Classic 90s Movie: “Chungking Express”
May is Classic 90s Movie month. Today’s guest post comes from David Suto.
Movie Title: Chungking Express
Year: 1994
Writer: Wong Kar-wai
Lead Actors: Brigitte Lin, Tony Leung, Faye Wong, Takeshi Kaneshiro
Director: Wong Kar-wai
IMDB Plot Summary: “Two melancholy Hong Kong policemen fall in love: one with a mysterious female underworld figure, the other with a beautiful and ethereal server at a late-night restaurant he frequents.”
Why I Think This Is A Classic 90s Movie: Chungking Express showed another side of Hong Kong and East Asian cinema in a time when Kung Fu and other action flicks dominated the Western perception of that world.
Rather than harsh machismo and what might often have been wholesale melodrama, this character drama exploited genre figures (cops and criminals, their occupations largely beside the point) in a manner examining real life quandaries and everyday circumstances. No wonder Quentin Tarantino opted to distribute it under his short-lived Rolling Thunder Pictures.
Therein exists a proximity of our cinematic fantasies in relation to our real life desires. Told as two separate stories, the movie’s second half features Faye Wong’s non-typified food stall worker as the audience’s impish Alice intruding upon a filmic Wonderland. Her actions wrangle her daydreams into being.
But this awareness only peaks around the corners. Chungking Express is more to the point a fast, fluttering romance of lonely hearts. That classic theme, loneliness, is depicted in the movie via materialism and urban anonymity. What was 1994’s urban jungle (the local title translates as “Chungking Jungle”) is today’s technological one.
Wong Kar-wai’s then picture of international Hong Kong (language, people, commerce) meanwhile preexposes today’s buzzing globalism. Just look at the expanding number of Hollywood studio films catering to Chinese multiplexes and overall growing import of foreign box office for examples within the movie industry itself.
The effusive mise-en-scène co-engineered by lensers Andrew Lau (story one) and Christopher Doyle (story two) and costume/production designer William Chang revs with color and immediacy echoing the anxiety of Hong Kong’s impending repatriation to mainland China. Its packaged 90s cool would go on to define or influence a style of ads, music videos, and burgeoning filmmakers the world over. So much so its origins are lost on many of its imitators and their connoisseurs. Further, the director soon later felt compelled to change his visual approach moving forward and into the new millennium.
More simply, Chungking Express vivified the world to a rare auteur in Wong Kar-wai whose works are possessed of their own singular identity.
My Favorite Moment In The Movie: Wong Kar-wai’s film (as typical of his larger filmography) places a primacy on moments over rigid structure. And along with every great motion picture, isolating a singular moment is not easy. Many entries thus far mention their respective film’s ending. (How telling.) Chungking Express is no less tempting in this regard. But to not spoil maiden viewings, I’ll choose a scene in media res.
The pick, something of a cheat, is a roughly three minute sequence set to Dinah Washington’s “What a Diff’rence a Day Made.” In it, Tony Leung’s character reminisces on a first interlude with his fetching air hostess ex (Valerie Chow). “On board every flight, there’s one stewardess you long to seduce.” Apart from casual voice-over, it’s done with scant dialogue. The scene is sexy, playful, cool, and in context, a tinge wistful: all apt descriptors for the film in its entirety. It captures the movie’s overriding themes of the desire for romance and the fleeting nature of our lives, relationships, and their memories. This artful little flashback doesn’t disrupt the narrative’s flow but enhances its sway, intimately and enticingly revealing a major character’s relevant past (entering then exiting by route of Wong Kar-wai’s always tasteful transitions no less).
At last, it shows off the director’s keen ability of matching song to scene. (Mined in this instance from the filmmaker’s own gilded memory of Washington’s chic ditty featured in former United Airlines commercials).
My Favorite Dialogue In the Movie: Ending aside:
“If my memory of her has an expiration date, let it be 10,000 years…”
Consummating the movie’s first story and delivered with a degree of detachment, it plays on a cultural expression while coalescing one of the movie’s theses of everything having a terminal conclusion.
Even love falls short of everlasting.
Note: the dialogue is rarely outwardly flashy. The turnstile of characters speak and narrate with heart-on-their-sleeves sincerity. It’s meant to be direct and airy without dipping its toes in schmaltzy tar.
Key Things You Should Look For When Watching This Movie: The screenplay might be the last thing anyone mentions about Chungking Express. This is likely because it was written somewhat on the go. The crew made this movie while taking a break from their grueling production on Ashes of Time. Chungking Express was an independent effort pressed for time. Necessity took over. Actors’ limited schedules shaped the structure and order of the film. It was all a collaborative amalgam, incorporating even biographical aspects of many involved. The result is something beautiful in this writer’s opinion and a reminder the mission of any script is the finished on-screen product. Most important in that? Having a strong, clear voice.
As seen throughout his filmography, Wong Kar-wai is preoccupied with memory and time. A compulsive reader of novels, his films have a noticeably literary bent. I think these help explain one another. In his terrific Criterion commentary of Chungking Express, critic Tony Rayns cites the director/film as referencing the early works of Haruki Murakami in their Americanized perspectives and (some) dramatic devices.
The director also implements narration in each of his works. They’re good case studies for those interested.
Though often discovered on set, staging is a dimension/tool available to writers not to be overlooked. Thoughtful use of space can inform character dynamics and perspectives. How do the surroundings and their minutiae color characters and mood? (Think of every scene as a mini-movie and consider every dramatic variable. More texture gives you more possibilities.)
Concerning repeat viewings: characters occasionally wander through scenes long before their formal narrative introductions.
Thanks, David. To show our gratitude for your guest post, here’s a dash of creative juju for you. Whoosh!
We already have a set of 80s Movies. This month we cover 90s movies. So thanks to all of you for your participation in this project, creating a resource for writers, movies they should watch to help learn the craft of screenwriting!
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