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12/13/2014

Chungking Express/重慶森林 (1994) - Kar-Wai's urban love drama is a visual treat



+ Best Hong Kong Movie of the Year


A beautiful, evocative poster for Wong Kar-Wai's Chungking Express


QUICK REVIEW:

In the big city, people live very close to each other, but carry on their lives very far apart as well: A restless cop loses his girlfriend and seeks solace with a drug smuggler donning a blond wig. Another cop loses his flight attendant girlfriend and begins seeing a girl at the snack bar, where he picks up his boss's daily salad.

The plot arc is unusual in Express, which tells one story and then another. The film drifts forward in much the same aimless, intimacy-seeking pace that its lead characters live their lives in. Their in some ways transparent lives break through in melancholic grandeur in the film's most evocative images (by cinematographers Wai-keung Lau (Infernal Affairs/Mou Gaan Dou (2002)) and Christopher Doyle (Hero/Ying Xiong (2002))), in the rainy night or the ones where time seems to stand still. 
Tony Chiu Wai Leung (In the Mood for Love/Fa Yeung Nin Wa (2000)) gives a tender performance, and Express is visually strong and beautiful. It does, I think, overuse two of its gimmicks a bit: SPOILER The use of the song California Dreamin' by The Mamas and the Papas and Leung's characters 'dialog' with objects. 
The film is directed by great Chinese filmmaker Wong Kar Wai (In the Mood for Love), who wrote and made the film as a creatively freer exercise during his making of the big sword adventure Ashes of Time/Dung Che Sai Duk (1994)). He is busy at the moment with pre-production on his next film, The Ferryman (2015), which will star both male leads from Express.

 

Related post:

 

1994 in films and TV-series - according to Film Excess

 

Takeshi Kaneshiro and Brigitte Lin in Wong Kar-Wai's Chungking Express


Watch the not very good US trailer for the film here


Cost: Unknown

Box office: 0.6 mil. $ (US), 7.6 mil. HK$

= Uncertainty

[Express seems to have been a big local hit in Hong Kong, but without any budget information, - besides the director's statement in different interviews that it was "very low-budget", - we cannot know for sure whether the film, - which received a slim US distribution through Quentin Tarantino's (a fan of Kar-Wai) Rolling Thunder Pictures distribution company, - was a financial success.]

What do you think of Chungking Express?

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