Wong Kar Wai - Chungking Express
or, life is but a dream I hope to live forever
Catch up with me:
You don’t get Chungking Express—the movie that really threw Wong Kar Wai into the international auteur he’s now known as—without the grueling and some would say—especially contemporaries—the disastrous production of Ashes of Time, which we’ll be discussing next month1.
While on break from editing Ashes of Time, Wong decided to throw a movie together in his two months of spare time.
This is the kind of audacious nonsense that I would do, so I love that this is the generative quality behind this movie. A movie that I have always remembered—no matter how many times I’ve seen it—as a showcase for Faye Wong. And it is! But I never seem to remember that she’s not even in it for the first 45 minutes.
It’s also the first real collaboration between Wong Kar Wai and Tony Leung.
And I just want to get this thought out of the way: for my adult life, people have been talking about how audiences won’t buy an Asian leading man, or that we can’t see the sex appeal in Asian men.
Maybe it’s because I’ve been watching Jackie Chan and Jet Li fly for my whole dumb life or because I knew about Toshiro Mifune when I was a teenager, but I’ve never really understood who it is that thinks this way or even if there is a person who thinks this. But if you ever meet someone who thinks Asian men can’t be sexy, all you need to do is show them Tony Leung in a suit smoking a cigarette.
Anyway, I want to talk about the half of this movie I always forget.
Chungking Express is really two short films shoved together through sheer will. Unlike Days of Being Wild, the stories don’t share protagonists or anything like that. It’s just two separate movies packaged in the same movie for no real good reason, except for a conceptual one. And I guess a single location.
The first movie is about a cop trying to find love and failing. He’s desperate for it and he can’t let go. Alongside this sad puppy romanticism is one about immigration and exploitation and drug trafficking. A woman in a blonde wig ends up on the unfortunate side of a drug deal gone wrong. The two meet and share a drunken yet chaste night together. In the morning, she kills her former lover who is also her drug pusher and the cop tries to sweat off his heartache to keep from crying.
Then we move to the second story! The first one really is that odd, but it’s also endearing and charming. You can’t help but feel charmed, despite the way it doesn’t really hold itself together. It’s a romantic comedy sharing a suit with a Triad noir and it never even attempts to reconcile these two conflicting styles and storylines.
But the second half of the movie is more directly a romantic comedy, and it’s really funny! Faye Wong and Tony Leung are just perfect together. Leung has great comedic timing and an often hilarious internal monologue, while Faye Wong is your manic pixie dreamgirl a decade before Garden State and therefore long before anyone invented that term.
She finds herself routinely going to his empty apartment and cleaning it, changing the decor, and even leaving her own things there, all without Leung’s character—a cop—notices anything. Eventually she’s found out but it’s romantic instead of deranged.
Kim Ki-duk’s 3-Iron would dial up the romance and derangement a decade later using a similar conceptual framework2.
But so what holds this movie together?
Charm and style, mostly. But there’s also this sense of space and sharing it. The cop in the first story mentions being 0.1 centimeters away from a woman who he falls in love with. In a city like Hong Kong, where people are often packed tightly together, where you can’t help but push past people to get where you’re going, this close proximity is difficult to avoid, and yet our protagonist draws attention to it.
The second story has two people sharing a physical space but at different times. In the first, we have people sharing space together leading to unfulfilled love, and in the second we have people nontemporally sharing the same space but managing to find one another by the end.
It’s cute.
I’ll feed you this Robert Ebert quote:
This is the kind of movie you'll relate to if you love film itself, rather than its surface aspects such as story and stars. It's not a movie for casual audiences, and it may not reveal all its secrets the first time through…If you are attentive to the style, if you think about what Wong is doing, Chungking Express works. If you're trying to follow the plot, you may feel frustrated…When Godard was hot, in the 1960s and early 1970s, there was an audience for this style, but in those days, there were still film societies and repertory theaters to build and nourish such audiences. Many of today's younger filmgoers, fed only by the narrow selections at video stores, are not as curious or knowledgeable and may simply be puzzled by Chungking Express instead of challenged. It needs to be said, in any event, that a film like this is largely a cerebral experience: You enjoy it because of what you know about film, not because of what it knows about life.
While I restocked DVDs at Blockbuster in 2005, stumbling across Chungking Express felt like fate. Of course, this is a lie because I was, then, a liar. I already had seen In the Mood for Love and so I was actively seeking this movie and knew exactly where it was at the shelf, but I was adept, then, at lying to myself about my life as I lived it, and because I had learnt to love and live through movies and books, I was able to throw my whole heart into the latenight screen when I watched this while drinking whatever liquor my parents had in the house that I convinced myself they wouldn’t notice was missing.
I knew more about film then than I do now. Movies were my life. I didn’t need anything else. Or, well, I did. I needed a whole lot else, but I felt as if I’d never get those other things I needed, like love and understanding, so I gave myself to the movies and they, thankfully, were an inexhaustible source of beauty and meaning for me to dress myself in.
I never learnt to live, but I knew the steps, the costuming, and so when I finally took the stage of my own life, I had people like Tony Leung and Marcello Mastroianni to wear as masks until I was able to stand there as myself.
I suppose it wasn’t until I lived in Ireland that I finally came to know myself. Some of you who have been with me since those days may remember the blog I kept while abroad. For the rest of you: maybe I’ll be talking about this in two weeks.
This quick movie that barely holds itself together lives on style over substance. Faye Wong is not a real girl. She’s a dreamgirl. She’s my dreamgirl. She’s every lonely boy’s dreamgirl. And no one does lonely boys better than Wong Kar Wai.
It’s why he’s the one who taught me how to live. Or, not taught.
But I learnt to live by watching the failures he painted so beautifully on the inside of my skull.
I walked those Dublin streets ecstatic and stupid, in love with my idiocy, with the absolute absurdity of my life, with the immense fortune I felt in the love people shared with me even while I was often begging for money because I burned through what to me was a fortune in those twelve months where, for the first time since I was twelve, I didn’t have to earn money.
I would have, but I wasn’t allowed. Immigration stuff, you know.
I spent certain nights walking, falling in love with temporary strangers who I met long after my friends went home to bed. We’d walk around St Stephens Green. One night a girl wept while telling me about two New York towers collapsing. Another night some Irish boy bought me my first kebab. Some nights I just wandered alongside the Liffey because I couldn’t sleep and I felt less alone with the middle of the night crowd of drunks, because I was one of them. Often drunk out of my skull and willing to talk to anyone about anything because I had a need inside me so vast that I thought I could hold the whole world inside me.
I fell in love in Dublin. It took me to Neuschwanstein where everyone spoke to me in German even though all I could say was Ich verstehe nicht even after three semesters of German, and it took me to the edge of the Irish world at Giant’s Causeway and it took me down deserted streets in Howth when we got lost after hiking for hours and you took so many pictures of me and I took so many of you and at the end of those months we said goodbye and then I never really saw you again.
Don’t wake me
I’m not dreaming
I used to go to a movie theatre in Dublin almost every week. It was across the Liffey but it reliably got me out of my apartment. I became a regular at the movie rental spot too. And at the used bookstores. And when I didn’t feel like spending money I never really had, I wandered Dublin and almost always ended up back at the Garden of Remembrance where I sometimes read the books I compulsively bought but often where I’d stare at that statue of a vision aswim like a swan on a river where bondage became freedom for an entire people.
"An Aisling"
I ndorchacht an éadóchais rinneadh aisling dúinn.
Lasamar solas an dóchais agus níor múchadh é.
I bhfásach an lagmhisnigh rinneadh aisling dúinn.
Chuireamar crann na crógachta agus tháinig bláth air.
I ngeimhreadh na daoirse rinneadh aisling dúinn.
Mheileamar sneachta na táimhe agus rith abhainn na hathbheochana as.
Chuireamar ár n-aisling ag snámh mar eala ar an abhainn. Rinneadh fírinne den aisling.
Rinneadh samhradh den gheimhreadh. Rinneadh saoirse den daoirse agus d'fhágamar agaibhse mar oidhreacht í.
A ghlúnta na saoirse cuimhnígí orainne, glúnta na haislinge.
I saw a vision in Wong Kar Wai and I lived a different vision when I was 21 in Ireland and I held these different and conflicting visions inside myself and they both became me, unfurling over a year, where I broke my own heart against the shores of different women who shared the same name but whose love for me was not the love I wanted it to be and though I told myself often that that was okay, that this was enough, to be close to you, to share space, to have you hold me and to have me hold you, to feel your body pressed against mine and—
There were days I felt like dying but then the sun would shine upon me and I’d smile, feeling lighter than ever before despite the poverty and physical hunger and the longing because I felt the love and kindness of so many people all at once like a wave swallowing me and though I felt forever undeserving of their love and kindness and generosity, it buoyed me and carried me ever onward.
It kept me alive. It gave me a dream to live.
And so when I think about Chungking Express and how it may not fit together well or that it may be more for cineastes than the average person, I shrug and smile, because once people loved me, a fool, and I let them, because I, the Fool, loved them so powerfully my knees nearly gave out at 4am on Grafton Street.
Some things I read last week that I liked:
Also, my good friend Grant Wamack has a new book out and it’s climbing up the charts. So help him get to number one in his category!
As always, I’d appreciate you reviewing my books on Amazon or telling your friends about them or about this here newsletter.
Also, I can’t believe this trailer has convinced me to watch the oldest man alive whip some dudes while wearing a dope hate.
And then some more free books:
I love it!
I love it!
Pretty sure 'Chungking Express' was the first Kar Wai movie I had seen. I think my dad or older brother got the DVD on a whim - we loved the format back then - and we were amazed by what we saw. I don't think I necessarily got it but it was certainly charming and we were all interested in seeing more of Kar Wai's films later.