Chungking Express

In recent times, many films shot towards the end of the last century are being restored and in some Roman theaters they are re-projecting them, sometimes in the form of monographic reviews. The Cantonese director Wong Kar-wai, for example, became famous in the Western world after the great success of the film “I’m in the mood for love” in 2000. A rather atypical director in current Chinese filmography, considered a New Wave for being outside of any narrative canon and for that photography of smudged and ephemeral images created by Chrisopher Doyle. Wong Kar-wai had started making feature films revisiting traditional Chinese martial heroes and in 1994, during breaks in the filming of “Ashes of Time” which lasted two years, he shot in three months “Chungking Express”, the international translation of “Hong Kong Express”. The title means “the jungle of Chungking” and refers to Chungking Mansions, a complex of buildings in the heart of Hong Kong where people of all nationalities, especially Indians and Pakistanis, gather to stay overnight and get food quickly and cheaply. The film, shot with a small cast and budget, was initially conceived of three episodes - with the third the director then developed another film - and tells the two love stories of two policemen in the mid-90s in Hong Kong, still a British colony at the time. The first story told is shorter and shows He Zhiwu (played by Takeshi Kaneshiro), a young policeman with serial number 223, who has been abandoned by his girlfriend and meets a mysterious and shady woman (played by Brigitte Lin), with whom he falls in love, implicated in drug trafficking. The woman has a gun and wears a blonde wig, wears a raincoat but also sunglasses (a woman for all seasons ...) and, a detail highlighted by the director, she wears very expensive Manolo Blahnik shoes. For those who do not know, Manolo Blahnik is a Spanish designer of women's shoes, with a fashion house in London, much loved by Carrie Bradshaw, the protagonist of "Sex in the City" who however will start the series four years later. The second story instead tells the story of the meeting between another policeman (Tony Leung Chiu-Wai who won the Prix d’interpretation masculine at the Cannes Film Festival for “I’m in the mood for love”) designated by the serial number 663, also just left by his woman, a hostess, and the young waitress Faye (Cantonese singer and actress Faye Wong), who works in a fast food kiosk. The environment that the director shows is always one made of slightly claustrophobic interiors, even when the scenes are shot outdoors in the streets or squares. It almost seems that the urban situation is predominantly mental (symbolic?) or social, but never spatial. A curiosity: the second episode is partially shot in the apartment of the director of photography Chrisopher Doyle. His love stories seem to be born and die during nocturnal digressions, always much desired and little consumed, they tell of everyday life, sometimes almost banal courtships, attractions, escapes and returns, as if the desire for the relationship were the most beautiful part of the relationship itself, which will find its peak in “I’m in the mood for love”. Wong Kar-wai’s cinema is made of atmospheres, of glances, and his way of making cinema - films often shot without a script based on suggestions and improvisations - has been compared to the way of painting of the Impressionists who colored the canvases directly with the brush, without first making a drawing with the outlines to fill in. Furthermore, the Cantonese director in his sequences loves to play with time that fragments, and disarranges going well beyond simple editing. As in all Wong Kar-wai’s films, music has an important role and sometimes overwhelms the dialogue. The film opens and closes with the Cranberries' Dreams, in a Chinese remake sung by Faye Wong herself, while the second story of the film is characterized by the almost obsessive repetition of the 1963 song California Dreaming by the Mamas & Papas.