Chungking Express
A truly sad and depressing film, Wong Kar-wai’s Chungking Express is an exploration of loneliness, focused in on two men looking for love in the past in Hong Kong. Showing how one can be distressed and left hurt by looking to the past and waiting for it to change, Chungking Express features
With incredibly written dialogue, Chungking Express brings its two lonely men to life with lines that absolutely touch your soul. For example, one describes how a girl who wished him a happy birthday will live on in his memories forever, only to then wonder when a memory expires. Lines such as these will overcome inadequacies in the film as a whole, as they transcend the medium. Instead, it makes the experience feel incredibly real and authentic. Wong Kar-wai’s film may feel as though it is occurring at a distance from the audience, but lines such as these make the film realize that there is no distance at all. This is not a romance film, rather it is one about lost love and the pain it can cause. As such, it is an incredibly cold film, but not emotionless.
Stylistically, the film uses a ton of hand-held camera, if not solely hand-held. The end result is a kinetic and chaotic experience that highlights the loneliness of its protagonists. As the city and even their lives (as cops) run around hectically, their love life and home life remain empty and filled with solitude. It is always lovely when a director’s style matches some element of the film and offers its own thematic elements. This is very much the case with Chungking Express. Additionally, the film is just simply very well shot. Hand-held cameras can be quite nauseating and annoying when noticeable, yet Chungking Express deftly avoids these trappings and instead utilizes the style effectively. Essentially, it is supposed to put you into the scene. The camera does this here, but certainly not always.
A thoroughly melancholy and moving experience, Chungking Express will make you feel its characters loneliness in a very human way that will more than likely break your heart. Both this and In the Mood for Love (the other Wong Kar-Wai film I have seen), both have this quality that make you think they will be a romance film and certainly play out like a romance film should, but they are anything but romance films. Rather, they are explorations of love and what it does to a person once they feel it and how they feel when it is ripped out of their clutches.
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