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chungking linersIt took Hong Kong director
Wong Kar-wai just three months to make Chungking Express--it was shot in
two months, edited in three weeks--and rarely has a film felt more urgent: You
can feel the ebb and rush of time in every frame. Initially conceived as a
triptych (the third part of Chungking Express would later become Wong's
follow-up feature, Fallen Angels), Chungking Express is divided into a
pair of swoony love stories that are as singular in content as they are in
radical form. In the movie's first section, the unlikely lovebirds are a pouty
young cop named known as detective #223 (Takeshi Kaneshiro) and an enigmatic
Blonde With No Name (Brigitte Lin), a femme fatale straight out of film noir,
complete with trench coat, dark glasses, and purse-size gun.
The film begins with #223 lamenting a relationship that's gone south with an
unseen woman named May. As #223 mourns prettily--gulping down pineapple,
phoning unavailable women by the dozens--the Blonde negotiates the confusion of
an indoor bazaar known as Chungking Mansions and orchestrates an elaborate
smuggling operation. What follows next is less a typical love story than a
series of stuttering connections, near-misses, and tender happenstance. In the
film's second act, the virtual lovers are yet another cop, known only by his
badge #223 (Tony Leung), and a counter girl named Faye (Faye Wang), who works
at a fast-food joint called Midnight Express, and who pulls off one of the most
deliriously romantic gestures this side of Lubitsch.
A film about time, serendipity, the hard shimmer of night, and the erotics of
camerawork, Chungking Express is a genuine wonder--dazzling,
bewildering, intoxicating. It's also very fast--breathless, even. In many of
his films, Wong Kar-wai's camera always seems on the move, as if he were
searching for a way to break through the solitude that wraps around his
characters, his story, his city. Even so, in each of his films there are also
stretches when nothing seems to happen save the sweep of a second hand. (The
films are forever slowing down and picking up speed.) One of the director's
favorite strategies is to accelerate everything in the frame except the actors.
He keeps the actors motionless and shoots at 10 frames per second, then prints
the "slowed" footage at double the rate it was shot. In these scenes, the world
seems to rush by as the players scarcely move.
In the first act Chungking Express, there's a crucial moment when badge
#223 emerges from a smear of color. As the city hurtles past, it's as if he has
slipped out of time and space. And, in a sense, he has: He's eased out of the
here and now and into a Wong Kar-wai film--that fitful place of neon,
smoke-clogged rooms, and heartbreak, of sentimental cops and the tough women
who may or may not love them. It's a place where relationships remain elusive
and desire eternal, but also and finally a place where stories of ecstatic
passion always find their perfect analogue in Wong Kar-wai's ravishing
aesthetic. Here, love may be imperfect, but filmmaking is inviolate.
--Manohla Dargis
Manohla Dargis is the film critic for the L.A. Weekly.
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