What did Chungking Express use to shaped the style of Wong Kar-Wai.
In this era of rapid development of information technology, overwhelming commercial blockbusters are constantly sweeping the mindset of the audience on the huge screen, keep giving visual impact on them.. It is difficult for many people to appreciate and enjoy an old movie that does not have too many ups and downs, no major events, no violent plot conflicts but only lights and shadows for emotions, this is Wong Kar Wai’s movie. Wong Kar-wai has established himself as one of the authoritative figures in the contemporary film industry with his lush sensual visual effects, a perfect soundtrack and affectionate romanticism. He wrote and directed films that attracted worldwide audiences and critics, with poetic emotions and music, narrative and style, inspired countless other filmmakers’ bold and powerful theme and memory. Compared with other Chinese directors, he doesn’t care much about grand narratives. He only cares about the emotions of lonely individuals in urban life. He likes the killer on the edge of the city, the lover who wanders in a foreign country, and the people who couldn’t love it in the 1960s. Chungking Express, one of the most distinctive films of Wong Kar-Wai, a low budget movie which takes a month to complete the shooting received high praise from both local and international.
In Chungking Express, there is a unique way to promotes the story and shows the characters, the storyline becomes less important, instead of enriching and expressing the characters through the plot, the director mainly promotes the development of film plot and expresses the emotional changes in the character’s heart through several elements such as props, vision and music. Time and memory are the everlasting theme in Wong’s movie. Observing the distinctive personal style of Wong Kar Wai’s movies, the memory and flow of time are broken and free, traversing countless ambiguous clips. The two stories in Chungking Express illustrates dramatically opposite expression of time. For the first stories, He Qiwu as well as Cop 223 emphasizes the concept of time, he keeps stressing that canned food will expire soon, the expiration date on the can implied 223’s girlfriend, in addition, the director constantly interspersed frames of the beating electronic clock, the repeated concept of time highlights the fear of being abandoned.
223 wants to find someone else to fill the blank in his heart, however, for the second story, the cop 663 is a faithful person who cannot get out from the broken relationship easily, there are few intuitive expressions of time in his storyline, the same work suits, work content and the similar emotions that he repeats everyday blurred the sense of time flow, the audience can only observe the passage of time from the change of other character.
The reason that Chungking Express branded and labelled in the style of Wong Kar-wai, his cinematographer Christopher Doyle’s contribution can never be ignored. He is good at using slow shutter speed, which leads to individual frames that are more blurred than usual. For the movement of camera, plenty of hand-held shooting keep the screen in a state of drastic shaking, especially in some dynamic scene, the camera following character tightly, established an unsecured and terrified keynote of character’s mindset. The same imaging technology has different effects, matching the different mentalities of the two protagonists. For 223’s part, while he is chasing the criminal, the characters are moving quickly, the background is blurred, and the visual effect of shaking the characters’ shadow creates a sense of urban loss. For 663’s part, when he was drinking at Faye’s fast-food store, the character moves slowly, wants to stop time, the background is blurred, and the character is immersed in the passage of time.
Moreover, the indeterminacy of camera movement does not completely maintain the same frequency as the subject gives a sense of peeper., which often approaching the character autonomously in abrupt movements, forming an impactful visual effect. For the setting of lights and shadow, Christopher consciously looked for scenes rich in light and shadow changes, such as bars with flashing lights and shadows, streets with neon flashings, and dim and obscure residences.
Different light presents different tonal environments. The characters performing in this space are also given different emotions. He intentionally placed the characters in various colors, flashing, and having In an environment with strong light movement, an uneasy and blurred atmosphere floating like debris can be created.
In the second half of the film, the confused abstract part of Wong Kar-wai’s usual photography is replaced by unique and human-aspired themes. The song ‘California Dreaming’ for instance, serves as a music pass in the chaotic film. The symbolism of the song is two-fold. On the one hand, California, a place radically different from Hong Kong, highlights the characters’ desire for escape and reinvent. Secondly, the latter half of the song’s title reflects the film’s tendency to occasionally take on a surreal quality, blurring the line between the real and the imagined until they merge into one..(Cho. I , 2020). For the final couple of scenes, the girl returned from America after fulfilled her ‘California dream’, they finally get together, while 663 was asking her about California, California becomes insignificant anymore..
The film is about the emotional state of urban men and women, the attitude of facing broken love and the loneliness felt in the broken love. In urban life, men and women often pass by but there is no real and direct communication. Whether it is in the transformation of light and shadow or the controlling of the camera, the image style of Wong Kar-wai’s movies of this period is very strong, public, and deliberately pursuing the extreme beauty of form, using the pen of the camera to outline the loss of the individual spiritual world struggling in the gloomy city.
Article:
Cho. I, 2020, ‘Chungking Express’ is Poetic, Genre-Bending, and Incomplete, The Harvard Crimson, viewed 21th MAY 2021,
https://www.thecrimson.com/article/2020/12/8/chungking-express-FLC-review/
Images:
Chungking Express, 1994, https://m4uhd.tv/watch-movie-chungking-express-1994-15203.html, directed by Wong Kar Wai.