Pineapples and Pop Music- the enduring brilliance of Chungking Express
The movie turned 30 this year and remains an absolute masterpiece.
To my surprise - if asked - I am often able to list out my favourite movies though these lists are never complete. I don’t know what it is that lets me identify a favourite, it is mostly a gut feeling. What does a movie make me feel? I know that it doesn’t have to be the most technically sound, logical, award-winning cinema. It isn’t always the biggest starrer, the most popular or coveted work of a director.
My first Wong Kar-wai movie was In the Mood for Love. And that movie is poetry on screen, it is a heartbreak set to a deep violin melody. I fell in love with Yumeji’s theme. I slapped on the film poster, and the art of the movie anywhere I could - It was my laptop wallpaper, my phone wallpaper, my Facebook cover image, and I stuck a printout of the red poster at my office workstation. I loved everything about it, but it wasn’t my favourite movie.
I watched Wong Kar-Wai’s Chungking Express many years later - mostly because I was unable to find the film with subtitles but then Mubi happened to me. And this one was an instant favourite. This was love.
Hong Kong auteur Wong Kar-Wai shot Chungking Express during the break he took from editing his wuxia epic Ashes of Time which was an all-consuming, mega-starrer martial arts movie that was taking forever.
Chungking Express was made on a shoestring budget, with no permits and a constantly changing script. Made like a student film, it comes with a young project's optimism, experimentation, bravery and inherent coolness. It’s not weighed down by the trappings of needing to be something great, and that is what makes it so great. It’s organic and inspired by the places, the music and the city that Wong Kar-Wai grew up with. It’s a love letter to Hong Kong on the precipice of change, to love and to movies.
While not his most elaborate project, the movie is often considered to be the world’s window to the work of Wong Kar-Wai (credits to Tarantino’s obsession with the movie for this global fame). Along with his long-time collaborator, Christopher Doyle whose apartment was used to shoot much of the movie, Kar Wai created something truly lasting, cerebral, and mega cool.
The movie is split into halves - two stories, of two cops, one part shot at night, the other during the day, telling disconnected tales about waiting and wanting, about staying and going away. This consistent dichotomy is probably a reflection of the changing times that the movie was made in. The movie was made in 1994. In just 3 years, Hongkong, then a territory of the United Kingdom was to be handed over to the People’s Republic of China - it was in a state of flux, a state of hurried uncertainty, the young were unsure of how their lives were about to change, something significant was slipping away.
Lovelorn, heartbroken Cop 223 (Takeshi Kaneshiro) has been dumped by girlfriend May on April 1. He chooses to believe that this is a joke and decides to wait an entire month for her to come back. He buys cans of pineapple, her favourite fruit - all with an expiry date of May 1st, which also happens to be his birthday. If she does not come back, like the canned sticky fruit, his love too will expire. On the night before his wait is to end, a chance encounter with a woman in a blond wig and a trench coat (Brigitte Lin) changes the course of his love story. She’s on the run from a botched drug deal in the shadowy, neon, crowded Kowloon Walled City, where most of the night scenes are shot - at a fast food joint called the Midnight Express.
The rest of the movie plays out primarily in the day. Cop 663 (Tony Leung Chiu-Wai) is also dealing with a broken heart. His flight attendant girlfriend has dumped him and he and his house sit brooding the memory of their time together. He meets Faye (Faye Wong), who works as the counter girl at Midnight Express, and she instantly develops a crush on him. While he is away at work, Faye smuggles her way into his apartment cleaning it up, rearranging things, leaving millimetres of change that mostly go unseen but little by little nudge him out of the heartbreak.
Chungking Express remains a standout film in terms of the energy and style it packs between the opening and end credits, cut to some truly iconic music - California Dreaming by The Mamas and The Papas is Faye's endless refrain through the movie, while her own Mandarin version of Dreams by The Cranberries, who were HUGE in Hong Kong and China at the time, makes a frequent appearance too.
This is a movie for those who love film and understand style. If love is whimsical to you, you’ll see what makes this a masterpiece. Chungking Express is more than - or despite - the story or plot, which is pretty simplistic, to be honest.
The movie sets loneliness and isolation against busyness. Doyle’s energetic, stylised, blurred long shots distort the way time is captured. It is about losing love and finding it. The movie's visual language is as much a character as Faye or Cops 223 and 663, or even more so. The characters float about in the play of light and darkness, and the music and style that Wong Kar Wai put together - on a random two-month break.
Chungking Express turned 30 this July. I have been working on this piece for many weeks - but it wasn’t the easiest to zero down on the one thing I love most about this movie. It is the whole thing - every piece and part falls just as it should. And that’s rare and gorgeous.