All right. Enough of France for now – let’s go to China for Wong Kar-wai’s 1995 film CHUNGKING EXPRESS.
This is a flick I was always on the verge of renting in the mid-90s because in the States it was distributed through Quentin Tarantino’s personal wing of Miramax, Rolling Thunder. At the time I rented everything with any connection to Tarantino, but somehow I never got around to this one.
The film is actually divided into two stories that are only superficially connected within the narrative, though they both share some of the same themes and echo a few moments from each other.
The first is about a lonely cop (Takeshi Kaneshiro) who has been recently dumped. He gives himself a month before moving on, hoping his lover will come back. Meanwhile, a mysterious woman (Brigitte Lin) attempts to orchestrate a drug deal. The two characters’ paths cross on the last night of the cop’s 30 days.
The second story is also about a lonely cop (Tony Leung), also recently dumped, who catches the eye of a girl who works in a snack shop (Faye Wong) who intercepts his apartment key and takes it upon herself to secretly invade and disrupt his life in cute, basically harmless ways.
The charm of the movie comes from the interesting characters – we hear their inner monologues, and they’re offbeat, quirky, cute and very human. If you’re looking for a satisfying plot, I’d steer clear of this flick, but the plot is not the point. The point is how these people interact and how they see their little corner of the world. They very messiness of the loose end filled story is what makes the movie compelling.
I imagine this is one reason Tarantino was drawn to it, since his films often confound narrative convention and go one way when you expect them to go the other, transforming fractured narratives into satisfying experiences.
Wong Kar-wai does the same here: CHUNGKING EXPRESS is not about one big overall message, it’s about the little moments, and often times those moments are the ones that make romance memorable.
No comments:
Post a Comment