Wong Kar-Wai’s Chungking Express Essay, Research Paper

Chungking express is a movie directed and written by Wong Kar-wai, a famous filmmaker, who specializes in costume epics. Wong Kar-wai was rewarded Best Director at the 1997 Cannes Film Festival . He is one of the most sought-after talents in Asian cinema, and one of the most important directors of the 1990 s. Unlike other filmmakers, Wong Kar-wai uses a lot of different techniques of film processing. He has the deepest interest in creating an original mode of cinematic narration. Image, actor movement and language are all unleashed to usurp the authority of straight forward linear narrative, but this turns out to have very specific thematic and formal applications and implications. For, Wong Kar-Wai s film filmmaking style has given to the audience the feeling of reality from the lives of people who can t deal with life or more specifically life in society.

Brief summary

Chungking Express is a movie about two Hong Kong policeman. The movie is divided into two parts, each of the movie s stories involves a lovelorn policeman on the rebound.

The first part of the movie involves a plainclothes and handsome detective known as badge No.223. After being dumped by his girlfriend, the policeman was heartbroken therefore, he decided to eat 30 cans of pineapples representing his ex-girlfriend s name and her favorite fruit. Afterward, in the bar, he met a blond wig criminal lady, who sales drugs. The criminal lady and the policeman became friends, without him knowing the truth behind the blond hair lady s background.

The second part of the movie is about a uniform cop known as badge No.663. The policeman breaks up with his air-stewardess girlfriend. Unlike the policeman from the first story, this one discusses his loneliness with his furniture, his stuffed animals, or even with his bar of soap in his bathroom. Meanwhile, the policeman s ex-girlfriend came back to the lunch counter, where they used to order food, to give him back the set of keys of his apartment, which was inside of an envelop. But the set of keys ends up in the hands of Faye. Faye is a mischievous girl, in her late twenties, who works at the lunch counter. She was the one, who kept the set of keys, as she opened the policeman s ex-girlfriend s letter. By the end, we would see Faye breaking into the policeman s apartment to sweep, scrub, dance, rearrange and fantasize his apartment while his was away. This sort of a kinky character was due, because the policeman was the secret admirer of Faye.

The style of Wong Kar-wai

This movie is about real life, the two unrelated stories took place in ordinary Hong Kong locations, such as apartments, shops, train station, and involve a handful of characters. Most of the Chungking Express was filmed at night with a handheld camera. The action scenes are gritty and blurred, and most of the shots have some fuzzy object jutting into the foreground. Lets take the scene of when the policeman No.223 was chasing after a criminal and when a gang of Indians was chasing the blond hair lady.

An other special effect to mention is the shift, imaginative change of the camera angle, the giddy action sequences with slow motion and speed up movements This is shown when the policeman No.663 was standing by the lunch counter drinking his coffee. We would see people walking by very fast, like if the whole world was in a hurry, and we would see the policeman sipping his coffee with a very slow and calm action and Faye watching him drinking his coffee quietly (we see Faye blinking her eyes very slowly). Again, when we nearly got to the end of the movie, we see the policeman No.663 sitting hours at the California restaurant while waiting for Faye.

Moreover, Wong Kar-Wai s Chungking Express and Fallen Angels presents life as a radiant neon blur a world of hyper real clarity broken with interludes of pixilated slow-motion noir effects. For example, when the policeman No.223 was sitting in front of the lunch counter.

The characters and the setting

When we see a movie, the first thing we would likely to observe is the behavior and the characteristics of each character. One kind of great film acting honorably derives from the theater, from psychological realism, from finding the inner truth of the scripted character. What Wong Kar-wai is looking for in his movies are no exemptions. He is also looking to have in his movies, this quality of being documentaries about physical and behavioral qualities of the star. His particular originality is with the women. For example, in Chungking Express, we see Faye dancing while working at the lunch counter, she literally dances to a rock soundtrack of California Dreaming . Also, when Faye was in the apartment of the policeman, we saw a scene where we can hear Faye s song, a Chinese pop singer, as if we were watching a MTV video clip.

We also said that Wong Kar-wai is the first great post-MTV director Because he s soundtracks are derived from the American jukeboxes, Latin, jazz and 60 s pop infiltrating every second scene, along with Cantonese pop music and cover versions of western songs. For example, we can hear the jazz each time that the scene with the blond wig lady appears and the scene when a Chinese lady is dancing in front of the jukebox.

Other information

I think what have made this movie so real, so moving and so special is that Chungking Express was written, shot and edited in three consecutive weeks after Wong Kar-wai has spent three years working on Ashes of time. Wong Kar-wai was described as the greatest director to come out of Hong Kong is that he s the most Eurocentric, the most taken with the high masters of auteurism. Wong Kar-wai s productions have given to the viewers the feeling of a whole new movie style, because he uses very different techniques then other filmmakers. For instance, when we see the character standing still, the world just seems to be rushing very quickly and when we see the chasing, the camera is following each movement of the character.

In a few words, I admire Wong Kar-Wai s work because it gave us something different from other filmmakers. What I like the most is that the stories that he shoots, reveals the truth of reality and show people how people really are, along with their kinky characters.