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"With Chungking [sic] I just dived in. It was like a student film.
We didn't have any big camera set-ups; the whole film was
hand-held. Every afternoon I'd go to a Holiday Inn coffee
shop and write, and every evening I'd walk the two blocks
to Chungking Mansions with the script and we'd start shooting
anywhere there was light. It was shot in chronological order,
and it was very liberating and exciting."
Wong Kar-Wai, CinemaScope, Winter 2000
Wong isn't kidding. Chung King Express really is like a student film, with all the plusses and minuses associated with that description. Energetic originality, youthful charm, experimental audacity - all are present in abundance. As are moments of clumsy amateurishness, characters who mainly consist of kooky quirks, an over-reliance on interior-monologue narration, and a quite tiresome preoccupation with "coolness" in all its forms.
Even the title is an pedantic affectation - the opening credits announce quite clearly that the English transliteration is Chung King Express. But when we signs for Chungking Mansions apartment-block there is no gap between 'Chung' and 'king': presumably this is why the film is almost universally referred to as Chungking Express. To be pedantic, perhaps Chungking / Express would have been more accurate, as the title conjoins the locales where the two plot-strands take place.
Chungking Mansions is the residence of lovelorn Cop 223, real name He Zhiwu (Takeshi Kaneshiro), who becomes fixated with the glamorous, enigmatic, unnamed older woman (Brigitte Lin) he meets in a bar. Midnight Express is the take-away where free-spirit, twentyish Faye (Faye Wong) works, run by her middle-aged 'cousin' (Chen Jinquan) and regularly visited by another lovelorn Cop, number 633 (Tony Leung Chiu Wai).
The two stories don't exactly dovetail - we're with Cop 223 and/or the enigmatic woman until around the halfway point, which is when Faye arrives to work at Midnight Express. At which point the focus shifts decisively to Faye and Cop 633, and the soundtrack becomes dominated by Faye's favourite song - a certain sixties perennial by the Mamas and the Papas which is repeated and repeated and repeated and repeated to an almost autistic degree. This repetition should be annoying, but if there's one thing director Wong knows how to do, it's the confluence of music and image - it helps, of course, that the images here, as with nearly all Wong's work, come courtesy of the brilliant cinematographer Christopher Doyle HKSC.
Chung King Express was shot by Doyle and Wong on the hoof during a month-long break in their epic science-fiction martial-arts spectacle Ashes of Time: and, by one of the immutable laws of moviemaking, the 'quickie' turned out to be much better received than the 'biggie' (see also Wim Wenders' State of Things / Hammett and End of Violence / Million Dollar Hotel, Barry Levinson's Wag the Dog / Sphere, William Richert's Winter Kills / Success, etc etc etc). In CinemaScope magazine's "best of the 90s" poll of moviemakers, festival directors and critics, Ashes of Time crept in at #84 - Chung King Express made #3**. At number thirty, meanwhile, stood Wong's 1995 Fallen Angels, the expansion of what was originally going to be Chung King Express's third plot-strand.
It's well known that Fallen Angels was something of an 'offshoot' of Chung King Express, which perhaps explains why the former has never attracted the kind of acclaim so regularly lavished on the latter. But, to these eyes at least, Fallen Angels is much the more satisfying and accomplished work, combining its many magical moments into a more coherent whole. It also helps that the photogenic Kaneshiro has more screen-time in Fallen Angels, but since he's playing a mute he doesn't actually have any lines.
This may seem perverse, given Kaneshiro's almost unique polyglot status which has made him a star in Taiwan, Japan (he's from Taiwanese and Japanese stock) and mainland China - but Kaneshiro's acting abilities are somewhat rough-edged in Chung King Express, especially in his scenes with veteran Lin (these sequences may remind viewers of Tom Cruise's embarrassing antics opposite Vanessa Redgrave in Mission Impossible).
Lin's stately reserve gives Chung King Express valuable ballast - whereas a little of Faye Wong's hyperactive cuteness goes rather a long way. This contrast perhaps isn't surprising, given the fact that Lin ("China's Grable", as one fan put it) is deliberately presented to stir memories of Gena Rowland's wonderfully no-nonsense gangsters' moll from Gloria, whereas Faye Wong - "China's answer to Bjork" - seems to have been given much more of a free rein by her indulgent, namesake director. Ironic, then, that she has so many scenes stolen from her by a pudgy, deadpan oldster - surrounded as he is by superstars of far-eastern music and cinema, it's amusing that Chen emerges as the unsung star of the show.
Neil Young
31st December, 2004 [seen on VHS, Sunderland, 29th December]
* CinemaScope 'best of the nineties', Winter 2000
1 Breaking the Waves (Von Trier, 1996) 42pts
2 GoodFellas (Scorsese, 1990) 34pts
3= Chung King Express (Wong, 1994) 31pts
3= Safe (Haynes, 1995) 31 pts
5 Naked (Leigh, 1993) 27 pts
6 Flowers of Shanghai (Hou, 1998) 23 pts
7 Fargo (Coen, 1996) 21 pts
8= Hana-Bi (Kitano, 1997) 19pts
8= Pulp Fiction (Tarantino, 1994) 19pts
8= Unforgiven (Eastwood, 1992) 19pts
CHUNG KING EXPRESS [7/10]
Chongqing Senlin aka Chungking Express : Hong Kong 1994 : WONG Kar-Wai : 97 mins |
