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Wong Kar-wai (director), Chungking Express, 1994. 92 min.
Whenever I think of Wong Kar-waiβs Chungking Express I hear California Dreaminβ by The Mamas & the Papas and I see Faye Wong and Tony Leung standing always on opposite sides of a counter. No matter how many times Iβve seen it, I remember it as a showcase for Faye Wong. And it is! But sheβs not even in the first 45 minutes of the film.
While on a break from editing Ashes of Time, Wong Kar-wai decided to throw a movie together in his two months of spare timeβthe result is Chungking Express, which has a rushed, thrown-together quality. But this gives the film an unusual strength rather than weakness. Lacking the meticulous choreography and lighting of so many other films, it gains a lived-in feel. The actors stop feeling like actors and become people.
People like any of us. Like all of us.
Chungking Express is really two short films shoved together through sheer will, a conceptual framework, and a single location.
Brigitte Lin and Takeshi Kaneshiro in Chungking Express
The first of these is about a cop trying to fall in love. Heβs desperate for it and canβt let go. A woman in a blonde wig orchestrates drug smuggling, which falls apart on her. The two meet and share a drunken yet chaste night together. In the morning, she kills her former lover who set her up for failure and the young cop tries to sweat off his heartache to keep from crying. A smashing together of sad puppy romanticism and a noirish tale about immigration and exploitation makes for an inelegant pairing, but Takeshi Kaneshiro is so earnest and Brigitte Lin is so perfectly a femme fatale that one canβt help but be charmed by their story.
The second is more directly a romantic comedy and is really funny. This is Tony Leungβs first real collaboration with Wong Kar-wai and as much as this is a showcase for Faye Wong, Leung shines bright, with impeccable comic timing and a hilarious internal monologue. Faye Wong is your manic pixie dream girl a decade before Garden State (2004) and therefore long before anyone invented the term.
Faye Wong in Chungking Express
Wongβs character finds herself routinely going into Leungβs apartment and cleaning it, changing the decor, and even leaving her own things there, all without his characterβa copβnoticing anything. Eventually sheβs found out but itβs romantic instead of deranged.
Kim Ki-dukβs 3-Iron (2004) would dial up the romance and derangement a decade later using a similar conceptual framework.
Charm and style and the way Leung and Wong play off one another hold the film together. Keeps it lodged deep inside the viewer long after the credits roll.
But thereβs also this sense of space and its sharing. The cop in the first story mentions being 0.1 centimetres away from a woman with whom he falls in love. In a city like Hong Kong, where people are often packed tightly together, where you canβt help but push past others to where youβre going, this close proximity is unavoidable and often unpleasant, yet Kaneshiroβs character longs for it, as if the closeness of space could substitute for love and romance.
Two people sharing space together leads to unfulfilled love in the first story, yet in the second, two people sharing a physical space non-temporally manage to find one another by the end.
Thereβs a great beauty here wrapped in cuteness. A powerful statement about love and longing and desire and how we often cannot find love until we find and accept ourselves.
How to cite: rathke, e. βTwo Stories in One: Wong Kar-wai’s Chungking Express.β Cha: An Asian Literary Journal, 23 Jun. 2023, chajournal.blog/2023/06/23/chungking-express/.
e rathke writes about books and games at radicaledward.substack.com. A finalist for the Baen Fantasy Adventure Award, he is the author of Glossolalia, Howl, and several other forthcoming novellas. His short fiction appears in Queer Tales of Monumental Invention, Mysterion Magazine, Shoreline of Infinity, and elsewhere. [All contributions by e rathke.]
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