Chungking Express

Chungking Express Notes


http://www.filmeducation.org/pdf/film/Chungking%20Express.pdf

Research

Context - film anticipates the potential handover of Hong Kong from Britain to China.


















At the time that Chungking Express(1994) was being made, Hong Kong was undergoing changes and moving ever closer towards the millennium while another historical moment, its handover to China in 1997, was just round the corner. There seemed to be so many possibilities for the future; both bad things and good things could happen. Citizens of Hong Kong became increasingly anxious about the unknown future. They were worried that political changes would result in a decrease of freedom, an undesirable change in lifestyle, and a negative effect on the economy. Yet at the same time, they were happy to be part of their motherland again. Now, with the help of China’s abundant resources, Hong Kong could continue to excel in its economy and diverse culture, and even further push the country’s prosperity.

Themes
It is in the first half of the film that the notion, theme or conceit of expiry dates arises. Clearly this can be a reference to the impending end of Hong Kong as a British colony, but it is also a general theme which relates to the theme of change in the second half. It is no surprise that, together with the theme of change and dreams and travel (escape?) later on, people have perhaps over-emphasised the political reference as being absolute and central. Wong Kar Wai appears actually to be showing impermanence in everything (a concept prevalent in many philosophies), whereas some of his characters are unprepared for such change. In the ultra-transient setting of Hong Kong the effect is all the more profound, particularly when different time flows and deadlines converge and coincide. An example is when we hear Dennis Brown’s slow, soulful tones on the jukebox for the final time, and Brigitte Lin unexpectedly switches who is to be subject to an expiry date.

 
Or there is also the scene where Kaneshiro and Brigitte Lin share a room for the night, and she simply falls asleep leaving him with about four hours to spare (it’s at least two hours since his birthday started, and he leaves before his birth time of 6 a.m.). All he does is eat chef salads and watch TV, yet there is a sublime thrill to the perfectly captured impermanence of this scene. Rather than invoking anticipation, the moment is held within its own confines, finite yet eternal, enhanced by Don’t Look Now-style time inter-cutting of two different shots (although, ironically, it is not a sex scene but Kaneshiro eating and brushing his teeth - incidentally, the inter-cutting is not apparent in the international release version of the film, which features many minor differences). Wong Kar Wai invites us to share this ethereal scene, yet he also asks us to acknowledge that for Brigitte Lin this has been a non-experience - she sleeps through it and is only aware of an act of kindness where Kaneshiro has removed and polished her shoes.

 

Cult Hong Kong filmmaker Wong Kar Wai's Chungking express is a stylish combination of romance, dead-pan comedy and film noir set in and around Hong Kong's notorious Chunking Mansions, a complex of shabby hostels, bars and clubs teaming with illegal immigrants. The story centres on a small takeaway stall, the midnight express, which is frequented by two lovelorn cops.  They become involved with a mysterious drug dealer dressed in a blonde wig and sunglasses (Brigitte Lin), on the run from drug traffickers, and an impulsive young dreamer (Faye Wong) who works behind the counter of the Midnight Express. The central concerns of the film are identity and our reluctance to show, or to accept, who we truly are. The Brigitte Lin character wears a wig and sunglasses to hide her true self. Cop 223 refuses to accept the fact that his girlfriend has left him. The waitress (Faye Wong) secretly cleans the apartment for cop 633 who avoids reading a goodbye note from his ex-girlfriend and is unable to realise that his apartment is getting cleaner and cleaner. 

 

Wong uses fast-forward and pause in the film; we observe the speeded-up passing of

Clouds and Cop 633’s accelerated running. The use of voice-over obliges the audience to

Identify with the narrator. This identification is further emphasised by the frequent use of

Long takes which leave the protagonists either frozen in time, whilst other characters move

Hurriedly past in a jumble of vibrant activity, or else they are filmed (usually with a handheld

Camera) in such rapid motion that other characters and locations smear into a blur of

Colours.

 

• Both stories take place in part at the Midnight Express fast-food take-out counter. Both stories involve lovesick young cops who have just been deserted by their girlfriends, and both relate how the male protagonist strikes up a new romance. Otherwise, the two stories are entirely separate, the first taking up the first 45 minutes or so of the film and the second the remainder

• The two stories are tied together by just a single sentence at the transition point. The transition occurs when the first Cop 223, brushes past Faye, the new waitress at the midnight Express, and observes that ‘At the high point of our intimacy, we were just 0.01 centimetres from each other. I knew nothing about her. Six hours later, she fell in love with another man'. The immediately, the film shifts to the story of the waitress and the second cop 633.
  
  

• The pineapple represents May for Cop 223 and the expiration date is when his hopes for her expire. This notion, that nothing endures, that change is inevitable and unavoidable recurs throughout Wong’s films. Everything, decides Cop 223, has an expiration date.

Loneliness

• Loneliness and isolation, though, is a theme that is quite obviously and explicitly asserted in the film. The lonely feelings and isolation of the characters in Chungking Express and their distance between each other symbolize the distance between Hong Kong and China. Voiced-over monologues have been used extensively in the film to bring out important messages.

• The fact that the characters listen to their often self-indulgent internal monologues so frequently tells in itself how lonely people in Hong Kong can be, not to mention the contents of the monologues such as those in this one by the young cop Wu which appears in the very beginning of the film: "Everyday we brush past a lot of people. People who may become our best friends, or people we may never meet." In here, he is complaining about how hard it is to find a true friend in the hustle and bustle of city life(Schaeffer S07).

• Both stories deal with the subjects of loneliness and just wanting some companionship in the world, all with very realistic characters and settings -it carries an important theme of being emotionally isolated in Hong Kong, one of the most bustling, busiest cities in the world.

• 'California Dreaming' - The Mamas and Papas ( first play of the song that will become a motif for Faye's desire to escape Hong Kong.