Production Year: 1995 - Action/Adventure - Director: Wong Kar-Wai - Original Language: Cantonese\Mandarin - Classification: 15 years and over - Starring:Valerie Chow, Bridget Lin, Takeshi Kaneshiro, Faye Wong
An historical document that's fast and funny, a wild ride
Disadvantages:
None
Recommend to potential buyers:
yes
Full review
Won Kar-Wai's CHUNGKING EXPRESS was released in 1994, part drama, part thriller, part romance, part comedy and a melancholic fable on the loneliness of this modern world in which we have lost ourselves. Based in Honk-Kong's Chungking Mansions, a visually stunning, densely populated complex of neon-lit shabby hostels, bars, clubs and drugs, we follow four of its isolated inhabitants as the similarities of their unusual stories very cleverly link whilst, ironically, never linking them together.
The first unusual story connects a beautiful and mysterious drug smuggler and her dodgy dealings with a love-sick policeman trying to get over his girlfriend of five years. Buying tins of pineapples that expire on the same date at the end of the month, his plan is to eat one of them every day, until the last day, the last tin, in the belief that if by this time they are not back together then their love, too, will be expired. The second unusual story is about a young female fast-food worker who dreams her life away escaping to California when she falls in love with a second love-sick policeman (Wong-Kar Wai regular Tony Leung) getting over his air-hostess girlfriend. As the fast-food worker gradually obsesses over him more and more, a chance falls upon her due to work, where he regularly frequents to eat, whereby she has the key to his apartment at her disposal. One day she uses it to enter the apartment and seeing its sad state she decides to clean and redecorate it, little by little everyday, whilst he is at work. Not noticing the small differences when he arrives home, his lonely life of contemplating his lost love, talking to the miserable apartment as if it was her, is gradually brightened as his apartment gradually brightens.
On a break from his other lesser film, ASHES OF TIME, Wong Kar-Wai, a filmmaking auteur, wanted to make something lighter and funnier in style, quicker and more catchy, so writing a script during the day and shooting at night, he finished in 23 days what is, in my opinion, his most electric film. In fact, so astute a realisation of modern life that the film's physics, the perfect acting, the precise writing, the impeccable production, even the inspired directing all take second place to the carefully constructed mayhem that unfolds on screen. Surely influenced by Jean-Luc Godard and pre-dating Quentin Tarantino, it's fast and funny, with little conventional narrative and (for those of you with nervous dispositions) kaleidoscopically shot with shaky hand-held cameras. Indeed, CHUNGKING EXPRESS absolutely crackles with a breathless sense of urgency that after one hour-and-forty minutes left me speechless, having brilliantly reflected the lexicon of emotions of city life, portrayed in those crucial years in which it was made, those leading up to Hong-Kong's handover to China. A great film.
(A film-only review; not to be associated with the format it comes on, available bonus features or plastic bits that may or may not be attached to the casing)
Chungking Express [1995]
Chungking Express tells two stories loosely connected by a Hong Kong snack bar. In one, a
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cop who's been recently dumped by his girlfriend becomes obsessed with the expiry dates on cans of pineapple; he's constantly distracted as he tries to track down...
