Chungking Express (1994)

PG-13, which shocks me for some reason.  I mean, there isn't anything all that offensive in the movie.  Some people die, but not in shocking or offensive ways.  There are people being used as mules for drugs and there's an implication of the awful things that they have to do to move these drugs.  But it isn't like the movie actually aims to be edgy or offensive in any way.  I suppose there's some cultural racism in there, but it is more an attempt to gain a sense of verisimilitude versus perpetuating stereotypes.  Honestly, I'm so used to everything good being R that I assumed that this, too, would be R.  PG-13.

DIRECTOR:  Wong Kar-Wai

Hey, Jeff.  I finally saw Chungking Express.  It only took twenty years to get around to it.  Okay, I haven't been writing lately.  It's because I've been super sick.  I don't know if it was Covid or it was something else, but I'm feeling good enough to write.  (Wait, Tim, you were so sick that you couldn't write?  Yes, it was that bad.) Heck, I started this movie when I was feeling okay and then finished it when I could finally tolerate watching a screen without wanting to run for a toilet.  Okay, I'm sharing too much, especially when I'm talking about a romance film.  Honestly, my wife would have liked this one, but she fell asleep really early one night and I finally started feeling okay.  Besides, we're really behind on TV.  The moral good and whatnot.

I can't say that I've heard of an anthology film that really just tells two stories.  On top of that, it's weird that I really bonded to the one story that isn't the one that is associated with the famous image.  I always thought of Chungking Express as that movie with the blonde wig and the rad glasses who points a gun while being shot at a Dutch angle.  I have a very specific image of how movies are supposed to be like.  But this wasn't the movie I thought it was going to be.  As part of that preconception for how movies are supposed to be, I have to confess that I'm kind of dumb when it comes to plot and storytelling.  In this case, I had a lot of moments where I wasn't sure what I was watching was real or not.  Possibly, it's the dreamlike vibe of both stories that makes me question what is going on.  But a lot of it comes from the fact that these are love stories that are intentionally atypical and bizarre, which makes them charming.

I'm going to anger someone, but at least I'm engaging on some level.  With La La Land (Yeah, I just compared a Wong Kar-Wai film to La La Land), the story takes two very specific backgrounds and throws them together.  The audience gains a sense of empathy and understanding from them not from their bizarre situations, but the fact that they fundamentally act like human people.  With Chungking Express, it takes a bizarre background but with absolutely absurd character choices and dares the audience to bond with these characters.  It sounds like I'm attacking the film, but quite the opposite.  Somehow, Wong Kar-Wai made these characters insanely bananas and yet, there's something in the film that bonds with us.  It's almost like watching aliens fall in love.  I would have made none of the choices that the characters did, but still completely understood.  

Okay, that's not completely true.  I have a story here because I can write it here and no one is reading this anyway.  When I was in sixth grade or something, I carpooled home with a family and stayed at their house until my parents came to pick me up.  Now, I was really young.  I didn't know what a crush was.  But I'll tell you this weird thing about me.  I really enjoyed cleaning a girl's room.  There was a girl who was slightly older living there and, like a real weirdo, I would clean her room regularly.  It makes sense if you meet me. I clean the house every night in hopes that my wife will love me the more.  It's my love language.  The girl told me to stop, so I did.  It's one of those little shame things that I hold onto.  So that second story, when it happened?  Okay, I got that.  Yeah, it's a real invasion of privacy what she does.  But I'll tell you what?  I got it.  I also got it when she didn't know how to handle the next stage of a relationship.  When Cop 663 finally figures out (He's a police officer and he doesn't figure out real basic things?) that Faye is cleaning his apartment because she is attracted to him, I can get that Faye doesn't want to change the dynamic.  I mean, the movie implies that she eventually matures out of that stage that she was in when she worked at the shop, but it doesn't quite spell it out for us either.  There's something very comforting in the fact that she has created this life for 663.

For Faye, that world is safe.  663 is a perfect guy.  I mean, we get that he's a nice guy from his voiceovers.  But he also is kind of lame in his own way.  We see his flaws as a potential suitor from his perspective.  Heck, I even think that Faye sees these flaws.  But when she is in his apartment, there's really no way for him to screw it up.  His pining for the stewardess was bound to come back and bite him on the butt.  In a weird way, the way that Faye invades his privacy in an actual criminal way is the only way for that relationship to work.  Now, I would never advocate what Faye has done in real life.  As I established, everything about this movie is about the most absurd way to go about things.  But it's because Faye took this insane way about discovering 663 that their relationship even had a prayer.  Faye knows so much about 663 through his apartment. 663 on the street is this confident police officer who is grieving a breakup (one, that I'll editorialize, that seems pretty toxic).  But this is a guy who is kind of filthy.  He has a giant Garfield that he talks to.   And it doesn't seem like she's in love with him when she first gets the keys.  If anything, sneaking into 663's apartment seems like a bit of punk rock. It's taking on the system and she's doing it because she's not supposed to.  It's criminal altruism. 

If you haven't guessed, I'm a big fan of the second story.  So why am I so quiet about the first story?  I  don't know.  Maybe I just couldn't get into the first story.  I was sleepy.  It took a lot to relate to the character.  Also, the first story starts off with an effect that initially pulled me out of the film.  In a lot of these '90s Hong Kong films, there's this action thing that happens when action sequences have such a low frame rate akin to stop motion animation.  It's really annoying and it took me back to Wong Kar-Wai's As Tears Go By.  It took a while, but I realized the effect being reused in this was to a different result.  It is almost hypnotic in this one as opposed to extreme.  But by the time I readjusted my focus, most of the story was over.  It's also way less romantic to me.  There's something really pathetic about the first story, which has to be the director's intention.  The voiceover of Cop 223 is so hyperbolic about love that there's nothing really to relate to.  When the film ends and there is no real romance between 223 and the Woman in the Blonde Wig, it's a lot of investment for what seems nothing.  Like, the story is really well done.  But I just didn't care about it at all.

I'm going to say this for Wong Kar-Wai that might also get me in trouble with the real film nerds.  There's something really double-edged with his use of music.  He loves repeating the same motifs so often that it almost becomes boring.  It's something that I would do as a young man because I really liked something.  But there's only so much "California Dreamin'" or "Dreams" that I can handle in a movie.  They're good songs, but they pervade the film to an almost obsessive level.  

Anyway, Jeff and the Internet, I'm glad I saw it.  It was absolutely beautiful.  It did the job.