Chungking Express

Off to the cinema to see Chungking Express, a brand-new 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.

Production-wise the film is a spot-on recreation of Hong Kong circa 1994, something the production team achieved by travelling back in time and filming the entire movie in 1994. To make things real spicy-like they even released it in 1994, and then they returned to the present day and...

No, I'm kidding. Chungking Express isn't a cyberpunk film. It's just a film. From long ago and far away.

Chungking Express was written and directed by Wong Kar-wai, who was born in Shanghai in 1958. His family moved to Hong Kong while he was a child, where he grew up watching television. In his twenties he got a job as a TV scriptwriter, before moving to the film industry. In another world he might nowadays be famous for Sexy Lady Assassin 13 or Shaolin Deadly Windows: Punch Hard, but he forged his own path.

Chungking was filmed in late 1993 and early 1994, released in 1994 in Hong Kong and, after strong word of mouth, internationally in 1995. It established Wong Kar-wai's reputation outside Hong Kong, and today it's a modern classic. A likeable film, a good-looking film, a good-sounding film, a good-tasting film, etc, but by gosh it has problems. It reminds me a bit of Wings of Desire, in the sense that almost everything works except for the core emotional drama. But I can understand why film critics like it. It's very much a film-maker's film, a filmy film, one of the filmiest films that doesn't actually have characters making a film in it. Quentin Tarantino was, famously, a fan. He persuaded Miramax to distribute it internationally.

I can see why Quentin Tarantino liked it, and not just because it has several lingering close-ups of women's feet. The film was shot on a tiny budget in the space of just two months, but despite being thrown together almost casually the film looks and sounds gorgeous, with winning performances from a bunch of charismatic actors. 

It's one of those films that inspires people to make a film. It has a real "let's grab a camera and make a film" quality. And in its defence it avoids the kind of self-absorbed narcissism that plagues "let's grab a camera"-style films. But it needed more time in the oven. A better script wouldn't have hurt the film at all.

Chungking is also one of those films that inspires people to make films with film, with 35mm film. It's a fantastic advert for 35mm film. The colours. The grain.

Back when Chungking came out 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 mistakes. It's a lot like life. It has masses of grain. The cramped locations necessitated tight close-ups, 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, but in 1994. Which you can't do any more. You can't go to Hong Kong in 1994 any more. It's gone.

I've been to Hong Kong. Chungking Express was one of the many reasons I went, but while there I wished I had been to Hong Kong in 1994. Back then the Kowloon Walled City still existed, although it was in the process of being demolished, and the main airport was at Kai Tak, uncomfortably close to the heart of the city. By the end of 1994 the walled city was gone, and Kai Tak closed in 1998.

If you wanted to remake Chungking Express nowadays you'd need to recreate old-fashioned Hong Kong 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 step-printing motion blur effect. You can still shoot in 35mm, but it costs a fortune, and the producers would insist that you add the scuzziness with software.

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 it's hard 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. Are they the real Hong Kong, and is Kai Tak just a distraction? I don't know. Apparently the budget was so low that one of the film's two cinematographers had to temporarily vacate his own apartment so that Kar-wai could use it as a filming location.

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 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's essentially a series of semi-improvised scenes strung around the availability of the cast and the locations because Kar-wai had some free time.

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 a prototypical Manic Pixie Dream Girl, although Chungking predates Garden State by a decade so if he really wanted to, Kar-wai should sue Zach Braff instead.

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 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 implies that a certain character is Lin's gangster boss, although it never spells things out openly - I kept wondering if the gangster boss had been hired on an extra's wages, because he has no clear dialogue - 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.

I have the impression that Kar-wai wanted to turn this sequence into a miniature crime drama, but he didn't have the time or the means to flesh it out. Perhaps it was supposed to be a skeleton, but the film would be no worse if the introductory story had been longer and more involved. It's engaging, but despite including some of the film's most memorable images it feels unsatisfying.

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 that Leung's job as a policeman has no bearing on the plot at all, 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. In the first story 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 dialogue or if it was supposed to be taken seriously, and I'm unwilling to take a stand because the subtitles might not have captured the nuance. In a neat piece of cinéma vérité the film was released only two months after 01 May 1994, which raises the question of whether audiences in Hong Kong rushed home to see if they also had tins of pineapple that expired on that date. Perhaps those tins were collectors' items for a while.

I have some other questions. The film was apparently shot in or around New Year 1994. Did the props people scour Hong Kong for tins of pineapple that were due to expire 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?

I wrote all these questions down on a notepad while watching the film. I made eighty-five pages of notes. One day I will post the notepad to Wong Kar-wai. One day.

They vex me, those cans. Still, the film. The second story is more involved than the first, but it doesn't work either. As mentioned up the page it has the same problem as Wings of Desire. Individually Tony Leung and Faye Wong are charismatic, but they have no chemistry together. I didn't believe for a moment they had any kind of romantic attraction. Age-wise they were surprisingly close in 1994 - and I suppose every other year, because neither actor has been accelerated to near-light speed - but Wong was a very young-looking 25 and Leung was a distinguished 32, so their relationship comes across more as father and daughter than fuck-buddies.

And although Faye Wong is fantastic in the role, something about her character made me uneasy. She's a playfully eccentric pixie of a kind that only exists in the minds of men. Nothing about her is real, not in this world, nowhere, not ever. On one level it's possible to read the second part of Chungking as a fantasy dreamed up by a bored policeman, in which Wong's character literally doesn't exist, but I don't think that's what Kar-wai was going for.

In the real 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.

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.

It's hard to dislike Chungking Express. If you treat it was a dreamlike collection of nostalgic images rather than as a narrative film it's a lot more successful. Like some of the best science fiction Chungking Express isn't so much a narrative experience as a portrait of a fascinating alternative universe. It feels like the most carefree aspects of 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 the film still work if Kar-wai had spent more time refining the script, if it was a conventional portmanteau film along the lines of Pulp Fiction? Yes, it would have been a much stronger film. Quite possibly a more boring, more ordinary film, but it would have been stronger.

On a technical level I saw the film at the Prince Charles Cinema in Leicester Square on 27 November 2022. 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 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 get bums on seats. Dreamers, every one.