Chungking Express
For most filmgoers, only three or four cities exist in the world at any given time. Viewers in the West, whether or not they travel much in the real world, know their way pretty well around virtual versions of New York, Los Angeles and perhaps Paris – but certainly not London, which hasn’t figured on cinema’s imaginative map for a long time. Another place, however, that’s beginning to take on distinctive contours for us is Hong Kong – largely from the huge volume of genre action movies that have become available on video here in the last few years, but also from the occasional legit production like Wayne Wang’s underrated 1989 film Life Is Cheap But Toilet Paper Is Expensive, a tall tale of a Chinese-American cowboy lost in the Hong Kong labyrinth.
That film – made by a director very much at home both in Hong Kong and the US – was at once an insider’s and an outsider’s view. Wong Kai-Wai’s film Chungking Express , released this week, is Hong Kong from the inside, but with a similarly cosmopolitan perspective – the city refracted through an optic of fast food, Hollywood glamour and early new wave shooting style.
Set in a snack bar and its environs, Chungking Express is urban cinema par excellence – a story of crowds, crossed paths, stolen kisses and snatched takeaway meals. A melancholy sort of screwball farce put through a formalist blender, it’s the story of two lovelorn cops, two women and a lot of hanging around, but everything, explains the director, begins with the place itself. The action is centred around Tsimshatsui, Hong Kong’s tourist area, and particularly the building Chungking Mansions – a vast, crammed complex of shops, restaurants, bars and flophouses.
‘I’ve been curious about this building since I was very young,’ explains Shanghai-born Wong, whose father used to manage a nightclub in the basement. ‘When we researched the building we found there were over 200 hostels there, very shabby, and over 5,000 tourists every day. The police department considered it to be overused with electricity so it’s very dangerous, it could catch fire easily. The building contains a vast diversity of people from different parts of the world, so it’s like a compressed Hong Kong.’
Chungking Mansions becomes a House of Fiction, with Wong dropping us into the centre of two stories that happen to touch on each other. The frantic rush of event makes it feel as though he has just touched by chance on two out of a million possibles, his own potential Short Cuts. ‘Two hundred stories would be OK,’ says Wong. In fact, there was a third story about a killer and his agent, which has now been decanted into Wong’s next film, Fallen Angel.
Chungking Express is partly about Asian fantasies of America, with one of its characters, played by singer-turned-actress Faye Wong, obsessively listening to a CD of California Dreamin’ and another popular star, Brigitte Lin, dressed as a generic femme fatale in raincoat, blonde wig and shades. The get-up is partly Wong’s tribute to Gena Rowlands’s hard-boiled dame in the John Cassavetes film Gloria. ‘Originally I wanted to write the character of a retired film star for Brigitte Lin, because I knew she was going to retire after this film. This character’s one remaining wish was to play Blanche Dubois in A Streetcar Named Desire. So she’d put on a blonde wig and hang around at night, acting like Vivien Leigh in front of the video screen. But when Brigitte did the dialogue in English, she was kind of tense, so we skipped that. But she looks cool in the wig and the raincoat, so I thought of Gloria, and changed the whole thing.’
It can be a confusing film, even on a second viewing characters frequently swap places with each other, or are doubled, there are two women in blonde wigs, two dressed as air hostesses, two called May (and one Faye). ‘It’s only a problem for Western audiences,’ Wong insists, ‘because all the stars in the film are so popular in Asia.’ Even so, the duplications are a necessary part of the film’s thesis that in modern city life, everyone is living a borrowed identity with whatever accoutrements come to hand. ‘Everybody has a uniform in cities – like Brigitte’s raincoat, or the policeman’s uniform. It gives them an identity, but inside this identity there’s something different, they’re trying to be something else.’
It’s perhaps inevitable the film’s mall setting can be read as a model of Hong Kong itself as a focal point for arrivals and departures on the eve of its return to the Chinese mainland. But Wong is reluctant to answer the question of 1997 and what will follow. ‘The only answer is, you still have to live. The way of making films will change when society changes – but with more space and more stories. I think the most interesting things will come out in 1998, or in 2000.’
Although it’s a film largely about dead time, about characters waiting for something to come along and transform their lives, Chungking Express has a dynamic off-the-cuff feel. It’s the result of Chris Doyle’s brisk hand-held camerawork and the fact that Wong was writing by day and shooting by night – partly in reaction to the highly organised rigout of his previous film, the swordfighting epic Ashes Of Time. ‘I didn’t have a full script, so I didn’t have the time to play – I just had to improvise.’
The result is Wong’s most distinctive film so far, and something very different from his other three features. The first, As Tears Go By (1986), is a mainstream gangster action movie, laced with stylistic flash – a deliberate shot at MTV style, Wong says. Days Of Being Wild (1990) is very different – a languid, melancholic portrait of a young low-life in the early sixties. ‘I’m not trying to recreate that period,’ says Wong. ‘I’m trying to remake a sixties of my own out of memories. That’s why the visual style is very shallow depth of field – so the effect is like a trance.
Days Of Being Wild, originally planned the first of two instalments, died the death on its original Asian release. Since then, however, it has acquired legendary status, with one of its stars, Andy Lau, appearing in a watch commercial that pastiched its style. Wong points out that it currently plays on Taiwanese television up to three times a month and that the original poster now fetches around pounds 2,000.
Chungking Express has made Wong a name to drop internationally, partly because of its accessible appeal to cosmopolitan pop culture, partly because it is the first film to be distributed in the US by Rolling Thunder, Miramax’s new outlet for Quentin Tarantino’s personal selections. It seems plausible that Wong might go the route of fellow Hong Kong star director John Woo and take up Hollywood’s offers, but he’s not revealing anything yet. He’s intrigued by a proposition of Tarantino’s – to take a story in the style of Chungking Express and have several directors make their own version of it in different cities around the world. It’s more appealing than another suggestion he’s heard – to remake this film with Julia Roberts in the Faye Wong role. That’s a California Dream too far.
