California dreaming
A review requested by Valentine, with thanks to supporting Alternate Ending as a donor through Patreon.
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Few films have ever embodied boundless joy at their own creation as much as Chungking Express. It is loose, improvisatory, free; it thrives on raw, spontaneous camera movements and jolting edits, bright colors gleaming out cheerfully through a soup of grainy film stock. It exists because Wong Kar-wai, then a director in the full bloom of his "exciting young auteur" period, was having an absolutely horrible time with the post-production of Ashes of Time, a wuxia epic that was the most expensive film of his career, and he needed to blow off some steam. That meant taking two months away from the editing room to conceive a story, write a screenplay, film it, and edit it, all before picking back up with Ashes of Time, and Chungking Express even beat that film to theaters. It is, in essence, a movie made by a writer-director who really badly needed to remind himself of why he enjoyed making movies, and who, upon finding that feeling again, had the movie erupt out of him all in one marvelous explosion of creativity. The script, we are told, was being written essentially on the spot: the movie was filmed in order and it was written as it was being filmed, so the actors basically knew one day in advance where things were going - Wong himself presumably only knew a couple of days in advance where things were going. There was enough material left over from this volcanic event to create a whole separate feature out of it, which came out the following year as Fallen Angels, and it's very good, but by that point the sheer propulsion that carried Chungking Express to completion must have tapered off; Fallen Angels is just less of an all-encompassing thing than its parent film.
You can feel all of this radiating out of the film: it is a rich, living thing, looking and moving like it's constantly in the act of discovering itself, as though the camera itself has no idea what's going to show up when it sweeps this way or that. You could, I think, go so far as to call it "messy", but it's a calculated, focused mess, in which the stylistically excesses and seeming shapelessness are all so tightly bound to the film's attitude and emotionally overloaded story that they certainly never feel like accidents, not even happy ones. The result is, to me, the quintessential "early Wong" film, from the period when his movies still had the brash ballsiness of youthful vigor (he was 35 when the film was shot), before he began transitioning into his more stately melodramas and emotional tone poems with Happy Together in 1997, and it might even still be my favorite Wong film, allowing that his 2000 masterpiece In the Mood for Love is such an enormous artistic achievement that I'd feel like I was cheapening it if I called it "my favorite".
Chungking Express is two stories, united by a single scene plotwise, but united much more by an evocation of the intense feelings of loneliness and love that sweep back and forth over you like a tidal wave when you're in your twenties and you're living in a densely-packed city where you're constantly surrounded by people and making connections with none of them. The first story centers on He Qiwu (Kaneshiro Takeshi), Cop #223, somewhere in Hong Kong: this part of the film was shot in Kowloon, where the Chungking Mansion building is located, and I think we're definitely supposed to know that this is all taking place someplace extremely specific, with its own unique textures and people and business, while at the same time having all of those precise-looking spaces add up to someplace that feels as universal and all-encompassing as a fairy tale. It has for a very long time been my contention that the best way to tell universal stories is through extreme specificity, detailed and observant about the most particular kind of people and places; Chungking Express is one of the movies that was responsible for helping me figure that out.
But back to our lonely protagonist: Qiwu's girlfriend May, who never appears in the film, broke up with him on 1 April 1994. Supposing this might be an April Fool's joke, and also wondering if she'll get over it if he gives it enough time, he decides to spend the next 30 days buying cans of pineapple - May's favorite food - with the expiration date of 1 May. If that date arrives and she hasn't tried to reconcile, he'll know it's really over - just in time for his 26th birthday, which is also 1 May. Meanwhile, a woman (Brigitte Lin) in a blonde wig and a camel trenchcoat is trying to find the gangsters who are responsible for her recent smuggling job going wrong, hoping to get revenge on them before they can kill her first. She and Qiwu happen to cross paths once, shortly after his break-up, and shortly after she escape from the trap that was set up for her; it's not remotely clear that she even noticed him, but he's decided that it might be worth falling in love with her and seeing what happens.
That's of course a tremendous amount of whiplash between two wholly incompatible narrative throughlines and genre, and part of the great joy of this opening sequence of Chungking Express is that it's just okay with putting both of those threads next to each other and not really worrying about what happens. Really, what it's doing is erasing any distinction between the two halves of the story, which has the net effect of making the blonde woman material play as much stranger: we expect that this more violent, crime-thriller material will feel more consequential and significant, but the film's overall vibe is more of a light, shrugging, "I don't know, it's just a bunch of stuff that all happened in Kowloon this one time", and seems openly more interested in things like close-ups of the expiration dates stamped onto in cans than the life-and death matter of Lin's scenes. This despite Lin giving, maybe, my favorite performance in the film: all four leads are good in four different ways, but there's a gravitas to what she's doing, fueled by the fact that she's got the only actual story. And that even feels like part of the shrug - "yep, I'm totally happy to go visit with Brigitte for a few minutes, she's great. Also, look at the way this blue neon makes Qiwu's shirt look like it's glowing". There's a feeling that, even as the world undergoes remarkable stresses and strains, violence happens, and all that, people are still just going about living their lives, and for most of us "I know she's not coming back, but I bet I can create this really complicated ritual that will help me negotiate with reality to pretend that I don't know that" has much more meaning and emotional depth to it.
And so back we go to the sense of place, the detailed physicality of it all. The first half of Chungking Express found Wong working for the second and last time with cinematographer Andrew Lau, and they created a stunning vision of the city at night that looks like basically nothing else I've seen, including movies very particularly trying to copy this exact style.* It's deliciously grainy, covering the movie in a slight veil of shimmering grey that makes the bright colors pop more in contrast, both the nighttime lighting and the colors of objects and costumes themselves. But that's not the truly enthralling material: where this becomes one of the '90s most interesting-looking films, one of the great triumphs of cinematography blurring invisibly with story and character psychology, is in the constant whipping around of the camera, with a reduced shutter speed in some cases to give the whole thing a slight visual "stutter", not quite slow motion and not quite a series of still frames, but something like a lag in reality itself, as though the frantic emotions burning in the characters' brains were too much for the film to process. The result is a veritable gallery of frenetic, smeary images, a feeling of speed and restlessness that goes beyond the story and emerges purely in the form of the film itself. But it's never abstract: it's always emphatically present and real, capturing the sense of these streets with uncommon vigor and tactility, especially when the camera slows down and stares at objects and people. Chungking Express, in its first half, is a film about trying to capture meaning in objects and environments, trying to place oneself in a concrete way amongst the surfaces and props and all that, and the raw beauty of its look is an absolutely perfect way to bring that to the foreground.
All of which means that I do, in fact, like the look of the first part more than the look of the second, shot by Wong's usual cinematographer Christopher Doyle, though this is one of the few comparisons in which Doyle's work here suffers. The second part of Chungking Express is a bit softer, brighter, calmer; it's still focused on surfaces and spaces, but now with a veneer of dreamy romance. And this nicely matches with the narrative content. If Qiwu and the blonde woman's stories are about melancholy and loss, our new set of protagonists are living through stories of melancholic happiness, if there is such a thing. An unnamed cop, badge #663 (Tony Leung Chiu-wai), has just been dumped by his air hostess girlfriend (Valerie Chow), who leaves her key to his apartment at Midnight Express, the snack stop where he routinely buys salads. Faye (Faye Wong), the newest employee of the market, has already developed a huge crush on 663, and steals the key so she can let herself into his apartment, tidying it up and redecorating it so it's a place for life and happiness, not a gloomy morgue of loss and misery. And while she does this, she typically listens to "California Dreamin'" by the American group The Mamas & the Papas - I am not sure how many times, but you hear the song a whole damn lot.
It's all unbelievably joyful to watch - the uplifting version of the anxious-making sadness of the first part. It helps that the focus shifts: the constant fluctuation of who's giving us voiceover narration means that every one of the major characters comes to the foreground multiple times across the film, but this second story is definitely more interested in following Faye than in 663, who is basically just Qiwu with a less idiosyncratic fixation on objects (his totem is a plane that reminds him of his ex, and which never feels like "a character" the way those cans of pineapple do). So it's less about wallowing in loss than in forthrightly trying to make things more alive and present and open to the world, and everything from "California Dreamin'" to Faye Wong's big, exaggerated facial expressions (it takes a whole lot to pull focus from Tony Leung, one of the world's greatest actors here giving a terrifically warm and inviting performance; she does it pretty much constantly) to the playfully show-offy compositions (Doyle and Wong really do fall in love with reflections and otherwise using glass here) supports that.
What ties this together - beyond the immaculate shot in which Faye and Qiwu almost smack into each other, preserved in a freeze-frame that forcefully tugs us from one story into the next - is the incredible kineticism and energy of it all. This is all very much a tribute to idiots in their 20s, people who feel things extremely hard and are definitely wrong to do so, but who are in this merely being messy, wonderfully strange humans, like all of us were in our 20s. And what Wong is capturing here - not for the first time in his career, but it's the best example - is the youthful brio of being that kind of person, fearless and enthusiastic in all of one's little dumb gestures and misguided choices and deeply appealing sincerity. This is one of cinema's all-time most youthful movies, with its kinetic camerawork and its restless editing scheme - by God is there a lot of cutting in this film, enough that I'd call it "unnecessary" if it weren't that the way the film connects little individual beats as memories skipping around in a room works so well, like it's trying desperately to see everything from every angle simultaneously - and the way it's content to just absorb the imposing good looks of all four leads. This is cinema as romantic delirium, and as ultra-realist documentary of being a young mess in a vibrant city, and it is nothing less than one of the greatest treasures of 1990s filmmaking.
Tim Brayton is the editor-in-chief and primary critic at Alternate Ending. He has been known to show up on Letterboxd, writing about even more movies than he does here.
If you enjoyed this article, why not support Alternate Ending as a recurring donor through Patreon, or with a one-time donation via Paypal? For just a dollar a month you can contribute to the ongoing health of the site, while also enjoying several fun perks!
*And which style is that? In 2020-'21, Wong went on a bit of a weird bender, restoring almost all of his features and in the process vandalising the look of several of them, by fucking with the color grades to uniformly bad ends. Chungking Express wasn't the biggest victim of that process, but I still watched the 2008 Criterion Collection Blu-ray for this review.
Do you have a movie you'd like to see reviewed? This and other perks can be found on our Patreon page!
Few films have ever embodied boundless joy at their own creation as much as Chungking Express. It is loose, improvisatory, free; it thrives on raw, spontaneous camera movements and jolting edits, bright colors gleaming out cheerfully through a soup of grainy film stock. It exists because Wong Kar-wai, then a director in the full bloom of his "exciting young auteur" period, was having an absolutely horrible time with the post-production of Ashes of Time, a wuxia epic that was the most expensive film of his career, and he needed to blow off some steam. That meant taking two months away from the editing room to conceive a story, write a screenplay, film it, and edit it, all before picking back up with Ashes of Time, and Chungking Express even beat that film to theaters. It is, in essence, a movie made by a writer-director who really badly needed to remind himself of why he enjoyed making movies, and who, upon finding that feeling again, had the movie erupt out of him all in one marvelous explosion of creativity. The script, we are told, was being written essentially on the spot: the movie was filmed in order and it was written as it was being filmed, so the actors basically knew one day in advance where things were going - Wong himself presumably only knew a couple of days in advance where things were going. There was enough material left over from this volcanic event to create a whole separate feature out of it, which came out the following year as Fallen Angels, and it's very good, but by that point the sheer propulsion that carried Chungking Express to completion must have tapered off; Fallen Angels is just less of an all-encompassing thing than its parent film.
You can feel all of this radiating out of the film: it is a rich, living thing, looking and moving like it's constantly in the act of discovering itself, as though the camera itself has no idea what's going to show up when it sweeps this way or that. You could, I think, go so far as to call it "messy", but it's a calculated, focused mess, in which the stylistically excesses and seeming shapelessness are all so tightly bound to the film's attitude and emotionally overloaded story that they certainly never feel like accidents, not even happy ones. The result is, to me, the quintessential "early Wong" film, from the period when his movies still had the brash ballsiness of youthful vigor (he was 35 when the film was shot), before he began transitioning into his more stately melodramas and emotional tone poems with Happy Together in 1997, and it might even still be my favorite Wong film, allowing that his 2000 masterpiece In the Mood for Love is such an enormous artistic achievement that I'd feel like I was cheapening it if I called it "my favorite".
Chungking Express is two stories, united by a single scene plotwise, but united much more by an evocation of the intense feelings of loneliness and love that sweep back and forth over you like a tidal wave when you're in your twenties and you're living in a densely-packed city where you're constantly surrounded by people and making connections with none of them. The first story centers on He Qiwu (Kaneshiro Takeshi), Cop #223, somewhere in Hong Kong: this part of the film was shot in Kowloon, where the Chungking Mansion building is located, and I think we're definitely supposed to know that this is all taking place someplace extremely specific, with its own unique textures and people and business, while at the same time having all of those precise-looking spaces add up to someplace that feels as universal and all-encompassing as a fairy tale. It has for a very long time been my contention that the best way to tell universal stories is through extreme specificity, detailed and observant about the most particular kind of people and places; Chungking Express is one of the movies that was responsible for helping me figure that out.
But back to our lonely protagonist: Qiwu's girlfriend May, who never appears in the film, broke up with him on 1 April 1994. Supposing this might be an April Fool's joke, and also wondering if she'll get over it if he gives it enough time, he decides to spend the next 30 days buying cans of pineapple - May's favorite food - with the expiration date of 1 May. If that date arrives and she hasn't tried to reconcile, he'll know it's really over - just in time for his 26th birthday, which is also 1 May. Meanwhile, a woman (Brigitte Lin) in a blonde wig and a camel trenchcoat is trying to find the gangsters who are responsible for her recent smuggling job going wrong, hoping to get revenge on them before they can kill her first. She and Qiwu happen to cross paths once, shortly after his break-up, and shortly after she escape from the trap that was set up for her; it's not remotely clear that she even noticed him, but he's decided that it might be worth falling in love with her and seeing what happens.
That's of course a tremendous amount of whiplash between two wholly incompatible narrative throughlines and genre, and part of the great joy of this opening sequence of Chungking Express is that it's just okay with putting both of those threads next to each other and not really worrying about what happens. Really, what it's doing is erasing any distinction between the two halves of the story, which has the net effect of making the blonde woman material play as much stranger: we expect that this more violent, crime-thriller material will feel more consequential and significant, but the film's overall vibe is more of a light, shrugging, "I don't know, it's just a bunch of stuff that all happened in Kowloon this one time", and seems openly more interested in things like close-ups of the expiration dates stamped onto in cans than the life-and death matter of Lin's scenes. This despite Lin giving, maybe, my favorite performance in the film: all four leads are good in four different ways, but there's a gravitas to what she's doing, fueled by the fact that she's got the only actual story. And that even feels like part of the shrug - "yep, I'm totally happy to go visit with Brigitte for a few minutes, she's great. Also, look at the way this blue neon makes Qiwu's shirt look like it's glowing". There's a feeling that, even as the world undergoes remarkable stresses and strains, violence happens, and all that, people are still just going about living their lives, and for most of us "I know she's not coming back, but I bet I can create this really complicated ritual that will help me negotiate with reality to pretend that I don't know that" has much more meaning and emotional depth to it.
And so back we go to the sense of place, the detailed physicality of it all. The first half of Chungking Express found Wong working for the second and last time with cinematographer Andrew Lau, and they created a stunning vision of the city at night that looks like basically nothing else I've seen, including movies very particularly trying to copy this exact style.* It's deliciously grainy, covering the movie in a slight veil of shimmering grey that makes the bright colors pop more in contrast, both the nighttime lighting and the colors of objects and costumes themselves. But that's not the truly enthralling material: where this becomes one of the '90s most interesting-looking films, one of the great triumphs of cinematography blurring invisibly with story and character psychology, is in the constant whipping around of the camera, with a reduced shutter speed in some cases to give the whole thing a slight visual "stutter", not quite slow motion and not quite a series of still frames, but something like a lag in reality itself, as though the frantic emotions burning in the characters' brains were too much for the film to process. The result is a veritable gallery of frenetic, smeary images, a feeling of speed and restlessness that goes beyond the story and emerges purely in the form of the film itself. But it's never abstract: it's always emphatically present and real, capturing the sense of these streets with uncommon vigor and tactility, especially when the camera slows down and stares at objects and people. Chungking Express, in its first half, is a film about trying to capture meaning in objects and environments, trying to place oneself in a concrete way amongst the surfaces and props and all that, and the raw beauty of its look is an absolutely perfect way to bring that to the foreground.
All of which means that I do, in fact, like the look of the first part more than the look of the second, shot by Wong's usual cinematographer Christopher Doyle, though this is one of the few comparisons in which Doyle's work here suffers. The second part of Chungking Express is a bit softer, brighter, calmer; it's still focused on surfaces and spaces, but now with a veneer of dreamy romance. And this nicely matches with the narrative content. If Qiwu and the blonde woman's stories are about melancholy and loss, our new set of protagonists are living through stories of melancholic happiness, if there is such a thing. An unnamed cop, badge #663 (Tony Leung Chiu-wai), has just been dumped by his air hostess girlfriend (Valerie Chow), who leaves her key to his apartment at Midnight Express, the snack stop where he routinely buys salads. Faye (Faye Wong), the newest employee of the market, has already developed a huge crush on 663, and steals the key so she can let herself into his apartment, tidying it up and redecorating it so it's a place for life and happiness, not a gloomy morgue of loss and misery. And while she does this, she typically listens to "California Dreamin'" by the American group The Mamas & the Papas - I am not sure how many times, but you hear the song a whole damn lot.
It's all unbelievably joyful to watch - the uplifting version of the anxious-making sadness of the first part. It helps that the focus shifts: the constant fluctuation of who's giving us voiceover narration means that every one of the major characters comes to the foreground multiple times across the film, but this second story is definitely more interested in following Faye than in 663, who is basically just Qiwu with a less idiosyncratic fixation on objects (his totem is a plane that reminds him of his ex, and which never feels like "a character" the way those cans of pineapple do). So it's less about wallowing in loss than in forthrightly trying to make things more alive and present and open to the world, and everything from "California Dreamin'" to Faye Wong's big, exaggerated facial expressions (it takes a whole lot to pull focus from Tony Leung, one of the world's greatest actors here giving a terrifically warm and inviting performance; she does it pretty much constantly) to the playfully show-offy compositions (Doyle and Wong really do fall in love with reflections and otherwise using glass here) supports that.
What ties this together - beyond the immaculate shot in which Faye and Qiwu almost smack into each other, preserved in a freeze-frame that forcefully tugs us from one story into the next - is the incredible kineticism and energy of it all. This is all very much a tribute to idiots in their 20s, people who feel things extremely hard and are definitely wrong to do so, but who are in this merely being messy, wonderfully strange humans, like all of us were in our 20s. And what Wong is capturing here - not for the first time in his career, but it's the best example - is the youthful brio of being that kind of person, fearless and enthusiastic in all of one's little dumb gestures and misguided choices and deeply appealing sincerity. This is one of cinema's all-time most youthful movies, with its kinetic camerawork and its restless editing scheme - by God is there a lot of cutting in this film, enough that I'd call it "unnecessary" if it weren't that the way the film connects little individual beats as memories skipping around in a room works so well, like it's trying desperately to see everything from every angle simultaneously - and the way it's content to just absorb the imposing good looks of all four leads. This is cinema as romantic delirium, and as ultra-realist documentary of being a young mess in a vibrant city, and it is nothing less than one of the greatest treasures of 1990s filmmaking.
Tim Brayton is the editor-in-chief and primary critic at Alternate Ending. He has been known to show up on Letterboxd, writing about even more movies than he does here.
If you enjoyed this article, why not support Alternate Ending as a recurring donor through Patreon, or with a one-time donation via Paypal? For just a dollar a month you can contribute to the ongoing health of the site, while also enjoying several fun perks!
*And which style is that? In 2020-'21, Wong went on a bit of a weird bender, restoring almost all of his features and in the process vandalising the look of several of them, by fucking with the color grades to uniformly bad ends. Chungking Express wasn't the biggest victim of that process, but I still watched the 2008 Criterion Collection Blu-ray for this review.
