Chungking Express (1994)

directed by Wong Kar-Wai

Brock Allen 

“The meaning of life doesn't seem to shine like that screen / ...The hopes and the dreams / Don't give credit to the real things /... I love movies / I wanna be in my own movie / I wanna be.”

- Weyes Blood

I passed through Hong Kong’s Aberdeen Tunnel smothered in Fallen Angels’ green filter, but I wasn’t stretched the same. I wasn’t on a motorcycle and no cigarette dangled from my lips. I didn’t ride towards a tunnel exit’s oblivion. I sat alone in the front-top of a double-decker bus, and I moved slowly towards the tunnel’s light-diffused opening. In this moment, I remembered Wong Kar-Wai’s film. A couple drones through the tunnel, their faces spread, their eyes squinting and delirious. These captured stills superimposed on my tunnel. The single row of light serpentined along the ceiling, the clean pattern of tiles flowed green and white. Sunlight gathered and dissolved those hard cut lines until they were gone and I was through, lurching between the canyoned forest road, green leaves reflecting heavy sun.

“And the sky is grey / I've been for a walk / … Stopped into a church / I passed along the way / Well, I got down on my knees / And I pretend to pray.”

- The Mamas & the Papas

On my first night in Hong Kong, I walked thirty minutes to Broadway Cinematheque where the theater was playing Edward Yang’s Taiwanese film, A Brighter Summer Day. When I bought the ticket, the cashier asked if I knew the film’s length. I said I did, and that I looked forward to the four hours in a room, comforted by a film I had already seen. I like the thin walls in old theaters. The way sound leaks from the next screening room. The way the other room’s sound plucks you from the movie back to your seat. Back to ragged cloth and depressed armrest cushions where elbows settle in and plastic digs into forearms. Sound bleeds through, swells and blossoms, and edges dissolve like a bled-through bandage where bass vibrates through everyone together. Jet-lagged, I slept through half the movie.

Afterwards, I bought various Hong Kong-version movie posters. One, of Andrei Tarkovsky’s The Sacrifice. Behind Cantonese text, Tarkovsky adjusts a model farmhouse on a spongy marsh. The real farmhouse depicted in the film towers a few hundred feet behind, past pools of water beneath a leafless tree, almost out of frame.

I’m not present often. My mind’s projector double-exposes most moments behind blank eyes. I want to structure life like a film, to double-back and reshoot significance. To let the film roll until the moment is found and edited around. I want to adjust my model farmhouse like Tarkovsky, everything perfected while the real one remains in the background, quiet and solitary. I want to live in the ten minute increments of a film reel, before and after: black.

I travelled to Hong Kong to see where my favorite films were made, where Wong Kar-Wai filmed his masterpieces, movies that reshaped how I saw film, reshaped how I thought about image and texture and song. Movies that sent shockwaves of hope through my body. Movies that made longing look beautiful. I wanted to feel the energy of cinematographer Christopher Doyle’s images. I found it, and it was the constant, erratic energy of loneliness, but it didn’t look the same, feel the same as the movies. It was dogged and boring.

“And oh, my dreams, it's never quite as it seems / Never quite as it seems.”

- The Cranberries

Chungking Express is desire, loss, hope, and despair split in two and emblazoned in whirling images of canned peaches, umbrellas, model airplanes, and Hong Kong’s Central Escalator. The escalator in Chungking Express moves by the apartment of Tony Leung’s character, Cop 663, where he flies his model airplane between his fingers in a directionless and broken figure eight.

The Central Escalator’s flat, connected metal sheets cut through Hong Kong’s Central District and climb between buildings for a half-mile, between chasms brimming with neon signs that  transmute the escalator’s plexi-glass to pale yellow. I played a cover of the Cranberries’ “Dreams” sung by the film’s lead, Faye Wong, on each of my escalator rides. Guitars shimmer, bass expands, and drums crescendo into what is supposed to feel like elation, and depending on the ride, on which day, if it was morning or night, I could feel something close to that euphoria. Tony Leung’s apartment building was torn down years before I arrived, but when I rode the escalator, I could still picture Leung’s Cop 663 sitting in the building’s gap. On the sofa in his police uniform pants and white tank top, I watched him cut his model airplane through the apartment’s thick air. Faye Wong rode the escalator in front and above me, in her small, round sunglasses and yellow shirt. She crouched and shouted. I looked to see Cop 663 scramble to the vanished window. I laughed as Wong laughed. I exited where I believe she exited. I walked for something to eat.

“Even though Faye Wong was a singer, she was not an actress,” Wong Kar-Wai said. “She didn’t have any acting training, so when we began the film she was actually very nervous… To help her I said, ‘Capture the rhythm of Faye, let’s play this music. She will feel much better.’... She is attracted to music, would pick up the rhythm for the music and feel much more confident.”

In the mornings, I slurped macaroni and ham soup as my knees brushed against others under the table. One evening, I accidentally ordered half a roasted goose, and in my embarrassment finished it and felt sick the rest of the evening. Each day I ate pig knuckles in altered forms: nestled in murky broth under wonton noodles, drenched in a Sichuan pepper soup, or pulverized into a gelatinous country-style pate.

Wong Kar-Wai’s lonely figures loomed above me, wherever I walked in the city. I found them in parks at the end of narrow stairways burrowed beneath buildings. In one park, a woman in her seventies sat beside a bulging grocery bag and ate a banana. Across, men played chess on stone tables and muttered to each other, themselves. These angled looks I’ve witnessed before, the loneliness projected onto their figures. I slanted and stretched everyone in my movie’s vision.

“I’ve gotta scratch it down, I never could amount / That’s it, babe / And now the sugar’s run out / And I don’t know what to say / Say again, this place / Say again, this place / Here is your princess / And here is the horizon.”

- Aldous Harding

Music is a central character in all of Wong Kar-Wai’s films. A character that speaks when no one can, says what they wish they could. In Chungking Express, the Mamas & the Papas’ “California Dreamin,” and the Cranberries’ “Dreams” inform the atmosphere of the film, playing on the characters' repetitive thoughts and wants, their circular dreams.

Minutes after the Aberdeen Tunnel, I found docked ferries, except for the one I was meant to take. It was gone, left earlier in the morning. When I realized, I sat dumbly on a bench and stared at the left space. I listened to Aldous Harding and thought about horizons—the watery one I could see and was meant to cross. In a live performance of “Horizon,” Harding presents the “princess” in her left hand, and the “horizon” in her right. The “horizon” floats above her hand in offering and her eyes widen in its temptation. Her gaze lingers and she is reluctant to remove herself from what the offering might bring.

“Horizon” opens with another offering: “Let me put the water in the bowl / For your wounds, babe.” As some inane gesture to myself, as some offering of water, when I couldn't afford it I bought the plane tickets to Hong Kong hoping in a kind of proactivity against every other fractured thing. I watched that water fill Aberdeen Harbour and construct those horizons, and I waited for answers to questions I knew couldn’t be answered.

“For reasons I cannot explain / There’s some part of me wants to see Graceland.”

- Paul Simon

I know now that I don’t know why I went to Hong Kong. I don’t know what I thought seeing a city shaped in Wong Kar-Wai’s vision could bring. I know that when I bought the tickets five months before, I was sad, and Tony Leung and Faye Wong look so beautiful when they are sad. I thought a city where sadness can be so gorgeously lit could light me the same, but I was depressed the same as before, just in different lighting.

I ate at the noodle shop, Leaf Dessert, owned by a husband and wife and featured in three films shot by Christopher Doyle. I found its sloped tarp and metal stall settled into the 40-degree hill and I ordered pig knuckles with wonton noodles, a rice ball with coconut and sugar, and a creme soda. After I ordered, the husband arrived. He barked, and she glowered over the steaming pots. I sat at one of the half-dozen plastic tables. Across, customers chatted over empty bowls, before the husband came out and growled at them until they left flustered.

While I ate, a black van pulled to the side of the adjacent street. A film crew flowed out, officious and blocking traffic. Two cameramen flanked each side of the street shooting B-roll. After this flurry, they waited, an agitated cluster. While I gnawed around the pig knuckle and splashed broth on my shirt, the wife sat at the table near mine with a to-go box of food. She opened it and before taking a bite began to weep. She muttered to herself and the mutters turned to shouts. She shouted between bites and she sobbed. She stared at her food. It was only her and me beneath the tarp.

Within a few minutes, another black van arrived, and the “talent” stepped out—three middle-aged men, who I guessed were European or Australian. They all wore skinny jeans with extravagant washes and ridges, pointy leather loafers, and sunglasses that hung from the buttons of their too-tight polos. All three squinted at their phones. All three nodded distractedly to the director’s instructions for what seemed like a travel show. They lined up at the base of the street, the base of the hill. They didn’t speak, only tapped at their phones.

This is the closest I came to a Wong Kar-Wai movie. This couple once imprinted onto Chistopher Doyle’s film. I had seen this stall, these characters, now people. This couple is this coin. This coin is this representation and this plea, but the rawness of her weeping was only met with my uncomfortable witnessing. When looking for this city and living in it through representations, I made spectres of everyone.

A cameraman stood on the street a few feet above the “talent” ready to backpedal. He counted them in, and their faces came alive. They climbed the street pointing to buildings, looking around with wonder, laughing at each other’s jokes. Half-way up the street, the director yelled, “Cut,” and the three men walked back down with their phones back out, and hopped in the van. Through it all, the wife didn’t stop weeping and shouting. I ate quickly.

“Walking in the deep water / … And my head hurts.”

- Grouper

In Chungking Express, lights stretch and pedestrians blur through the screen like wraiths, fragmented parts of themselves lag and catch up late. Behind them, Cop 663 leans against walls and sips black coffee out of paper cups, motionless in the shot’s delirium. I tried standing behind the swirling world, but I couldn’t stay still for long. I walked back to my hostel on sidewalks hedged in by night-time vendors whose blue-tarped stalls were filled with lingerie and vibrators, past roasted geese hanging behind oily windows, past erythrina trees’ squirming, distorted roots, past thousands of pedestrians lit by the brass-covered storefronts of Prada and Hermes. Sometimes, I wished I could press my temples with both palms until it all collapsed. Not a splat, just a compression. The air release of a shock. A whiff and gone.

I drifted through the streets always with my headphones on, with a face flushed and lit by neon signs, their buzzing cut by the hum of tires and voices, all of it severed by brakes squealing. I walked through the burnt air of dai pai dong’s hot wok oil, the oil that cooked the spam and eggs I would eat the next day. The next day, I again rode the escalator. I snapped pictures of smeared light. I walked narrow steps to alleys and roads beneath, only to climb up and take the ride. Wherever I went, I came back. On the escalator, I moved with everyone. And, together, we travelled in a slow, upward glissando.

Brock Allen is an essayist from Montana currently living in Utah, where he is an MFA candidate at Brigham Young University, and a managing editor at Fourth Genre. More of his work appears in DIAGRAM and Pithead Chapel.