Chungking Express

Off to the cinema to see Chungking Express, a cyberpunk science fiction film set in a futuristic city that looks like something from a William Gibson novel. It tells the tale of a bunch of human-like androids who fall in and out of love, set against a finely-detailed backdrop of neon signs and old-fashioned corded phones. According to my notes the production team went to the trouble of going back in time to 1994 in order to assemble all of the old-fashioned gadgets, and to make things real spicy-like they stayed there, in 1994, and shot the whole movie with 35mm film, in 1994, as if it was 1994, which it was.

I'll start again. Wong Kar-wai's Chungking Express (1994) is a modern classic, very much a film-maker's film. It was famously championed by Quentin Tarantino, who persuaded Miramax to distribute it internationally.

I can see why he liked it, and not just because it has several lingering close-ups of women's feet and high-heels. The film was shot on a tiny budget while Wong Kar-wai was resting in between projects, but despite being thrown together almost casually the film works, or at least mostly works. It looks and sounds gorgeous, and has winning performances from a bunch of charismatic actors. It's one of those films that inspires people to make films. Just grab some people and props and find a good location. Make a film, go on.

As of 2022 it's also one of those films that inspires people to make films with film, with 35mm film. It's a fantastic advert for 35mm.

Back in the 1990s Hollywood had mastered the technology of film to a point where the likes of Basic Instinct and True Lies had a glossy, almost digital sheen to them. But Hong Kong's film industry didn't have the money to lay on masses of floodlights and dolly tracks and cranes etc, so they had to shoot things quickly, often in cramped locations and poor lighting, with handheld cameras.

As a consequence Chungking Express has surface noise, just like life. It has masses of grain. The cramped locations mean that a lot of the film is shot in tight close-up, and sometimes the focus puller didn't get the focus right. And yet it looks wonderful, richly colourful and cinematic. Despite taking place in a bunch of objectively grotty locations in downtown Hong Kong it made me want to go there.

I've been to Hong Kong once before, but not in 1994. Chungking Express was one of the many reasons I went, but while there I wished I had been to Hong Kong in 1994. You can't go to Hong Kong in 1994 any more.

If you wanted to remake Chungking Express nowadays you'd need to recreate Kai Tak with CGI. You'd need to run the whole thing through some top-notch software to add grain and make the colours look all neon, and put in the slow-shutter motion blur etc.

I mean, you could shoot in 35mm, but it would cost a fortune. And the producers would insist that you add the scuzziness later on.

Chungking Express is a character drama set and shot in Hong Kong in 1994, by people who lived and worked there. It's often cited as one of the best products of the latter days of the golden age of the Hong Kong film industry, alongside Infernal Affairs (2002) and Wong Kar-wai's very own In the Mood for Love (2000). It was shot incredibly quickly and cheaply, in sequence, and although on an objective level it portrays Hong Kong as a horrible place it still manages to make the city look seductive. Chungking Express reminded me of the old quote about how difficult it was to make an anti-war film, because war is intensely cinematic.

Hong Kong permeates the film, although we see surprisingly little of it. There's a fleeting glimpse of Kai Tak and a few long shots of the city, but for the most part Chungking Express takes place in a series of shops and bars and an apartment. Apparently the budget was so low they had to use an apartment that was being rented by one of the film's two cinematographers.

In theory the film could have taken place in New York or Manchester or anywhere with a nearby airport, but it wouldn't have been the same. Hong Kong is portrayed as an overcrowded, poverty-striken mess than nonetheless works, or at least people get along, and all of the major characters dream of a better life. In a way they all get happy endings, or at least they move on a little, which wouldn't have worked at all if the film had taken place in Manchester. There is no hope in Manchester, no future, nothing.

Now, objectively, Chungking Express is a mess. A big mess. It was essentially a series of semi-improvised scenes strung around the availability of the cast and the locations, as if Kar-wai had decided to take the old adage that all you need to make a film is a girl and a gun literally. Or was it a girl and a car?

Plot-wise the film divides into a forty-minute overture starring Brigitte Lin as a drug smuggler and Takeshi Kaneshiro as an undercover policeman, followed by an hour-long romantic drama starring Tony Leung Chiu-wai and Faye Wong, respectively a uniformed beat cop and an archetypal Manic Pixie Dream Girl who to be fair existed ten years before Garden State because I mean 1994 was a really long time ago.

There's an underlying unreality to the film. None of the characters feel like real people and the plot has a dream-like quality. The first story, with the drug smuggling, has the form of a crime drama, but the individual scenes feel disconnected. When the operation goes wrong Lin's accomplices seem to vanish into thin air, and we never find out what happened to them. I have the impression that the smuggling operation goes wrong simply because that's what happens in films. If nothing went wrong there would be no drama.

The film strongly implies that a certain character is Lin's gangster boss, but it never spells things out openly, and Lin eventually resolves the situation abruptly, without any build up. In the process she kidnaps a child and kills three people - in theory terrible acts - but none of it feels real. Her story interacts briefly with that of Kaneshiro, who is trying to get over a relationship breakup, although they only really share a couple of scenes. The film implies that they have no future together (presumably Lin's character flees Hong Kong to parts unknown) but the story is never resolved. It drifts away into the night.

The second story is more focused. Tony Leung Chiu-wai is a policeman, Officer 663, who has split up with his girlfriend. He meets Faye Wong, who helps out behind the counter of her cousin's takeaway, and she develops a crush on him. This extends to breaking into his apartment to fix things up, while he seems unaware of what must have been obvious tomfoolery; he even fails to notice her hiding in plain sight when he returns early one afternoon.

Even after the penny drops he doesn't mind, although you'd think that a policeman would be more worried about a stranger going through his personal things.

It struck me while watching the film again that Leung's job as a policeman has no bearing on the plot whatsoever, which raises the question of whether the producers hired a police uniform for Kaneshiro's character, but it arrived too late for his scenes, so they decided to make Leung a cop purely to get some use out of it.

I also pondered the pineapples. Kaneshiro's character collects tins of pineapples that expire on 01 May 1994. His birthday. Something to do with love having an expiry date. I wasn't sure if the dialogue was a knowing parody of romantic diaologue or intended to be taken seriously, and I'm unwilling to take a stand because the subtles might not capture the nuance, you understand? The film was apparently shot in or around New Year 1994. Did the props people scour Hong Kong for tins of pineapple that expired five months later, or did they have them made up? How long does an unopened tin of pineapple last? Did they pick the date before gathering up the cans, or did they bulk-buy a load of cans that happened to expire on that day, or what? Did the entire film come about because Wong Kar-wai had a cheap deal on canned pineapples?

They vex me, those cans. Still, the film. On a purely narrative level it doesn't work at all. Neither of the stories are complex enough to be compelling as drama, and the characters don't feel real. In our world Faye Wong's character would have been sectioned, and in a parallel universe perhaps the film would have ended with Officer 663 smothering her with a pillow to put her out of her misery, a la Betty Blue or One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest. Despite the plaudits Chungking Express really does feel like a bunch of disjointed sequences improvised around the availability of the actors, and although both stories progress and have a resolution they feel like random events. Sounds terrible, doesn't it?

It's not a great film if you're on a diet, or if you feel hungry. Is the food symbolic? I suspect it was just a cheap way to give the actors something to do, but it's mouthwatering nonetheless.

But! It's still a really good film, because the style is enormous and holds it all together. Like some of the best science fiction films Chungking Express isn't so much a narrative experience as a portriat of a fascinating alternative universe where life is spontaneous and no-one has any real problems; it feels like the mid-1990s, distilled into a nostalgic potion. I could have wallowed in it for hours. It's a structure, a construction. I suspect that the film's version of Hong Kong circa 1994 has very little in common with the reality, but it's a fascinating place to visit.

Would it still work if Kar-wai had spent more time refining the script, and had turned in a conventional portmanteau film along the lines of Pulp Fiction? Quite possibly yes. It might even have been a stronger film. But its slightness gives it strength.

On a technical level I saw the film at the Prince Charles Cinema in Leicester Square. It was a digital restoration projected digitally. The screen narrowed slightly before the film began; apparently the original international release was stretched or matted slightly to widescreen, whereas Wong Kar-wai wanted it to be less wide.

There's a famous shot of Officer 663 drinking coffee while the world passes by at high speed. The IMDB says that the international version has only background ambience at that point, but I'm sure the version I saw had Faye Wong's cover of The Cranberries' "Dreams" on the soundtrack instead. TVTropes is of the opinion that one character shoots another character twice, but in both the film I saw at the cinema and the DVD from which I gathered the screenshots there are five gunshot sounds. Perhaps it's just a minor difference in the sound dub. The subtitles have been revised. One character's pager password is "undying love" in the print I saw, but "love you for 10,000 years" on the DVD.

The original release has simple black-text-on-white ending credits whereas the restoration has something that resembles a PowerPoint presentation. It doesn't fit the rest of the film.

For the record the Prince Charles Cinema showed the film in their upstairs screening room, and 104 of the 104 seats had been sold - there was even a note on the door to that effect - so after 28 years Chungking Express can still draw them in.

Canon 40mm f/2.8: Golden Cities, Golden Towns

Let's have a look at the Canon 40mm f/2.8 STM, a tiny little pancake lens from 2012. Is it any good? Yes! Although it was dogged by controversy when it came out and had a surprisingly short life. Not because there was something wrong with it but because it puzzled a lot of people.

See, back in 2012 the big new things in photography were digital SLR videography and compact mirrorless rangefinder cameras. They both took the camera industry by surprise. When Nikon added a simple video mode to their D90 it felt like an afterthought; ditto Canon with the 5D MkII. But professional cinematographers immediately flocked to those cameras because they produced high-def video with a cinematic look, at a fraction the cost of hiring a professional digital cinema camera.

And so the 5D MkII ended up capturing a niche as a portable cinema camera for action shots in big-budget movies. It was used to shoot parts of Captain America: The First Avenger, Iron Man 2, Black Swan, a whole episode of House, all of Birdemic, the list goes on. A whole industry sprang up around the 5D and cameras like it.

But from a consumer perspective neither Nikon nor Canon had any lenses that could autofocus quickly and silently while shooting video. Especially not cheap lenses. The 40mm f/2.8 STM was supposed to fill that niche, by introducing a new focusing system that used a stepper motor instead of Canon's regular mechanical focusing system, but the reviewers were generally unimpressed.

I have to admit I can't pass judgement on STM video focusing because my 5D MkII doesn't properly support it. For regular stills photography it works just fine. In any case the focus travel is really short. For the shots of Battersea Power Station I used it with an ancient Canon 1Ds:

I was hoping that the security guards would pat me on the back and say "awesome camera" and "you're alright" and "yes" and "I wish I was your brother" and "yes" but this did not happen. I also tried it with an old EOS 50E film camera, which came out in 1995, and it functioned without any problems. The 50E was one of a handful of Canon SLRs with eye-controlled focus - you could switch the focus points by looking at them. It works surprisingly well, but the 50E only has three focus points so it's slightly pointless.

The 40mm f/2.8 only focuses if the camera is turned on, which is a throwback to the earliest days of the EOS range. It takes 52mm filters, and the inner lens barrel sticks out a teeny-tiny bit at close focusing distances. Apparently if you bash the barrel the autofocus system gets confused and you have to turn the camera off and on again. I can't say I've noticed.

This is the world in 2022. A pop-up grocery store and a pop-up shared electric scooter business.

With a 40mm f/2.8 lens almost everything from a dozen feet or so is in focus, and if you want to blur out the background this is not the lens for you:

That was shot wide open, at a fairly close distance. Most of the rest of the shots in this article were taken at f/8. It's very much a point-and-shoot-without-messing-about lens.

The second big thing in 2012 was the compact mirrorless rangefinder. Such as the Olympus EP-1 and Panasonic's miniature-SLR-looking cameras. As with video, the success of cute little rangefinders took Nikon and Canon by surprise. In particular Canon had nothing remotely similar for years afterwards, until the RF system came out, which still isn't all that compact.

Although Canon didn't explicitly market the 40mm f/2.8 as a rangefinder rival, it came across as an inadequate attempt to hide the relative bulk of Canon's SLRs by making the lens smaller. As you can see, despite the 40mm's tiny size it does not turn an SLR into a compact camera:

I'm not complaining, mind. It's a moderate wideangle that takes up very little space, with fast, accurate autofocus. It's perfect for grab shots. Curiously it's a full-frame lens, despite being sold alongside a new range of APS-C cameras. It was joined a couple of years later by the Canon 24mm f/2.8 STM, which in contrast is APS-C only.

Perhaps coincidentally the 40mm f/2.8 has the same field of view as the Panasonic 20mm f/1.7, which was one of the star lenses of the Micro Four-Thirds system. It also has the same specification as all of those old rangefinder cameras from the 1970s, such as the Ricoh 500 ME or the Konica C35 etc. They all had 40mm f/2.8 lenses as well. I assume the design is easy to make in a compact package.

What's it like on an optical level? Sharp in the middle at all apertures and sharp all over at f/8, with a fair amount of vignetting wide open, but less than I expected. Contemplate the following two images:

That's f/2.8 at the top and f/8 at the bottom. As you can see f/2.8 is just slightly glowy, less contrasty, but it's fine. This is the full image at f/2.8:

I have nothing against the people of Athens. The problems that affect Athens aren't their fault. They are pawns in a game of chess that is being played by an NPC inside a massively multi-player role-playing game that you are only tangentially aware of. Like Bayonetta. Is Bayonetta a role-playing game? No, it's some kind of fighting game. I've never played it.

When I was in Athens I wondered what the Ancient Greeks such as Don Quixote and Tyco Brahe he has a crater on the moon named after him would have thought about modern Athens. On the positive side McDonalds barely has a presence in the city, so the hamburger gases that cloud the city are Greek hamburger gases, but on the other hand everything is broken and wrong. Except for the people, who are uniformly sophisticated and good-looking, and have elevated sprezzatura to a fine art.

People of Athens, especially the women, you're okay. Take it from me. This is the corner of the image at f/2.8 and f/8:

At f/8 the image is essentially sharp across the frame. The extreme corners are just slightly soft at f/5.6, slightly more at f/4. It struck me that the only way to fix Athens would be to demolish every other city block, but where would the people go? And so, yet again, vast underground cities are the only solution.

Vast underground cities. The 40mm f/2.8 STM had a surprisingly short life. It was discontinued in 2021, just nine years after it was launched, amidst a general cull of digital SLR lenses. The third big thing in photography in 2012 was the smartphone, which wasn't exactly new - 2012 was the heyday of the iPhone 4 - but smartphone cameras were naff until the 2010s. They have only got better since then, while digital SLR sales have declined, and stratified. Furthermore 40mm f/2.8 is a dull specification, and an odd focal length on an APS-C camera, and it overlaps with the 50mm f/1.8, so I can understand if it didn't sell well.

And that's the 40mm f/2.8. Objectively great, but it occupies a bit of a niche; Canon's 35mm f/2 is faster and wider and has image stabilisation, but it's also much larger and more expensive. Control over depth of field is one of the most compelling reasons to own a full-frame camera, but unless you get real close a 40mm f/2.8 tends to have everything in focus.

And yet it takes up virtually no space and almost doubles as a body cap, and it's cheaply available on the used market, so why not?