Chungking Express (1994)

Written by BornKnight on January 30, 2024

Filmed into the post production of two years of filming the Wuxia epic "Ashes of Time", with low resources, this movie is another example that we don't need millions of USD to make a masterpiece.

Wong Kar-Wai have a personal style of using melancholic characters distorted stories, using elaborate soundtracks in the background. This movie show two drama and crime stories about two lovesick policeman and their search over his relationship with a woman, always in a 0,01cm encounter of distance between them.

The first story stars Takeshi Kaneshiro as a cop obsessed by his breakup with a woman named May (replaced emotionally with letters and old pineapple cans), and his encounter with a mysterious drug smuggler. The second stars Tony Leung as a police officer roused from his gloom over the loss of his flight attendant girlfriend by the attentions of a quirky snack bar worker called Express - referred in the title (Faye Wong).

Both stories circles around Chungking Mansions, a 60's complex of buildings supposed to be residential, but that is made up of many independent low-budget hotels, shops and other services, filled with stores and stalls in the building cater to wholesalers shipping goods to Africa and South Asia, and amid the gigantic Central–Mid-Levels escalator with a length of 800m and one of the two highlights locations of the movie.

Both sequences have a unique visual approach sometimes intimate, sometimes frenetic with a beautiful use of color among the chaos that reminds me of the works of the photographer Saul Leiter.

On the unique soundtrack using ocidental musics we have the use for the first story is Dennis Brown's "Things in Life" and "Baroque", composed by Michael Galasso, can be heard twice during the first part of the movie.

On the second "California Dreamin'" by The Mamas & the Papas plays in the key scenes in the second story, which also features Faye Wong's Cantonese cover version of "Dreams" by The Cranberries.

In the plans of making there was a third movie but since it was too long it was released as a separate movie, Fallen Angels in 1995.

Another must watch classic with a unique style that differentiates it from other Hong Kong productions - I gave it a 8,7 out of 10,0 / A rate.