Insightful Writing And Audacious Filmmaking Combine For Wong Kar-Wai's Excellent Chungking Express

That old turn of phrase "There's more than one way to skin a cat" is...a really disturbing colloquialism if one stops to think about it for even a second. Why were people skinning cats back in the era in which that saying was conceived?? Those poor kitties! Anywho, while that expression is certainly creepy, it does get a larger truth, which is that there's more than one way to accomplish a certain task. For instance, in the world of small-scale dialogue-oriented character dramas, you can execute such a type of story in a number of ways. You could go about it in a fully naturalistic approach, which has served the likes of Richard Linklater and Yasujiro Ozu immensely well with a number of their best works.

In the 1994 movie Chungking Express, Wong Kar-Wai frequently goes for this realistic type of motion picture, but Kar-Wai also embellishes the movie with more stylized touches such as pervasively present voice-over narration from the individual characters and sequences where everything surrounding our lead character becomes a busy blur. These more heightened touches merge incredibly well with the predominately naturalistic tendencies of the entire production, a dichotomy that ends up giving Chungking Express its own identity that allows it to dig deeper into the feelings of its four primary characters.

Those four characters are spread around two separate tales, a story structure I was unaware was the films intended structure (I thought the two storylines were going to be revealed to be intersected beyond one brief moment in the middle of the movie at any point!) until it finished. The first of these tales concerns He Qiwu (Takeshi Kaneshiro), a cop whose recent break-up has left him emotionally stunted as he becomes more obsessed with the expiration dates on canned food than anything else in his life. In his attempts to evade his loneliness, he goes to a bar to meet women only to run into a lady in a blonde wig (Brigette Lin) at a bar with this woman having her own personal problems to deal with in regards to complications she's having with her criminal activities.

Our second tale concerns Faye (Faye Wong) and the romantic infatuation she develops for another lonely law enforcement, one we, the audience, only know as Cop 663 (Tony Leung Chiu-Wai). Cop 663 is going through his own sort of emotionally tumultuous break-up which has left his life in disarray. That means his apartment has fallen on hard times and Faye takes it on herself to clean up his humble abode without his knowledge, hoping it will improve disposition and their own relationship in the process. While she carries on her covert cleaning experiment, Cop 663 is looking for love...but unfortunately for Faye, none of the ladies he's interested in seem to be herself.

Each of these tales of romance carries differing facets in their atmosphere and tone, most notably in how the first tale being heavier on crime movie elements and more flashy filming methods compared to the succeeding segment. But the pair of storylines do carry noticeable recurring themes, namely in how, in each story, the main character who's becoming romantically infatuated with someone has a concrete name while the object of their infatuation is given no moniker to speak of. That leads into the primary theme of both tales in that they depict people being so close to each other, yet so so far away. Contrary to many romantic movies that make the prospect of happily-ever-after for its two lead characters seem inevitable from the first frame, Chungking Express is all about how, more often than not, love is an unrequited thing, one that slips through your fingers even just as you think you've caught it in your grasp. For a good chunk of our characters here, the experience of seeking new human connections does not erase sorrow over past romances but rather mixes such an emotion with bitter disappointment.

What's great is that Chungking Express presents this as a matter-of-fact facet of life, with the various individuals who turn down romantic advances of other characters (namely the unnamed woman in the blonde wig turning down He Qiwu) not being played like villains but rather like normal people making rational decisions. Clearly, Wong Kar-Wai, who pulls off the duties of writer and director on this project, has a keen eye for how human beings operate in relationships and his adherence to depicting the emotions stemming from people fallen out of love or falling in love in a realistic manner makes for some quite interesting scenes. He Qiwu's fascination with a can of food for every day of the first month after his break-up feels like just the kind of subdued but obsessive action a fellow coping with a major emotional readjustment would do.

Combined with this more naturalistic approach to depicting people coping with broken up or budding romantic relationships are frequent visual flourishes that prove to be more stylized than the rest of the movies more grounded filming style. The opening sequence, for instance, has He Qiwu chasing a criminal in a filming style that's slower than slow-motion, to the point that it begins to resemble La Jetee (a short film done in only still photographs) more than anything else. It's a visually fascinating way to start the movie that immediately gets across the sort of chaos He Qiwu engages with on a daily basis as a cop. The fact that he runs into the unnamed lady in a blonde wig in this moment (as he notes, they were only a few centimeters apart) makes for a fantastic way to visually represent the core idea of the movie (human beings being so close to connecting and then not doing that) right in the first scene.

Combining these sort of visually audacious tendencies with a more humanistic touch is the sort of oddball combination that Wong Kar-Wai excels in as he does a wonderful job mixing the two contrasting elements together to create something both emotionally powerful and incredibly distinctive on a filmmaking level. It helps too that Wong Kar-Wai is working with quite the strong cast here, particularly in regards to Takeshi Kaneshiro and Faye Wong, the latter of whom makes her characters infatuation with both Cop 663 and the song California Dreamin' equally engaging. Strong cast, top-notch filmmaking and a script full of introspective and wise touches, what more reason do you need to board Chungking Express?