Too often, we fail to recognize the little things. It’s a folly of being human, but rarely has it been something as felt and pushed against in a fraughtful, isolated year such as 2020. A handwritten letter from a friend lifted my spirits; a response from a panicked text at 2 a.m. offered instant comfort. Some well-timed memes made me laugh, and virtual movie nights fostered a sense of community. These little moments that fit so perfectly in the confines of small spaces –the gaps in life that many overlook in pursuit of greater conquests — have been the lifelines I’ve tethered myself to this year. The beauty in these instances, the gradiosity found in small comforts — these are aspects that have made the work of Wong Kar-wai so formidably moving. He, more than most, understands the humanity found in the mundane and beauty in fleeting, small offerings of kindness.
The innate sense of loneliness, along with the search for found companionship in all its shapes and sizes, is especially felt in the bustling, crowded and hazy cities with too many bodies and not enough souls. It’s the perfect arena for Wong, a Hong Kong filmmaker, who has a gravitational pull towards stories of individuals searching for meaning, looking for someone to see them, and uncertain in how to express that want for acknowledgement. He recognizes that “small” isn’t so small at all, but that slight gestures, like handwritten letters, can fill in the gaps, making it so we stay connected, grounded and feel loved. While so many of Wong’s films painstakingly track the day-to-day moments that make a person’s life dynamic, it’s his 1994 classic Chungking Express that executes this type of evanescent storytelling to its fullest potential.
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If you were to just take a passing glance at the visual artistry of Wong’s work — take a look at the images of the breathtaking Criterion box-set coming in 2021 — one would imagine his filmmaking is made up of big moments, the stuff of towering cinema. Again, look to the busy streets of Hong Kong in Chungking Express or the livewire energy of Fallen Angels. The atmosphere could easily be filled with moments that seek solely to take up the visual landscape. Instead, Wong subverts expectations by bringing forth the intimacy of every single moment. Even in the Wuxia epic The Grandmaster, a film that is seemingly built for those highly kinetic fight sequences that barely leave audiences with a second to blink, its best scene is a spar — a dance, really — between Tony Leung’s Ip Man and Zang Ziyi’s Gong Er. Each blow, each sidestep, hints at romanticism; the scene spends almost as much time evaluating facial expressions, like a smirk, as it does on the fight.
Chungking Express displays that level of unspoken intimacy best. The director features two separate yet slightly connected stories that break the film into pieces. The first is about a woman on the run who meets a heartbroken young man mourning a previous relationship, totally stuck in the past. The second focuses on the mutual attraction between a cop and a young shop attendee. Set in the crowded streets of Hong Kong, Chungking Express tells two stories of found companionship and the unlikely gains that each character gets through them.
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Dinah Washsington’s “What a Difference a Day Makes” plays in the background at one point in Chungking Express, a line that could become the thesis for the film. Greater still, the movie argues how a moment — a stray look, even — can make an impact. Nowhere is this more finely displayed than in the apartment montage, the film’s most endearing and enduring sequence. The scene is set to Faye Wong’s cover of “Dreams” by The Cranberries. Recall the iconic romantic moments in cinema — the grand declarations, the speeches and dramatic kisses in front of crowds. Few touch the tenderness of the quiet, unseen care that goes into the connection between Wong and Tong Leung as Cop 663. Initially aloof and even cold, Faye demonstrates her affection for Cop 663 by sneaking into his apartment to make slight adjustments to his everyday living — improvements people wouldn’t think about until they were already done — and by doing so, she lifts him out of his earlier heartbreak.
It would be easy to think of this as the main example — the one big scene — of shared comfort, but Chungking Express is a film that thrives with multiple rewatches to pick up on its wholly humanistic beats. Cop 633’s ex-lover only appears in flashbacks, but the sensual energy between them is still palpable. This isn’t created through any level of gratuity, but images of sweaty bodies in close confined apartments, where they sit close, teasing and sharing intimate glances as the cop pushes a toy car up Faye’s arm.
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Even the first half of Chungking Express that dedicates itself to Cop 223 (Takeshi Kaneshiro) and the “Woman in Blonde Wig” (Brigitte Lin) takes great lengths to showcase how crucial even fleeting connections can be to a person’s wellbeing. The first part is punchier with a stylized energy that feeds off of Lin’s apathetic, femme fatale persona. Possessing the air of a crime drama — where the protagonist is a lovesick hero, and with a plot that has little actual interest in action — this section’s most poignant sequence isn’t the woman’s runaway or a bar meet-cute drowned in hues of red, but instead the moment in a hotel where the Woman in Blonde Wig collapses, exhausted, and Cop 223 stays up all night watching TV. It’s innocuous at first, resisting immediate impact, but it’s all about the details. Kaneshiro’s character removes the woman’s shoes, and then also cleans them. His hands grasp at fries above his head, and his eyes are solely tuned on the television screen; it’s all so enormously, disarmingly human. Later, when Cop 223 receives a message wishing him happy birthday, the heartbroken young man is given a reason to move forward again. Perhaps it’s optimistic to assume kindness is responded to with kindness, but Chungking Express makes a strong argument for that case.
All three scenes tie together a film that is both more than the sum of its parts and made impossibly special due to these individual moments. The sequences breathe magic into what was already electric, in-the-moment filmmaking for one of the most romantic productions of Wong’s oeuvre.
Wong has explored similar concepts in some of his other films, though few capture the same level of whimsy as Chungking Express. Both In the Mood for Love and Happy Together follow individuals lost in a sea of people, either spurned by love, trying to capture new love or holding desperately to a love that’s been nothing but toxic. In the former, so much of the main couple’s troubles and tension come from what is unsaid; they’re simultaneously offering one another a sense of comfort as their respective partners are having an affair with each other, all the while still causing more friction in their lives by not admitting shared feelings. In the Mood for Love is rich in texture and beautifully shot, and so many of the memorable moments can be boiled down to a head on a shoulder, meetings in claustrophobic hallways and near missed opportunities. Happy Together expresses loneliness perhaps the most, and both films highlight the importance of whispers; the characters need to get what they’re feeling out of them, even if no one will hear what they say. Both relationships in the films spotlight what goes unsaid — it’s the empty spaces that are just as important as the over-explained emotions. We need to listen to silence and understand what it’s trying to tell us.
This sense of isolation could so easily create films that are cold and as desolate as the characters’ emotions themselves, but Wong instead goes for the opposite approach. Heat waves in the films are visceral, and a humid walk at night such as those in Days of Being Wild weigh down the air to cocoon audiences. The warmth in Chungking Express and so many of the director’s films is found in understanding the need for human contact and recognizing how many of us are lonely, even when swallowed whole by crowds of moving bodies, too distracted internally to take notice of one person feeling every bit of weight on their shoulders. What makes Chungking Express so beautiful, so perplexingly formidable, is in how it captures our longing by allowing these lost characters to be noticed. Cop 223 shares spaces with a mysterious woman, and she sees his need for solace by way of kind words. Cop 663 is heartbroken and meandering through life, and Faye offers him a lifeline by way of the simplest small home improvements. The small character gestures in Chungking Express give the film its soul, but the spark comes from the act of being seen at all.
Allyson Johnson (@AllysonAJ) is the film editor at TheYoungFolks.com as well as a film critic for ThePlaylist.net and CambridgeDay.com. As a member of the Online Film Critic Society and Boston Online Film Critics Association, her writing can also be found at TheMarySue.com and Seacoast Online.
Categories: 1990s, 2020 Film Essays, Comedy, Crime, Drama, Featured, Film Essays
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