CHUNGKING EXPRESS Movie Review

Hong Kong Express
Chongqing Senlin

Hong Kong's Breathless. The two most memorable stars of Wong Kar-Wai's snappy and intoxicating Chungking Express are not the two actors who play the two cops at the center of the movie's two plots; the real stars are Hong Kong itself and the man whose electric images seem to reinvent the city from minute to minute, cinematographer Christopher Doyle. Faye Wang is the lovestruck waitress who makes salads while dancing to the Mamas and the Papas whenever she's not obsessively but sweetly stalking cynical cop Tony Leung. A veteran of John Woo's Bullet in the Head and Hard-Boiled, Leung may unfortunately be best known in the west for his conventionally “exotic” role in Jean-Jacques Annaud's glossy, would-be-erotic epic The Lover. Director Wong Kar-Wai (Happy Together) paints an exhilarating portrait of unrequited love and desperate loneliness amid the youthful energy and perpetual motion of Hong Kong's glittering, pop-culture labyrinth of malls, fast food, and crime; it's that energy that makes the movie flow, and it's what we take home with us when the lights come up. You may not remember what happens to these characters a day after seeing Chungking Express, but it's likely that the sound and sights of the city that surrounds them will create in most viewers an unconscious, palpable dream of Hong Kong to be recalled with joy in sudden, Proust-style flashbacks at unexpected moments years from now.

NEXT STOP … Breathless, The Killer, Happy Together

1995 (PG-13) 102m/C HK Bridget Lin, Takeshi Kaneshiro, Tony Leung, Faye Wang, Valerie Chow, Piggy Chan; D: Wong Kar-Wai; W: Wong Kar-Wai; C: Christopher Doyle, Lau Wai-Keung; M: Frankie Chan, Roel A. Garcia. Nominations: Independent Spirit Awards '97: Best Foreign Film. VHS, LV, Closed Caption MAX