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.
