Movie Review – Chungking Express

Chungking Express (1994)
Written and directed by Wong Kar-wai

The Chungking Mansions is a building located in Kowloon, Hong Kong. It was intended as a residential building but ended up being partitioned into many independent low-budget hotels, shops, and other services. There’s a mix of selling directly to the public and wholesalers from these businesses. Because it has become so unlike its original intent, the Chungking Mansions are often compared to the now-demolished Kowloon Walled City. Wong Kar-wai grew up in the Mansions, and their densely packed environment shaped his sensibilities as a filmmaker. So many people in such a small space meant many stories, relationships, and conflicts.

Chungking Express is broken into two stories. In the first, He Qwiu, a Tawainese cop, is dumped by his girlfriend May on 1 April. He chooses to pretend this is an elaborate month-long prank, and on 1 May, he will call her back, and she’ll reveal he was right. Because May enjoys canned pineapples, Qwiu buys one each day. Meanwhile, a mysterious woman in a blonde wig is trying to stay alive after a drug smuggling operation she was involved in goes sour. Qwiu and this woman eventually cross paths without knowing the truth about the other person.

In the second story, Faye (Faye Wong) works at a snack shop and secretly falls for a cop (Tony Leung). He’s in a relationship with a flight attendant who leaves a letter at the snack shop to break up with him. When Faye tries to give him the letter, the officer knows what it is and pretends he can’t see it. The ex also left her keys, which Faye does not tell the officer about. She begins sneaking into his house, doing things to improve his life, and it cheers him up. While her growing love for him is strong, her desire to leave Hong Kong for California is proving stronger.

There isn’t much to the plot of Chungking Express. Wong repeats the themes in almost his entire body of work. People lingering in worlds of perpetual nighttime, pining for those they can’t have or whose love will prove too destructive. We see this in Fallen Angels, Happy Together, 2046, and In the Mood for Love. I will say that I prefer it when Wong focuses on a single relationship, which makes Happy and In the Mood my two favorites in his work. This doesn’t mean Chungking Express isn’t good. The film is masterfully crafted. I found engaging in the love stories more challenging because they are so brief.

In all his work, Wong is fascinated with the role urban spaces play in our relationships. That proximity brings bubbling potential with it. People are always centimeters away from someone who could be the most passionate love they ever had. There’s a tragic beauty in how these paths run so close yet may never actually cross. Potential love unrealized is a magnificent planet to orbit your film around. It can provide all the storytelling genres – comedy, tragedy, horror, romance, etc. It makes sense that Wong keeps returning to this well in the same way so many artists have been informed by the potential of love in their work.

There’s a youthfulness in the work that compliments the volatility of the relationships. These are not love stories of older people with lots of life experience. These moments will shape the characters as they age, reminders of how love found or lost can often sting, leaving behind reminders of how much risk is involved in opening up yourself. With youthfulness also comes a difficulty in understanding the difference between love and lust, leading to a lot of confusion. Qwiu is experiencing an affect, a mood or feeling of love without anything tangible being present. That is probably the most consistent element in Wong’s work. His characters are in love with the romantic concept of love. However, reality often finds ways of bringing the metaphorical roof down on their heads.

Chungking Express wouldn’t be possible without the French New Wave, which shows Wong’s appreciation of film across cultures and genres. He was languishing in post-production on Ashes of Time, his only martial arts film of the period. When we think of traditional Hong Kong cinema, that is the genre that comes to mind. It’s not that big of a stretch to go from martial arts or the stylized gunplay of John Woo to the mood of Wong’s pictures. They both depict a romanticized version of Hong Kong, but one trades in swords & guns for heartbreak.

In the second story, with Faye and Leung’s unnamed cop, we see the filmmaker Wong Kar-Wai taking shape. It’s a love story centered on the inability to have the person for whom you yearn. This is repeated in Happy Together’s toxic same-sex couple and in the reactive & doomed affair from In the Mood for Love. In the same way that Jean-Luc Godard remade noir in Breathless and Band of Outsiders, Wong reshapes neo-noir for the 21st century. You don’t need murders and conspiracy to tell stories of equally emotionally devastating scale. Smartly, Wong chose to withhold overt violence & the presence of gangsters here. That would be repurposed and used in Fallen Angels, the B-sides to Chungking Express.

Wong is also a deft hand at making any comment on contemporary politics or the role of China and its cohorts in the coming new millennium. There are subtle nods and feints towards it, but he would never be so overt. His films are lush mood pieces, attempting to recreate the feel of a particular emotion possibly only ever felt in response to one person you meet in your life. It can’t just be boiled down to love or lust, but seeing the possibility in another person and how forming a relationship with them will, in turn, remake you. Stories like these can unfold only in the dark of night. The daylight is too harsh and reveals far too much. When we are at the edge of sleep, having stayed up long after we should have gone to bed, we begin to feel our consciousness open to the possibility of things the rational mind eschews. 

Chungking is the only film in which Wong has a pair of protagonists who experience a happy ending. For the rest of his film career, his romances will all be tragedies, the best of which is In the Mood For Love. With Chungking, the director established himself as a contemporary filmmaker, blending elements of Western pop culture with Asian sensibilities. The cinematography feels both influenced by and influential on music videos of the era. The small scale of his love stories would ripple through independent cinema worldwide, especially structuring the picture as a themed anthology. Despite its 30-year-old age, Chungking Express feels potent, brimming with youth and energy just as much as it did upon its release.