kwai Fong. The opening tale tracks the separate paths of newly heartbroken cop 223 (Takeshi Kaneshiro) and a drug smuggler-killer on the run (Brigitte Lin), their unlikely meet-up leading to a tryst of sorts in which both never learn who the other truly is. The second, quirkier storyline sees Midnight Express worker Faye (Faye Wong) take her crush on local cop 633 (Tony Leung) to fanciful extremes, as she gets access to his apartment and introduces some “improvements” while he remains blissfully unaware of her intrusions. Within this simple structure, parallels and identity shifts run rampant. A gangster’s moll who wears a blond wig is replaced in the gangster’s affections by a younger version in a blond wig. A cop becomes a food stand owner while a food stand worker becomes a stewardess, replacing the cop’s former air stewardess girlfriend. Characters bump into each other, as if ordained by fate, only to fall in love with someone else a few hours later. Songs like Dinah Washington’s “What a Difference a Day Makes” and Dennis Brown’s “Things in Life” comment on the characters’ predicaments and suggest courses of action. Would-be lovers draw close, then part. Everyone may be seeking something permanent and true—“Love you for 10,000 years” is the password for Cop 223’s pager—but the film suggests that life is more fluid, and fickle, than that.
Yet for all of Chungking’s reversals and thwarted connections, dreams and memories remain eternal—as does longing. Lin’s character may be a hard-bitten cynic—“Really knowing someone doesn’t mean anything. People change,” she declares—but a single weary lift of her head hints at submerged wants and needs. Resistant to Kaneshiro’s puppy-dog charm, her eyes hidden by sunglasses, Lin does her best Garbo from under that blond wig, making fatalism feel downright languorous. While most who sing Chungking’s praises tend to give the tale of Lin’s killer and Kaneshiro’s cop short shrift, it’s a triumph of mood, bathed in midnight blues and burgundy reds, the atmosphere thick with yearning, and it concludes with two simple acts of kindness and a rapturous freeze-frame: a memory cemented for all time, a paean to almost-romance that’s better than the real thing.
Maybe I’m so interested in time because, as a filmmaker, I always have so many deadlines. But despite all that, there’s one thing that doesn’t ever change, and that’s the desire people have to communicate to others.
Wong Kar-WaI
The story of Faye and Cop 663 is more whimsical, thanks to Faye Wong; her elfin looks and pixie haircut might reference Jean Seberg from Godard’s Breathless, but her spaced-out performance is all her own. In a film stuffed with dreamers, she dreams the biggest, blasting “California Dreaming” and “Dream Lover” (itself a Cantonese reinterpretation of the Cranberries’ “Dreams”) on her stereo every chance she gets (“The louder the better, it stops me from thinking”) and contemplating escape from Hong Kong entirely. Cop 663 is more a sleepwalker than a dreamer, living in a stupor after a romantic breakup; Leung’s bemused performance finds the humor in his paralysis, balancing out Wong’s flighty antics. As Faye remakes Cop 663’s apartment without his knowledge, she shakes him out of his rut—or is he merely exchanging sleepwalking for dreaming? He absent-mindedly treats the new items Faye has left behind—a cuddly Garfield doll, a Mamas and Papas CD, a fat bar of soap (“Why’d you let yourself go?” he chides it)—as if they’ve been his all along, and it’s like a meeting of unconscious minds, as physical commodities themselves (and few places are as commodity-conscious as Hong Kong) become whatever one wants them to be. “Could dreams be contagious?” Faye ponders. Dangerous, too; the closest the two come to a romantic clinch is cut short when Wong falls asleep, for how can reality compete with a dream?
If all this sounds a bit on-the-nose, rest assured that Wong’s filmmaking is too giddy to linger on themes. Throwing his cinematic predilections at the screen—a little Godard here, a little Antonioni there—he stretches, compresses and dilates time, conjuring striking frames and camera movements seemingly from thin air. Characters are viewed through windows and glass counters, as reflections on an escalator’s stainless steel surface, or against neon-lit rain, the hustle and chaos of urban life rendered as visual poetry. Most memorably, we’re invited to join them in reverie when they sit frozen in place while the world rushes around them, as if time has slowed to the speed of their dreams. But no dream lasts forever, and even as romance beckons towards Faye and Cop 663, so does change and the inevitable passing of time, as Chungking gains a bittersweet edge down the stretch. Yet all is not lost; in what might be the most hopeful conclusion to any of Wong’s movies, the film climaxes with a leap of faith and the possibility of a new start, as two people share both time and space. Cue “Dream Lover,” as a fresh dream takes hold.
Chungking Express is both a high point and an outlier in Wong’s career. Never again would he attempt something so off-the-cuff and effervescent, although his follow-up, the acrid and garish Fallen Angels, would reuse many of Chungking’s motifs and themes (including a discarded plotline involving an assassin). Soon Wong would abandon present-day Hong Kong for good, retreating into a Hong Kong of the past (the acclaimed In the Mood for Love) or nebulous future (2046), his work growing ever more ornate, his characters getting more desperate even as their foibles remained the same. As with most directors branded as geniuses at an early age, Wong has had to contend with charges that he’s repeating himself, that his stylistic tics have grown stale, that what once was new has become an all too-familiar roundelay—all of which are fair accusations, especially if you’re talking about My Blueberry Nights (an ill-fated application of Wong’s aesthetic to an American road movie).
But Chungking Express still enchants because of its freewheeling energy, its embrace of human connection, no matter how slight, and the relatability of its characters’ desires and screw-ups. In these characters, we recognize the young versions of ourselves: a little lost, a little loopy, a little unresolved, still in progress, our youth bestowing upon us the privilege of dreaming and sleepwalking. The eternally youthful Chungking preserves that privilege in a quicksilver confection, speaking to the twentysomething in all of us, even if the twentysomething happened to be in a student movie house in Beijing three decades ago. ■
