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Dir: Wong Kar-Wai
Starring: Brigitte Lin, Tony Leung Chiu Wai, Faye Wong, Takeshi Kaneshiro In 1994 two films depicting the interweaving lives of their characters were released. One had hip dialogue, a cool cast and a soundtrack to die for. One didn’t. One graced the screens of multiplexes worldwide and struck box office gold. One didn’t. One captured the zeitgeist and passed into popular culture. One didn’t. One was Pulp Fiction. The other was Chung King Express. Weaving the lives of its four characters into a beautiful lyrical tapestry of love and loss Wai’s film is one of the great lost treasures of the 1990’s. Flying in the face of usual cinematic conventions it brilliantly mixes comedy with tragedy telling two stories of unlucky in love men looking for a break in modern Hong Kong. The first story concentrates on Officer 223 and a ‘40’s style femme fatale; he’s struggling to get over his ex-girlfriend and she is a drug dealer on a desperate mission to find her missing cargo. The second half of the film has a California Dreamin’ obsessed waitress gradually working her way into the life of another lovelorn cop. If the plot seems a little convoluted the brilliant script makes up for it, beautifully encouraging sympathy for characters that otherwise would have been self-pitying and self indulgent obsessives. The hand held camera work gives a slightly disturbing and unnatural feel to the film and depicts a realistic modern Hong Kong that’s neither utopic nor distopian but beautiful none the less. Indeed the whole film playing out like some kind of barely comprehensible dream against a backdrop of kaleidoscopic colours. But Wai’s visual tricks never take over the film, always remaining grounded in its narrative and brilliantly written characters who glow with humanity, despair, sadness, happiness and comedy making this a very real story of humans reactions to loves lost and found. In short, an undeniable modern masterpiece just begging to be discovered.
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