AUP2023 Design Editorial — Photography in Cinema: Wong Kar-Wai + Christopher Doyle

WONG KAR-WAI

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CHRISTOPHER DOYLE PHOTOGRAPHY IN FILM

WONG KAR-WAI

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CHRISTOPHER DOYLE

PHOTOGRAPHY IN FILM

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INTRODUCTION

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WONG KAR WAI

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CHRISTOPHER DOYLE

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TIMELINE

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DAYS OF BEING WILD

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CHUNGKING EXPRESS

98

ASHES OF TIME

140

FALLEN ANGELS

182

HAPPY TOGETHER

226

IN THE MOOD FOR LOVE

266

2046

308

BIBLIOGRAPHY

INTRODUCTION Cinematography has assumed an important and integral part in the art of motion picture making. It is both an art and a science. An imaginative, creative Director of Photography (also called the Cinematographer or DP), through proper use and manipulation of lighting design and camera work, can create mood, depth, romance, tragedy, perspective, tension, memories, and realism to an extent as to make the audience a part of the story. The cinematographer is responsible to work in consultation with the director and supervises the camera and lighting crews to realize the desired images to the narrative visual of the film. Cinematography requires knowledge of several kinds of technology: cameras, lenses, filters, lights and colour grading. It requires craftsmanship and creativity in designing camera setups; in composing the frame as a painter composes a picture; in using the process to achieve maximum consistency and beauty to the narrative of the film.

There is a need of research on modern cinematography and visual design techniques in the current day contexts as the first publication of the art of cinematography is dated from 1949 book, Painting With Light by John Alton.

It is essential to explore on the potentials of the various visual construction of the image in relationship to the narrative in film and to understand the various modern day cinematography techniques with the changes of technology in the production of film.

The quality that usually attracts this author to a scene in a film is the lighting design, and something that is particularly of interests is how the light creates a distinctive ambience and mood throughout a scene. As the impact and subtleties of light can only be interpreted through tones of colour, always the greatest challenge is to find those colour harmonies that will conjure up the right atmosphere and sense of place. The essential quality to be captured is the feeling of a particular kind of light at a certain time of day. The visual style,

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WONG KAR-WAI + CHRISTOPHER DOYLE

the light, colours, the way the actors and camera move all depend upon the space and mood of light in which a scene takes place. To create a scene in particular mood and atmosphere uses skills that depend to a great extent on a knowledge of colour and confidence with the lighting design. A well-crafted colour lighting could showcase a film’s production artistic motivation and story develop.

This research paper aims to capture the undeniable leading role of Christopher Doyle’s visual design in cinema, focusing on the importance of cinematography in narrative storytelling through a case study this cinematographer’s creative work. The research will raise the important roles of colour, lighting and camera design in narratives by uncovering the different techniques that Christopher Doyle adopts in shaping our experience of the feature films by detailing aesthetic elements used in the films. The research aims to capture the different colour strategies and lighting techniques. It will research on how technological and stylistic norms constraints shape Doyle’s visual strategies in designing colour in his scenes. How does colour strategy work along with the narrative of the film? Readers will be able to understand the importance of cinematography techniques in narrative storytelling and how the techniques have a sustained influence on screen aesthetic. As we move further into the digital age, there will be tools created to automate this color logging. It may be helpful for such tools to use some of the color analysis outlined in this thesis to provide aesthetic possibilities and understanding. The author goal is not to increase the validity of the thesis, but to broaden the study to encompass a broader range of purposes for future research.

INTRODUCTION

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WONG KAR-WAI

Wong Kar-Wai (born 17 July 1958) is a Hong Kong film director. His films are characterised by nonlinear narratives, atmospheric music, and vivid cinematography involving bold, saturated colours. A pivotal figure of Hong Kong cinema, Wong has had a considerable influence on filmmaking with his trademark personal, unconventional approach. His films frequently appear on best-of lists domestically and internationally.

Born in Shanghai, Wong emigrated to British Hong Kong as a child with his family. He began a career as a screenwriter for soap operas before transitioning to directing with his debut, the crime drama As Tears Go By (1988). While As Tears Go By was fairly successful in Hong Kong, Wong moved away from the contemporary trend of crime and action movies to embark on more personal filmmaking styles. Days of Being Wild (1990), his first venture into such direction, did not perform well at the box office. It however received critical acclaim, and won Best Film and Best Director at the 1991 Hong Kong Film Awards. His next film, Ashes of Time (1994), was met with mixed reception because of its vague plot and atypical take on the wuxia genre.

The production of Ashes of Time was time-consuming and left Wong exhausted; he subsequently directed Chungking Express (1994) with hopes of reconciling with filmmaking. The film, expressing a more lighthearted atmosphere, catapulted Wong to international prominence, and won Best Film and Best Director at the 1995 Hong Kong Film Awards. Wong consolidated his worldwide reputation with the 1997 drama Happy Together, for which he won Best Director at the Cannes Film Festival.

The 2000 drama In the Mood for Love, revered for its lush visuals and subtle storytelling, concretely established Wong’s trademark filmmaking styles.

Among his other work are 2046 (2004) and The Grandmaster (2013), both of which received awards and nominations worldwide.

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CHRISTOPHER DOYLE

Christopher Doyle (born 2 May 1952) is an Australian-Hong Kong cinematographer. He has worked on over fifty Chinese-language films, being best known for his collaborations with Wong Kar-Wai in Chungking Express, Happy Together, In the Mood for Love and 2046. Doyle is also known for other films such as Temptress Moon, Hero, Dumplings, and Psycho. He has won awards at the Cannes Film Festival and Venice Film Festival, as well as AFI Award for cinematography, the Golden Horse awards (four times), and Hong Kong Film Award (six times).

While living in other countries, he took on several odd jobs, such as an oil driller in India, a cow herder in Israel, and a doctor of Chinese medicine in Thailand. In the late seventies, Doyle took an interest in Chinese culture and received a Chinese name, which translates to “like the wind”. After language studies in Taiwan, he started working as a photographer. A couple of years later, he became a cinematographer, working with director Edward Yang in the 1983 film That Day, on the Beach.

Doyle has worked on over 50 Chinese-language films. He is best known for his collaborations with Wong Kar-Wai in Chungking Express, Happy Together, In the Mood for Love and 2046. He has collaborated with other Chinese filmmakers on projects including Temptress Moon, Hero and Dumplings. He has also made more than 20 films in various other languages, working as director of photography on Gus Van Sant’s remake of Psycho, Liberty Heights, Last Life in the Universe, Rabbit-Proof Fence, Paranoid Park, and The Limits of Control, among others.

He also wrote, shot, and directed Warsaw Dark, Away with Words starring Asano Tadanobu, and Hong Kong Trilogy: Preschooled Preoccupied Preposterous, an experimental portrait of three generations of Hong Kong people. He co-directed The White Girl with Jenny Suen.

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TIMELINE

1997

HAPPY TOGE

Chinese director Wong Kar Wai and Australian-born cinematographer Christopher Doyle collaborated for the first time nearly two decades ago.

Since then, they have made seven features together, all distinctive in form and feel.

A couple take a trip to A but both men find thei apart in opposite direc now works in a Chines and meets the youthfu Taiwan. Uhf zacnjb-Fai new spin, while Po-Win

Set in Hong Kong, 1962, Chow MoWan is a newspaper editor who moves into a new building with his wife. At the same time, Su Li-zhen, a beautiful secretary and her executive husband also move in to the crowded building.

With their spouses often away, they spend of their time together as friends.

2004

THER

Argentina ir lives drifting ctions. Yiu-Fai se restaurant ul Chang from i’s life takes on a ng’s.

2046 2000

IN THE MOOD FOR LOVE

Several women enter a science fiction author’s life over the course of a few years, after the author has lost the woman he considers his one true love.

It is said that in 2046, nothing ever changed. He chose to leave. He wanted to change.

A disillusioned killer embarks on his last hit but first he has to overcome his affections for his cool, detached partner. Thinking it’s dangerous and improper to become involved with a colleague he sets out to find a surrogate for his affections.

Against the sordid and surreal urban nightscape of Hong Kong.

In Hong Kong, two lovelorn officers find themselves attracted to very different women: Cop 223 has broken up with his girlfriend of five years and is now drawn to a mysterious woman with a blonde wig. When Cop 663’s Ex drops his keys off at a local cafe, a new girl at the counter rivets him.

1994

1990

DAYS OF BEING WILD

ASHES OF TIME 1994

HAPPY TOGETHER 1996

CHUNGKING EXPRESS

Set in 1960, the film centres on the young, boyishly handsome Yuddy, who learns from the drunken ex-prostitute who raised him that she is not his real mother. Hoping to hold onto him, she refuses to divulge the name of his real birth mother. The revelation shakes Yuddy to his very core.

1997

FALLEN ANGELS

A broken-hearted hit man moves to the desert where he finds skilled swordsmen to carry out his contract killings. Under the influence of drink, promised to marry Mu-rong’s sister Mu-rong Yang. We then find out what a man must give.

A couple take a trip to Argentina but both men find their lives drifting apart in opposite directions. Yiu-Fai now works in a Chinese restaurant and meets the youthful Chang from Taiwan. Uhf zacnjb-Fai’s life takes on a new spin, while Po-Wing’s.

Set in Hong Kong, 1962, Chow MoWan is a newspaper editor who moves into a new building with his wife. At the same time, Su Li-zhen, a beautiful secretary and her executive husband also move in to the crowded building.

With their spouses often away, they spend of their time together as friends.

2004

2046 2000

IN THE MOOD FOR LOVE

Several women enter a science fiction author’s life over the course of a few years, after the author has lost the woman he considers his one true love.

It is said that in 2046, nothing ever changed. He chose to leave. He wanted to change.

DAYS OF BEING WILD 1990

阿飛正傳

FILM DATASHEET SYNOPSIS

MOVIE

The movie is set in Hong Kong and the Philippines in 1960. Yuddy, or ‘York’ in English (Leslie Cheung), is a playboy in Hong Kong and is well known for stealing girls’ hearts and breaking them. His first lover in the film is Li-zhen (Maggie Cheung), who suffers depression.

Original Title: 阿飛正傳 Director: Wong Kar-Wai Writer: Wong Kar-Wai and Jeffrey Lau Country: Hong Kong Year: 1990 Duration: 1h 40min (Hong Kong) Genre: Crime, Drama,Romance

PRODUCTION

Production Company: Jet Tone Production Cinematographer: Christopher Doyle Executive Producers: Candy Leung, Alan Tang Producers: Alan Tang Film Editor: William Chang, Kit-Wai Kai, Patrick Tam Art Director: William Chang Cast: Leslie Cheung, Andy Lau, Maggie Cheung, Carina Lau, Jacky Cheung and Tony Leung

TECHNICAL SPECIFICATIONS

Sound Mix: Mono Color: Color Aspect Ratio: 1.85 : 1 Filme Lenght: 2.864 m Negative Format: 35mm (Agfa) Cinematographic Process: Spherical Printed Film Format: Digital Cinema Package DCP 4K - 35 mm

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WONG KAR-WAI + CHRISTOPHER DOYLE

Fig. 1 Original movie poster from 1991 for Days of Being Wild

DAYS OF BEING WILD

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DAYS OF BEING WILD: WONG KAR WAI’S LOVE SAGA SHIKHAR AGRAWAL

1 The development of colour digital colour grading has provided contemporary filmmakers to experiment with the consistent design more intensively than in the past.

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is an American author and film critic. She is a contributing editor for two prominent film magazines, the British Sight & Sound and the American Film Comment.

Days of Being Wild is Wong Kar Wai’s second film and one of the most underrated films of his Filmography. The exploration of love in Kar Wai’s started with Days of Being Wild which laid the foundation for his upcoming Love Trilogy namely Chungking Express, In the Mood for Love and 2046 respectively.

In Kar Wai’s cinematic world, the characters are consistently pursuing a journey “to be loved” as we all are in our lives, wishing to be loved intensely and passionately. Kar wai’s film portrays a persistent theme of time, longing, dislocation, and the restless search for human connection by its characters, like Tony Leung’s character in his Kar Wai’s In The Mood of Love insists an extramarital affair because he feels lonely in his own marriage. That’s the state, particularly with all his characters in his films, in short, they are lonely.

That’s how Days of Being Wild starts, with the main character, Yuddy, who is a young playboy in Hong Kong and is well known for stealing girls’ hearts and breaking them. His first lover in the film is Li-Zhen, who suffers emotional and mental disturbance as a result of Yuddy’s behavior. Yuddy is set out to break another girl’s heart and justifies his nature of being a playboy. The film explores Yuddy’s nature in a way that he had a traumatic Childhood, void of any parental love, as his mother left him in a brothel. Yuddy has been lonely, all his childhood and now he is afraid to be with someone else. Yuddy’s character is like that flightless bird that flies from one form of love to another, indecisively believing that the one he has a hold on will give rest to his wings. It never happens. Or it seems to, but it really doesn’t. The longing for

WONG KAR-WAI + CHRISTOPHER DOYLE

the last lost love makes him question whether the one he let go was actually the one who mattered. The question makes him fly again with a burden of regrets, fear of being lost, and a really indescribable loss of identity, resulting in death, finally. Yuddy’s character is portrayed of Youth Aggressiveness, confusion, regret, and loneliness, which ends in the loss of his own Youth, that’s what the name of the film suggests, days, or a story about the wilderness of youth, which we lost in time.

The second character in the film, a night patrolling officer, Chow played by Tony Leung has very brief screen time, but it instills a long association of Kar Wai with Tony who stars in almost all Kar Wai’s films.

Chow is lonely and in need of a companion, he isn’t aggressive like Yuddy, but more of a lonely introvert. This is when Yuddy’s former girlfriend Li meets chow in the street at night, Chow is delighted to accompany her.

Chow’s character of a lonely policeman is explored more in Kar Wai’s next film, Chungking Express. Watching Wong’s films, it sometimes feels as if your heart rate is slowing down. Time is a recurring element in Days of Being Wild, with frequent shots of wall clocks and references to what has happened in the past. For the movie’s characters, time is at once a trap — moving too slowly for their heedless desires — and a curse, as each passing second represents another lost moment of youth.

The movie’s final sequence takes a surprising leap into another time or space, as Chow in a really different avatar dresses up in his apartment, preparing for a night of being wild. Days of Being Wild through these three characters of Chow, Yuddy, and Li-Zhen suggests that the pursuit of love will never end. Watching any Wong Kar-wai movie

Fig. 1 Minimally plotted, each section of Chungking Express focuses on a lovesick cop who pines for his ex-girlfriend until another woman captures his attention.

DAYS OF BEING WILD

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Fig. 2 The younger generation of cinematographers have improvised on Doyle’s use of complementary chromatic zoning by using more intense splashes of dynamic neon colour lighting in scenes as the key practical lighting in music video scenes.

in 2021 hits differently than it might have in almost any other year. He’s a director known for exploring loneliness and to watch it at a time when all of us without question are among the loneliest we’ve ever been is a striking experience. We’re now a year into a pandemic and despite the vaccinations on the horizon, it feels like it has no end. We’re counting the time since we last hugged or kissed our loved ones in months and even years at this point instead of hours. Watching Days of Being Wild today, all those feelings unfurled like one of the tortured romances on screen, the ache striking you in a different part of your heart.

The film might have been Wong Kar-wai’s second feature, but it’s long been considered the first true Wong Kar-wai film. It burst onto the Hong Kong film scene in 1990 as a lush and moody treatise on a specific kind of romantic melancholy that Kar-wai would continue to explore throughout his career. It was also his first pairing with cinematographer Christopher Doyle, whose gorgeous and vivid photography would come to define the director’s style. But its treatment of romance is a bit different than his other efforts and perhaps it’s helpful to first see some of what it’s “not.”

It’s not Chungking Express because its narrative is not split into vignettes, nor are the circumstances as quirky or as contrived—though to be clear, this is no sleight against Chungking. That film was very much chasing a heightened magic feeling. Days of Being Wild however cannot find the humor in its loneliness or the playfulness in its longing.

Its scenes instead become moments that blur together and overlap.

Where Chungking looks toward the future, complete with specific dates

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WONG KAR-WAI + CHRISTOPHER DOYLE

2 A Fei jingjyuhn (1990; Days of Being Wild) was the first film in which Wong employed voice-overs by multiple characters and a complex, fragmented story structure—both signatures of his style.

3 It was also his first film with two of his key collaborators, cinematographer Christopher Doyle and actor Tony Leung. Set in 1960 in Hong Kong, the film follows Yuddy, a feckless ladies’ man, as he rejects the love of two women, as well as his foster mother, to seek his birth mother.

that one is waiting for (think of the cans of pineapple, the airline ticket), Days is stuck. One of its only markers of time is the constant repetition of the 3:00 hour, which makes it feel like time isn’t really passing at alI. It’s not Happy Together because it’s not centered on a single relationship between a couple over time, through seasons, jobs, and life changes. There is no true core couple at the heart of Days of Being Wild.

The romantic relationships we do see feel intimate, but also like we’re missing part of the picture. It’s more like watching asteroids being captured by an orbit, before breaking free and flinging back out into the vastness of space.

And it’s not In the Mood for Love, because Days of Being Wild is not about requited yearning. These people aren’t quite bound together through their mutual loneliness because no one’s ever on the same page. Instead, it’s more about the constant mismatch of everyone’s loneliness butting up against each other where time passes steadily, but without distinction. At its most simplistic, it’s a film about a group of twenty-somethings as they struggle with the aforementioned feelings of loneliness and longing. They lounge about in various shabby apartments and soul-sucking jobs, all filmed in gauzy shades of green while they suffer from terrible yearning. Yuddy or “York” (Leslie Cheung) sits neatly at the center of the story, the planet whose pull keeps capturing others in its orbit. The film explores his effect on the people in his life, specifically the women whose hearts he breaks. His first lover, Li-zhen (Maggie Cheung), is innocent and sweet, while his second, Mimi (Carina Lau) is a dazzling cabaret dancer. But both women ultimately love York more than he loves them. And when he isn’t chasing women or spurning them, he’s butting heads with his adoptive mother and wondering who his real family is.

But the details of these things are almost unimportant. What makes Days of Being Wild so affecting right now is how much of the narrative outright relies on the chance meetings of strangers. You bump into someone on the street and maybe you start to talk. You buy a Coke from the clerk and when you meet eyes, you realize she’s beautiful.

Maybe you start to buy a Coke there every day, just to talk to her again.

Maybe you make fast friends with a stranger at the bar. Kar-wai loves the way the simplest acts can change the course of a person’s life. But that makes sense as the appropriate fantasy for a director who is so amazing at capturing the cramped feelings of isolation and the elation that comes with a moment of connection. Needless to say, it’s been a year since any of us have had truly meaningful contact with a stranger. The genuinely delightful, unplanned interactions that you can have in your day to day have been missing from our lives for months. You can’t have a pleasant conversation with someone on the bar stool next to you, because there are no stools we can sit on, nor bars to enter. You can’t smile at someone across the room because you’re wearing a mask. You can’t see their face

DAYS OF BEING WILD

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4 But like objects in a dream, the pineapple cans, and their looming sell-by date, condense multiple meanings and associations. May was no. 223’s number-one girlfriend, but he must let go of his love for her (“When did everything start having an expiration date?” he muses) in order to move on to the next stage of his life, a transition marked by his birthday.

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and they can’t see yours. It was also his first pairing with cinematographer Christopher Doyle, whose gorgeous and vivid photography would come to define his style. At its most simplistic, it’s a film about a group of twenty-somethings as they struggle with the aforementioned feelings of loneliness and longing. They lounge about in various shabby apartments and soul-sucking jobs, all filmed in gauzy shades of green while they suffer from terrible yearning. Yuddy or “York” (Leslie Cheung) sits neatly at the center of the story, the planet whose pull keeps capturing others in its orbit. The film explores his effect on the people in his life, specifically the women whose hearts he breaks. His first lover, Li-zhen (Maggie Cheung), is innocent and sweet, while his second, Mimi (Carina Lau) is a dazzling cabaret dancer. But both women ultimately love York more than he loves them. And when he isn’t chasing women or spurning them, he’s butting heads with his adoptive mother and wondering who his real family is.

But the details of these things are almost unimportant. What makes Days of Being Wild so affecting right now is how much of the narrative outright relies on the chance meetings of strangers. You bump into someone on the street and maybe you start to talk. You buy a Coke from the clerk and when you meet eyes, you realize she’s beautiful.

Maybe you start to buy a Coke there every day, just to talk to her again.

Maybe you make fast friends with a stranger at the bar. Kar-wai loves the way the simplest acts can change the course of a person’s life. But that makes sense as the appropriate fantasy for a director who is so amazing at capturing the cramped feelings of isolation and the elation that comes with a moment of connection.

Needless to say, it’s been a year since any of us have had truly meaningful contact with a stranger. The genuinely delightful, unplanned interactions that you can have in your day to day have been missing from our lives for months. You can’t have a pleasant conversation with someone on the bar stool next to you, because there are no stools we can sit on, nor bars to enter. You can’t smile at someone across the room because you’re wearing a mask. You can’t see their face and they can’t see yours. Fear of the virus has us pulling away from everyone we don’t know, either to protect them or ourselves. And as I watched Days of Being Wild unfold, I was not focused on romantic love lost, but a loss of my connection with strangers. A loss of possibility itself.

Amanda Mull recently wrote about the shift in The Atlantic, describing how we miss “the people on the periphery of your life—the guy who’s always at the gym at the same time as you, the barista who starts making your usual order while you’re still at the back of the line, the co-worker from another department with whom you make small talk on the elevator.”

It’s something many people used to complain about, but it’s a loss we all feel keenly, even when we don’t realize it. And in Days of Being Wild, it goes a step further, reminding us not just of those we miss, but

WONG KAR-WAI + CHRISTOPHER DOYLE

the opportunities to meet people at all that no longer exist. And without those opportunities, there is no fantasy, no escape valve to isolation.

While Kar-wai has always been brilliant at exploring the melancholy lonelinesswe’re all susceptible to, there’s no way he ever could have imagined the way this work might resonate today. He couldn’t have predicted the fog of loneliness that would descend over the globe. Or maybe it was just something he understood implicitly. And we are all the more lucky to have it reflected back to us.

The breakthrough sophomore feature by Wong Kar Wai represents the first full flowering of his swooning signature style. The initial entry in a loosely connected, ongoing cycle that includes In the Mood for Love and 2046, this ravishing existential reverie is a dreamlike drift through the Hong Kong of the 1960s in which a band of wayward twentysomethings—including a disaffected playboy (Leslie Cheung Kwok Wing) searching for his birth mother, a lovelorn woman (Maggie Cheung Man Yuk) hopelessly enamored with him, and a policeman (Andy Lau Tak Wah) caught in the middle of their turbulent relationship—pull together and push apart in a dance of frustrated desire. The director’s inaugural collaboration with both cinematographer Christopher Doyle, who lends the film its gorgeously gauzy, hallucinatory texture, and actor Tony Leung Chiu Wai, who appears briefly in a tantalizing teaser for a never-realized sequel, Days of Being Wild is an exhilarating first expression of Wong’s trademark themes of time, longing, dislocation, and the restless search for human connection.

DAYS OF BEING WILD

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COLOR ANALYSIS DANIEL SUNDVIK

is an American film critic. He is a film critic for the Chicago Sun-Times. Sundvik became the first film critic to win the Pulitzer Prize for Criticism.

The last color function I wish to discuss is the use of color to seed narrative enigma. Doyle has referred to colors as “images from the future” whosemeaning is uncertain at the time of filming, yet they anticipate where the film eventually leads. Colors form part of a narrative puzzle, which becomes apparent through editing means such as flashforwards and flashbacks through which the film reveals its larger knowledge of events. Here color fashions an image from the future whose meaning is not yet decoded. These indeterminate images suffuse the narrative with their ambiguity, sincethey often occur without any narrative requirement, and their interpretationremains suspended between different possible alternatives. Their mystery liesin the ineluctable character of color itself, its slipperiness to perception andinterpretation. One example is the luscious green Philippine forest which appears near the opening of Days of Being Wild ,accompanied by Hawaiian guitar music — a color sound montage that evokes a paradise.

In typical Wong Kar Wai and Christopher Doyle fashion, Days of Being Wild sets each and every scene with meticulous detail. From barely lit apartments and street corners to bright splashes of lamps, bars, and sidewalk eateries, Days of Being Wild loves to play with lights and shadows. There’s also a constant switch between blue filters, unfiltered night scenes, and green filters for segments set in the more tropical environment of the Philippines, where a major part of the movie was shot.

Wet pavement sparkles, focus changes accentuate characters, and ambient occlusion hides details with superb mood-setting power.

Days of Being Wild is a marvel of photography without having any special

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WONG KAR-WAI + CHRISTOPHER DOYLE

Fig. 1, 2 and 3 A blue palette, as well as blues music accompanies the cops’ blue periods. Brief interludes of unrequited passion usually come in moments that have red hues. When Faye transforms Cop 663’s apartment, she hides the blue sandals (representing his melancholy) with red ones.

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Fig. 4 Into his place steps uniform cop no. 663 (Leung), who routinely stops by the Midnight Express to pick up a chef salad for his flight attendant girlfriend.

2 It is a great film that bares many similarities to Wong Kar-Wai’s later masterpiece In the Mood for Love, and is a must watch for fans of his work.

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Everything happens as the camera chances upon it, and that’s a good thing. The Blu-ray currently isn’t very easy to get a hold of, but the movie is available for purchase from several digital storefronts if you look closely.

The film features a number of reoccurring elements in its shots, including: seductive shallow depth of field two shots that smoothly rack focus between characters, high-angle long shots which highlight the isolation of characters in empty night-time streets, shots which prominently contain a clock or watch within the mise-en-scène emphasising the passage of time, sweat on foreheads and fans trying to ease the lethargic heat, multiple mirrors and reflections, and shots which contain several frames within the frame which serve to trap the characters they contain. In terms of its colour palette, Days of Being Wild is dominated by infinite shades of green and blue, giving the film a distinct visual appeal as well as a mood of cool distance.

WONG KAR-WAI + CHRISTOPHER DOYLE

Fig. 5, 6 and 7 Green stands for balance, nature, spring, and rebirth. It’s the symbol of prosperity, freshness, and progress.In Japanese culture, green is associated with eternal life, and it is the sacred color of Islam, representing respect and the prophet Muhammad.

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GEOMETRIC ANALYSIS ABEL FERRARA

is an American author and film critic. She is a contributing editor for two prominent film magazines, the British Sight & Sound and the American Film Comment.

Often considered a “feminine” shape, circles represent things that are soft, nonthreatening, natural, and maternal. The continuous curve and rounded figure reminds many of us of things that appear in nature, like galaxies, stars, planets, clouds, raindrops, flowers, and waves.

We even make connections between circles and femininity, maternity, and youth—the curvaceous form of a woman’s body, a big pregnant belly, the chubby cheeks of a new baby. But circles don’t just contain significance because of their physical likeness to real world objects.

Circles have been used symbolically to communicate “completeness”, “balance”, and “endlessness”—Shutterstock provides some great examples: the yin yang, the clock, the wedding ring.

This is why we see so many animated characters’ bodies— heroes, kids, “good guys”—containing rounded shapes, because circles represent innocence, happiness, and friendliness.

Squares can be seen as almost the antithesis of the circle in that it can often represent that which is unnatural or manmade. (Very few rectangular things occur in nature, at least compared to circles.)

Squares also represent “stasis”, “stability”, and “strength”, or things that may be considered boring or old-fashioned. We see a lot of squares used in film to communicate these messages, especially in direct opposition to the “natural world.” In Up, Carl is made up of many squares, while Russell is made up of many circles. Carl’s geometric make-up represents stasis and isolation, while Russell’s represents youthfulnes.

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WONG KAR-WAI + CHRISTOPHER DOYLE

Fig. 1 and 2 Christopher Doyle’s renowned cinematography style from the use of neon lights, complementary colour schemes and chromatic zoning has influenced a new generation of cinematographers such as Kelvin Chew, Ken Minehan and Charles He and the author to push the envelope of colour lighting design with more daring and dynamic visuals.

DAYS OF BEING WILD

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CHUNGKING EXPRESS 1994

重庆森林

FILM DATASHEET SYNOPSIS

MOVIE

The movie comprises two different stories, told one after the other, each about a romance involving a policeman. Aside for a brief moment when the first story ends and the second begins, the two stories do not interconnect. However, the three main characters from the second story each momentarily appear during the first Original Title: 重庆森林 Director: Wong Kar-Wai Writer: Wong Kar-Wai Country: Hong Kong Year: 1994 Duration: 102min/98min (Hong Kong) Genre: Comedy, Crime, Drama, Mystery, Romance

PRODUCTION

Production Company: Jet Tone Production Cinematographer: Christopher Doyle, Wai-Keung Lau (Andrew Lau) Executive Producers: Chan Pui-Wah Producers: Chan Yi-kan, Jeffrey Lau Film Editor: William Chang, Kit-Wai Kai, Chi-Leung Kwong Art Director: Wai Ming Yau Cast: Brigitte Lin, Tony Chiu-Wai Leung, Faye Wong, Takeshi Kaneshiro

TECHNICAL SPECIFICATIONS

Sound Mix: 4-Track Stereo/Dolby SR Color: Color Aspect Ratio: 1.66:1 (director specified for Criterion release)

1.85:1 (original ratio) Filme Lenght: 2.864 m Negative Format: 35mm (Agfa) Cinematographic Process: Spherical Printed Film Format: Digital Cinema Package DCP 4K - 35 mm

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Fig. 1 Original, rolled, one-sheet movie poster from 1996 for Chungking Express

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CHUNGKING EXPRESS: ELECTRIC YOUTH AMY TAUBIN

1 The narrative of Chungking Express comprises two separate and distinct stories.

Although they are thematically related, each has its own central characters and locations. (If you look sharply, however, you can catch glimpses of characters from the second part in a few shots in the first.) The first story harks back to the genre action elements of Wong’s first feature, As Tears Go By (1988), while the second section prefigures the romantic yearnings of his later films Happy Together (1997), In the Mood for Love (2000), and 2046 (2004).

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is an American author and film critic. She is a contributing editor for two prominent film magazines, the British Sight & Sound and the American Film Comment.

Chungking Express (1994) was the Masculin féminin of the 1990s, a pop art movie about cool twentysomethings looking for love in the city that has replaced Paris as the center of the world-cinema imagination.

What Jean-Luc Godard did for “the generation of Marx and CocaCola” in the mid-1960s, Wong Kar-wai did for restless Hong Kong youth during the anxious decade that preceded the handoff to China.

Masculin féminin (1966) and Chungking Express were the first films in which their respective directors focused predominantly on characters who were around ten years their juniors. This generatio n gap imparts a sense of distance mixed with tenderness, and also focuses the films on the dominant issue for heterosexual young adults: how to negotiate the desire and confusion they feel vis-à-vis the opposite sex.

Made while Wong was taking a break from the lengthy, difficult post-production of his only martial arts period picture, Ashes of Time (1994), Chungking Express was intended as a money-generating quickie for the director’s Jet Tone company, and indeed the movie, which was made in three months, start to finish, has a wacky spontaneity that is unique in his oeuvre. Wong piled on the commercial elements: the first half is a nod to the gangster thriller, the second is pure screwball romance. The protagonists of both sections are cops, and the four main actors are all Asian box office attractions: pop music idols Takeshi Kaneshiro and Faye Wong, Hong Kong action/dramatic star Tony Leung Chiu-wai, and veteran actress Brigitte Lin Ching-hsia (the film’s only fortysomething star, coming out of retirement for a cameo appearance as a drug smuggler, fashioned as an homage to another middle-aged

WONG KAR-WAI + CHRISTOPHER DOYLE

cult actress, Gena Rowlands in Gloria). Again comparing the film with Masculin féminin, the female leads in both are played by singers with youth culture followings. But unlike Masculin féminin’s Chantal Goya, a pop singer playing the role of a pop singer, Faye Wong in Chungking Express plays a waitress, albeit one who becomes identified with two songs—the Mamas and the Papas’ “California Dreamin’” and a Cantonese cover of the Cranberries’ “Dreams” by a singer named Faye Wong—which accompany her as she works. While the difference in strategy is minimal—at one point or another, both performers either lip-synch or dance to their own recorded voices—the difference between Godard’s and Wong’s depictions of the female characters is enormous.

The Goya character is monstrous in her narcissism and vacuity. On the other hand, Wong is as empathetic with Faye Wong’s waitress as he is with the cops played by Kaneshiro and Leung.

In Asia, the film didn’t disappoint, sweeping the Hong Kong Film Awards and doing well at the box office. In the United States, however, the turnout was disappointing, perhaps because Miramax, which distributed Chungking Express as a presentation by Quentin Tarantino’s Rolling Thunder company, was perplexed about whether to market it as an art film or an Asian exploitation flick. Nevertheless, the combination of filmmaking pyrotechnics and wistful romance proved irresistible to cinephiles. Chungking Express established Wong’s reputation as a major auteur, the most glamorous and enigmatic since Godard. It also marked a turning point in his work, a shift in direction that is actually signaled within the film, when the desultory underworld revenge narrative fades

Fig. 1 Minimally plotted, each section of Chungking Express focuses on a lovesick cop who pines for his ex-girlfriend until another woman captures his attention.

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Fig. 2 Into his place steps uniform cop no. 663 (Leung), who routinely stops by the Midnight Express to pick up a chef salad for his flight attendant girlfriend.

away and is replaced by a love story as simple as it is delirious. Writing in 1966 about Masculin féminin, Pauline Kael observed that “Godard has liberated his feeling for modern youth from the American gangster-movie framework which limited his expressiveness and his relevance to the nonmovie-centered world.” Wong makes the same move in Chungking Express, underlining the separation by placing it midway through the film.

The narrative of Chungking Express comprises two separate and distinct stories. Although they are thematically related, each has its own central characters and locations. (If you look sharply, however, you can catch glimpses of characters from the second part in a few shots in the first.) The first story harks back to the genre action elements of Wong’s first feature, As Tears Go By (1988), while the second section prefigures the romantic yearnings of his later films Happy Together (1997), In the Mood for Love (2000), and 2046 (2004). Ashes of Time, which Wong finally completed shortly after Chungking Express, is also a genre action picture but teeters on the brink of abstraction. (In the revised 2008 version, Ashes of Time Redux, Wong removes some of the stylistic links to genre, making the narrative even more abstract.) And Fallen Angels (1995), which Wong conceived as the third section of Chungking Express but spun off as a separate feature, is a hyperbolic amalgam of gangster violence and mad love, as ungeneric a noir as could be imagined, and not only because the frequent fish-eye-lensed close-ups turn its cast of beauties, male and female, into a bunch of banana noses. Wong’s reputation as an art-house director rests with the three later, increasingly operatic romances—Happy Together, In the Mood for Love, and 2046 —

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2 Chungking Express, the title under which the film was released in the United States, is not a direct translation of the original Hong Kong title, Chung hing sam lam (Chungking Jungle). The U.S. title suggests the kind of synthetic space that only exists in dreams or movies—Chungking referring to Chungking Mansions, the primary location of the first section, and Express to the Midnight Express, the popular take-out restaurant around which the action of the second part revolves.

3 The darker aspect of the collective anxiety about the handover is reflected in the situation of Brigitte Lin’s blonde-wigged gangster.

in part because genre films have never been fully accepted within the artfilm canon, and in part because Wong’s mastery of sensuous polyrhythms and lush visual and aural textures was not as fully developed in the earlier films.

Minimally plotted, each section of Chungking Express focuses on a lovesick cop who pines for his ex-girlfriend until another woman captures his attention. One might venture that the first section, which opens with one of Wong’s signature step-printed chase sequences, this one through the teeming corridors and blind alleys of Chungking Mansions—a warren of flophouses, cut-rate shops, and import-export “businesses” that is a haven to criminals and the poor of all nations—is something of a blind alley itself, one which Wong drops after less than forty minutes in favor of a more promising romantic situation. It’s as if the film itself is looking for love in the same way that its characters are—by trial and error. The protagonist of the first section is a plainclothes cop, officer no. 223 (Kaneshiro), who is seen running hard in that opening chase scene and in another, shorter chase where he makes a collar, pretty much the only exercise of his profession in the film. Mostly what no. 223 does is obsess about his girlfriend, May, who jilted him on April Fools’ Day. No. 223 has given May until May 1, his twenty-fifth birthday, to come back to him. He marks the days of this countdown by buying cans of pineapple (“May loves pineapple,” he tells us in voice-over), each dated to expire on May 1. If she doesn’t call him on his birthday, the relationship will expire as well. It is doubtful that May (whom we never see in the film) knows or, if she did, would care at all about this ultimatum.

But like objects in a dream, the pineapple cans, and their looming sell-by date, condense multiple meanings and associations. May was no.

223’s number-one girlfriend, but he must let go of his love for her (“When did everything start having an expiration date?” he muses) in order to move on to the next stage of his life, a transition marked by his birthday. Then there is the canned pineapple itself, whose mass-produced sweetness is as cloying as the puppy love no. 223 feels. In fact, with May 1 only hours away, he tries to feed some of the syrupy stuff to his dog, who, like May, manifests no interest in such an absurd ritual of devotion. But no. 223’s eating orgy—he downs all thirty cans—transfers his heartache to his tummy, so that in puking up the pineapple he is relieved of the past and immediately fancies himself in love with the next woman he meets.

Hovering over the web of associations that defines the psyche of no. 223 is another countdown: in 1994, the handover of Hong Kong to China was only three years away. Comic anxiety about sex and romance is a front for the deeper fear that political freedom—an entire way of life— has an expiration date in the near future. The most striking difference between Masculin féminin and Chungking Express is the constant political activity and chatter in the former and its total absence in the latter. While this difference reflects a change in youth culture from the

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4 But like objects in a dream, the pineapple cans, and their looming sell-by date, condense multiple meanings and associations. May was no. 223’s number-one girlfriend, but he must let go of his love for her (“When did everything start having an expiration date?” he muses) in order to move on to the next stage of his life, a transition marked by his birthday.

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1960s to the 1990s, it doesn’t mean that Wong is an apolitical director.

Rather, like Eastern European filmmakers of the Soviet era or, more to the point, like some of his Chinese mainland contemporaries, he smuggles politics into his films through metaphor. Thus the loaded meaning of the expiration date of canned goods.

The darker aspect of the collective anxiety about the handover is reflected in the situation of Brigitte Lin’s blonde-wigged gangster. When someone slips her a can of sardines dated May 1, she gets the message: time is running out for her. If she doesn’t deliver the drugs that her twotiming couriers have stolen, she will die. She and no. 223 run into each other—literally collide—in the opening chase sequence. A smart cop would spot that her wig, dark glasses, and trench coat are a disguise, but no. 223 doesn’t realize then, or when he picks her up in a bar exactly “fifty-seven hours later,” that she is potentially the collar of a lifetime. His vision clouded, like so many of Wong’s male protagonists, by déjà vu—by the nearly forgotten “impact” of their first encounter—he fancies himself in love with her. They wind up in a hotel room, where she instantly falls asleep and he consumes four chef salads (there is hardly a scene in the film that doesn’t involve eating), and then removes her shoes and polishes them before leaving. Their relationship is utterly chaste, and yet the small acts of tenderness they extend to each other free them both—her to take care of business and him to resume his search for love.

Chungking Express, the title under which the film was released in the United States, is not a direct translation of the original Hong Kong title, Chung hing sam lam (Chungking Jungle). The U.S. title suggests the kind of synthetic space that only exists in dreams or movies— Chungking referring to Chungking Mansions, the primary location of the first section, and Express to the Midnight Express, the popular take-out restaurant around which the action of the second part revolves. The Midnight Express has already figured in the first section: it’s where no.

223 goes to call his answering service (his password is “love you for ten thousand years”) to find out if there have been any calls from the elusive May. The proprietor tries to fix him up with one of his waitresses, who is also named May, but no. 223 isn’t interested. When he stops at the Midnight Express after his night with the mysterious blonde, May has moved on, and the proprietor suggests that no. 223 try the new waitress, Faye (Faye Wong). No. 223 accidentally sees an Indian man washing windows and responds, “Do you think I go out with guys?” Hopelessly confused—or maybe just a bit stupid—no. 223 proves himself not yet ready for love. He leaves the Midnight Express and is never seen again. As far as the narrative of the film is concerned, his story is over.

Into his place steps uniform cop no. 663 (Leung), who routinely stops by the Midnight Express to pick up a chef salad for his flight attendant girlfriend. Wong gives Leung, who will become his filmic alter ego, an entrance to die for. The shot is ostensibly from Faye’s point of

WONG KAR-WAI + CHRISTOPHER DOYLE

view, but as no. 663 walks into close-up, she’s not the only one instantly smitten by the most soulful set of peepers in contemporary cinema.

There is, however, someone who is immune to his charms, and soon no.

663 is jilted just like no. 223. Faye, using the keys that his ex-girlfriend drops at the Midnight Express, begins visiting no. 663’s apartment while he’s walking the beat, to do a bit of housecleaning. Wong will use this home-invasion ploy to more carnal effect in Fallen Angels, but nothing else in his films comes close to the giddiness with which Faye applies herself to housework as transgression, swiveling to the beat of “Dreams” on the soundtrack, or her delirious shift from joy to anguish when, crawling around in no. 663’s bed, ostensibly to straighten the sheets, she finds a woman’s long black hair under the pillow. In her first major acting role, Faye Wong takes over the film and runs with it. Her comic timing and her impulsiveness recall Katharine Hepburn in Bringing Up Baby—an association underscored when she leaves a huge toy cat, in this case a Garfield doll (the director would never be so obvious as to make it a stuffed leopard), in no. 663’s apartment as a substitute for the large white teddy bear left there by his ex.

As in Bringing Up Baby, opposites attract. No. 663, like the Cary Grant character, is an introvert, while Faye, like the Hepburn character, is dizzyingly extroverted. He’s so lost in his own head that he talks to a bar of soap to keep himself company. Not only does no. 663 fail to notice that Faye is gaga over him, he’s unaware that she’s been secretly transforming his apartment, until they come face-to-face at his front door—she’s leaving, he’s arriving, and when she sees him she’s so discombobulated that she slams the door in his face. It may be the only laugh-out-loud moment in Wong’s oeuvre. The two actors have terrific chemistry: their brief scenes together are more than sexy; they have an innocence that never returns to Wong’s movies after Chungking Express—a fling of a film, where regret is fleeting and joy triumphs, though who knows for how long.

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COLOR ANALYSIS DENNIS HOPPER

1 A kaleidoscope of vibrant aesthetics and ecstatic romance, Chungking Express is like a terrific double-album: the first side hyper, the second evocative. While the stories are thematically related and, like the title, share the same quarters, each is ravishing in its own way.

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is an American author and film critic. She is a contributing editor for two prominent film magazines, the British Sight & Sound and the American Film Comment.

Chungking Express is an expressive and impossibly romantic journey accentuated by lush colours and pop music. Here, as in Wong’s other films, the colour schematic ties itself to mood, while music helps to indicate setting and character. The two colours that adorn Chungking are red and blue, brightly smeared in neon around the marketplace. A blue palette, as well as blues music accompanies the cops’ blue periods.

Brief interludes of unrequited passion usually come in moments that have red hues. When Faye transforms Cop 663’s apartment, she hides the blue sandals (representing his melancholy) with red ones. When the characters are in the middle ground of heartbreak, yellow tints are present – the gold hues of the bar where Cop 223 and the wig-wearer meet or the bright dress Faye wears at the Midnight Express, a spanish song playing in a Hong Kong film. Does anyone find that odd?

To watch a Wong Kar-Wai romance is to immerse oneself in a sensuous environment, filled with dreamy colours. The two stories in Chungking Express get separate cinematographers: Wai-keung Lau does the first segment, Christopher Doyle the second. The first half of the film pops, colours bouncing around the screen as the camera whips through a busy metropolitan scene. With miraculous photographic tricks, Cop 223 is in focus while he chases down an assailant in the dazzling opening. Blurry smears of colours rush by, out of focus, as he runs after the suspect. If the first half encapsulates the impulses of a metropolis in motion, the second half is more lush and dreamy, as the frantic pace slows down and the viewer can more clearly see the details of the crowded market.

WONG KAR-WAI + CHRISTOPHER DOYLE

Fig. 1, 2 and 3 A blue palette, as well as blues music accompanies the cops’ blue periods. Brief interludes of unrequited passion usually come in moments that have red hues. When Faye transforms Cop 663’s apartment, she hides the blue sandals (representing his melancholy) with red ones.

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Fig. 4 When the characters are in the middle ground of heartbreak, yellow tints are present – the gold hues of the bar where Cop 223 and the wig-wearer meet or the bright dress Faye wears at the Midnight Express, a spanish song playing in a Hong Kong film.

2 The Essentials: Chungking Express (1994)

by Jordan Adler in The Balcony is Open, 2013.

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In the second story, Doyle uses a similar technique that Lau does. He focuses on the principal characters as passersby rush by them in droves, as if moving in fast-forward. One shot has Cop 663 drinking a black coffee in slow motion, as Faye watches, dazed, from behind the Midnight Express counter. This expressive camerawork observes people slowed down as they await the changes in their lives and their dreams to manifest, as they catch their breath against the rush of colour and compulsiveness. These moments of halted time amidst chaos is a motif of the film.

A kaleidoscope of vibrant aesthetics and ecstatic romance, Chungking Express is like a terrific double-album: the first side hyper, the second evocative. While the stories are thematically related and, like the title, share the same quarters, each is ravishing in its own way.

Chungking Express is an expressive and impossibly romantic journey accentuated by lush colours and pop music. Here, as in Wong’s other films, the colour schematic ties itself to mood, while music helps to indicate setting and character. The two colours that adorn Chungking are red and blue, brightly smeared in neon around the marketplace. A blue palette, as well as blues music accompanies the cops’ blue periods.

Brief interludes of unrequited passion usually come in moments that have red hues. When Faye transforms Cop 663’s apartment, she hides the blue sandals (representing his melancholy) with red ones. When the characters are in the middle ground of heartbreak, yellow tints are present – the gold hues of the bar where Cop 223 and the wig-wearer meet or the bright dress Faye wears at the Midnight Express.

WONG KAR-WAI + CHRISTOPHER DOYLE

Fig. 5, 6 and 7 Blurry smears of colours rush by, out of focus, as he runs after the suspect. If the first half encapsulates the impulses of a metropolis in motion, the second half is more lush and dreamy, as the frantic pace slows down and the viewer can more clearly see the details of the crowded market.

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GEOMETRIC ANALYSIS ABEL FERRARA

is an American author and film critic. She is a contributing editor for two prominent film magazines, the British Sight & Sound and the American Film Comment.

Chungking Express is an expressive and impossibly romantic journey accentuated by lush colours and pop music. Here, as in Wong’s other films, the colour schematic ties itself to mood, while music helps to indicate setting and character. The two colours that adorn Chungking are red and blue, brightly smeared in neon around the marketplace. A blue palette, as well as blues music accompanies the cops’ blue periods.

Brief interludes of unrequited passion usually come in moments that have red hues. When Faye transforms Cop 663’s apartment, she hides the blue sandals (representing his melancholy) with red ones. When the characters are in the middle ground of heartbreak, yellow tints are present – the gold hues of the bar where Cop 223 and the wig-wearer meet or the bright dress Faye wears at the Midnight Express, a spanish song playing in a Hong Kong film. Does anyone find that odd?

To watch a Wong Kar-Wai romance is to immerse oneself in a sensuous environment, filled with dreamy colours. The two stories in Chungking Express get separate cinematographers: Wai-keung Lau does the first segment, Christopher Doyle the second. The first half of the film pops, colours bouncing around the screen as the camera whips through a busy metropolitan scene. With miraculous photographic tricks, Cop 223 is in focus while he chases down an assailant in the dazzling opening. Blurry smears of colours rush by, out of focus, as he runs after the suspect. If the first half encapsulates the impulses of a metropolis in motion, the second half is more lush and dreamy, as the frantic pace slows down and the viewer can more clearly see the details of the crowded market.

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Fig. 1 and 2 His expressive camerawork observes people slowed down as they await the changes in their lives and their dreams to manifest, as they catch their breath against the rush of colour and compulsiveness. These moments of halted time amidst chaos is a motif of the film.

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ASHES OF TIME 1994

東邪西毒

FILM DATASHEET SYNOPSIS

MOVIE

A broken-hearted hit man moves to the desert where he finds skilled swordsmen to carry out his contract killings. Ou-yang Feng lives in the middle of a desert, where he acts as a middle man to various swordsmen in ancient China. One of those swordsmen is Huang Yao-shi, who has found some magic wine that causes one to forget the past.

Original Title: 東邪西毒 Director: Wong Kar-Wai Writer: Wong Kar-Wai Country: Hong Kong Year: 1994 Duration: 102min/98min (Hong Kong) Genre: Comedy, Crime, Drama, Mystery, Romance

PRODUCTION

Production Company: Jet Tone Production Cinematographer: Christopher Doyle, Wai-Keung Lau (Andrew Lau) Executive Producers: Chan Pui-Wah Producers: Chan Yi-kan, Jeffrey Lau Film Editor: William Chang, Kit-Wai Kai, Chi-Leung Kwong Art Director: Wai Ming Yau Cast: Brigitte Lin, Tony Chiu-Wai Leung, Faye Wong, Takeshi Kaneshiro

TECHNICAL SPECIFICATIONS

Sound Mix: 4-Track Stereo/Dolby SR Color: Color Aspect Ratio: 1.66:1 (director specified for Criterion release)

1.85:1 (original ratio) Filme Lenght: 2.864 m Negative Format: 35mm (Agfa) Cinematographic Process: Spherical Printed Film Format: Digital Cinema Package DCP 4K - 35 mm

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Fig. 1 Original, rolled, one-sheet movie poster from 1994 for Ashes of Time

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ASHES OF TIME: LOSS AND REVENGE AMY TAUBIN

1 The narrative of Chungking Express comprises two separate and distinct stories.

Although they are thematically related, each has its own central characters and locations. (If you look sharply, however, you can catch glimpses of characters from the second part in a few shots in the first.) The first story harks back to the genre action elements of Wong’s first feature, As Tears Go By (1988), while the second section prefigures the romantic yearnings of his later films Happy Together (1997), In the Mood for Love (2000), and 2046 (2004).

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is an American author and film critic. She is a contributing editor for two prominent film magazines, the British Sight & Sound and the American Film Comment.

Chungking Express (1994) was the Masculin féminin of the 1990s, a pop art movie about cool twentysomethings looking for love in the city that has replaced Paris as the center of the world-cinema imagination.

What Jean-Luc Godard did for “the generation of Marx and CocaCola” in the mid-1960s, Wong Kar-wai did for restless Hong Kong youth during the anxious decade that preceded the handoff to China.

Masculin féminin (1966) and Chungking Express were the first films in which their respective directors focused predominantly on characters who were around ten years their juniors. This generatio n gap imparts a sense of distance mixed with tenderness, and also focuses the films on the dominant issue for heterosexual young adults: how to negotiate the desire and confusion they feel vis-à-vis the opposite sex.

Made while Wong was taking a break from the lengthy, difficult post-production of his only martial arts period picture, Ashes of Time (1994), Chungking Express was intended as a money-generating quickie for the director’s Jet Tone company, and indeed the movie, which was made in three months, start to finish, has a wacky spontaneity that is unique in his oeuvre. Wong piled on the commercial elements: the first half is a nod to the gangster thriller, the second is pure screwball romance. The protagonists of both sections are cops, and the four main actors are all Asian box office attractions: pop music idols Takeshi Kaneshiro and Faye Wong, Hong Kong action/dramatic star Tony Leung Chiu-wai, and veteran actress Brigitte Lin Ching-hsia (the film’s only fortysomething star, coming out of retirement for a cameo appearance as a drug smuggler, fashioned as an homage to another middle-aged

WONG KAR-WAI + CHRISTOPHER DOYLE

cult actress, Gena Rowlands in Gloria). Again comparing the film with Masculin féminin, the female leads in both are played by singers with youth culture followings. But unlike Masculin féminin’s Chantal Goya, a pop singer playing the role of a pop singer, Faye Wong in Chungking Express plays a waitress, albeit one who becomes identified with two songs—the Mamas and the Papas’ “California Dreamin’” and a Cantonese cover of the Cranberries’ “Dreams” by a singer named Faye Wong—which accompany her as she works. While the difference in strategy is minimal—at one point or another, both performers either lip-synch or dance to their own recorded voices—the difference between Godard’s and Wong’s depictions of the female characters is enormous.

The Goya character is monstrous in her narcissism and vacuity. On the other hand, Wong is as empathetic with Faye Wong’s waitress as he is with the cops played by Kaneshiro and Leung.

In Asia, the film didn’t disappoint, sweeping the Hong Kong Film Awards and doing well at the box office. In the United States, however, the turnout was disappointing, perhaps because Miramax, which distributed Chungking Express as a presentation by Quentin Tarantino’s Rolling Thunder company, was perplexed about whether to market it as an art film or an Asian exploitation flick. Nevertheless, the combination of filmmaking pyrotechnics and wistful romance proved irresistible to cinephiles. Chungking Express established Wong’s reputation as a major auteur, the most glamorous and enigmatic since Godard. It also marked a turning point in his work, a shift in direction that is actually signaled within the film, when the desultory underworld revenge narrative fades

Fig. 1 Minimally plotted, each section of Chungking Express focuses on a lovesick cop who pines for his ex-girlfriend until another woman captures his attention.

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Fig. 2 Into his place steps uniform cop no. 663 (Leung), who routinely stops by the Midnight Express to pick up a chef salad for his flight attendant girlfriend.

away and is replaced by a love story as simple as it is delirious. Writing in 1966 about Masculin féminin, Pauline Kael observed that “Godard has liberated his feeling for modern youth from the American gangster-movie framework which limited his expressiveness and his relevance to the nonmovie-centered world.” Wong makes the same move in Chungking Express, underlining the separation by placing it midway through the film.

The narrative of Chungking Express comprises two separate and distinct stories. Although they are thematically related, each has its own central characters and locations. (If you look sharply, however, you can catch glimpses of characters from the second part in a few shots in the first.) The first story harks back to the genre action elements of Wong’s first feature, As Tears Go By (1988), while the second section prefigures the romantic yearnings of his later films Happy Together (1997), In the Mood for Love (2000), and 2046 (2004). Ashes of Time, which Wong finally completed shortly after Chungking Express, is also a genre action picture but teeters on the brink of abstraction. (In the revised 2008 version, Ashes of Time Redux, Wong removes some of the stylistic links to genre, making the narrative even more abstract.)

And Fallen Angels (1995), which Wong conceived as the third section of Chungking Express but spun off as a separate feature, is a hyperbolic amalgam of gangster violence and mad love, as ungeneric a noir as could be imagined, and not only because the frequent fish-eye-lensed close-ups turn its cast of beauties, male and female, into a bunch of banana noses. Wong’s reputation as an art-house director rests with the three later, increasingly operatic romances—Happy Together, In the

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2 Chungking Express, the title under which the film was released in the United States, is not a direct translation of the original Hong Kong title, Chung hing sam lam (Chungking Jungle). The U.S. title suggests the kind of synthetic space that only exists in dreams or movies—Chungking referring to Chungking Mansions, the primary location of the first section, and Express to the Midnight Express, the popular take-out restaurant around which the action of the second part revolves.

3 The darker aspect of the collective anxiety about the handover is reflected in the situation of Brigitte Lin’s blonde-wigged gangster.

Mood for Love, and 2046 — in part because genre films have never been fully accepted within the art-film canon, and in part because Wong’s mastery of sensuous polyrhythms and lush visual and aural textures was not as fully developed in the earlier films.

Minimally plotted, each section of Chungking Express focuses on a lovesick cop who pines for his ex-girlfriend until another woman captures his attention. One might venture that the first section, which opens with one of Wong’s signature step-printed chase sequences, this one through the teeming corridors and blind alleys of Chungking Mansions—a warren of flophouses, cut-rate shops, and import-export “businesses” that is a haven to criminals and the poor of all nations—is something of a blind alley itself, one which Wong drops after less than forty minutes in favor of a more promising romantic situation. It’s as if the film itself is looking for love in the same way that its characters are—by trial and error. The protagonist of the first section is a plainclothes cop, officer no. 223 (Kaneshiro), who is seen running hard in that opening chase scene and in another, shorter chase where he makes a collar, pretty much the only exercise of his profession in the film. Mostly what no. 223 does is obsess about his girlfriend, May, who jilted him on April Fools’ Day. No. 223 has given May until May 1, his twenty-fifth birthday, to come back to him. He marks the days of this countdown by buying cans of pineapple (“May loves pineapple,” he tells us in voice-over), each dated to expire on May 1. If she doesn’t call him on his birthday, the relationship will expire as well. It is doubtful that May (whom we never see in the film) knows or, if she did, would care at all about this ultimatum.

But like objects in a dream, the pineapple cans, and their looming sell-by date, condense multiple meanings and associations. May was no.

223’s number-one girlfriend, but he must let go of his love for her (“When did everything start having an expiration date?” he muses) in order to move on to the next stage of his life, a transition marked by his birthday. Then there is the canned pineapple itself, whose mass-produced sweetness is as cloying as the puppy love no. 223 feels. In fact, with May 1 only hours away, he tries to feed some of the syrupy stuff to his dog, who, like May, manifests no interest in such an absurd ritual of devotion. But no. 223’s eating orgy—he downs all thirty cans—transfers his heartache to his tummy, so that in puking up the pineapple he is relieved of the past and immediately fancies himself in love with the next woman he meets.

Hovering over the web of associations that defines the psyche of no. 223 is another countdown: in 1994, the handover of Hong Kong to China was only three years away. Comic anxiety about sex and romance is a front for the deeper fear that political freedom—an entire way of life— has an expiration date in the near future. The most striking difference between Masculin féminin and Chungking Express is the constant political activity and chatter in the former and its total absence in the latter. While this difference reflects a change in youth culture from the

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4 But like objects in a dream, the pineapple cans, and their looming sell-by date, condense multiple meanings and associations. May was no. 223’s number-one girlfriend, but he must let go of his love for her (“When did everything start having an expiration date?” he muses) in order to move on to the next stage of his life, a transition marked by his birthday.

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1960s to the 1990s, it doesn’t mean that Wong is an apolitical director.

Rather, like Eastern European filmmakers of the Soviet era or, more to the point, like some of his Chinese mainland contemporaries, he smuggles politics into his films through metaphor. Thus the loaded meaning of the expiration date of canned goods.

The darker aspect of the collective anxiety about the handover is reflected in the situation of Brigitte Lin’s blonde-wigged gangster. When someone slips her a can of sardines dated May 1, she gets the message: time is running out for her. If she doesn’t deliver the drugs that her twotiming couriers have stolen, she will die. She and no. 223 run into each other—literally collide—in the opening chase sequence. A smart cop would spot that her wig, dark glasses, and trench coat are a disguise, but no. 223 doesn’t realize then, or when he picks her up in a bar exactly “fifty-seven hours later,” that she is potentially the collar of a lifetime. His vision clouded, like so many of Wong’s male protagonists, by déjà vu—by the nearly forgotten “impact” of their first encounter—he fancies himself in love with her. They wind up in a hotel room, where she instantly falls asleep and he consumes four chef salads (there is hardly a scene in the film that doesn’t involve eating), and then removes her shoes and polishes them before leaving. Their relationship is utterly chaste, and yet the small acts of tenderness they extend to each other free them both—her to take care of business and him to resume his search for love.

Chungking Express, the title under which the film was released in the United States, is not a direct translation of the original Hong Kong title, Chung hing sam lam (Chungking Jungle). The U.S. title suggests the kind of synthetic space that only exists in dreams or movies— Chungking referring to Chungking Mansions, the primary location of the first section, and Express to the Midnight Express, the popular take-out restaurant around which the action of the second part revolves. The Midnight Express has already figured in the first section: it’s where no.

223 goes to call his answering service (his password is “love you for ten thousand years”) to find out if there have been any calls from the elusive May. The proprietor tries to fix him up with one of his waitresses, who is also named May, but no. 223 isn’t interested. When he stops at the Midnight Express after his night with the mysterious blonde, May has moved on, and the proprietor suggests that no. 223 try the new waitress, Faye (Faye Wong). No. 223 accidentally sees an Indian man washing windows and responds, “Do you think I go out with guys?” Hopelessly confused—or maybe just a bit stupid—no. 223 proves himself not yet ready for love. He leaves the Midnight Express and is never seen again. As far as the narrative of the film is concerned, his story is over.

Into his place steps uniform cop no. 663 (Leung), who routinely stops by the Midnight Express to pick up a chef salad for his flight attendant girlfriend. Wong gives Leung, who will become his filmic alter ego, an entrance to die for. The shot is ostensibly from Faye’s point of

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view, but as no. 663 walks into close-up, she’s not the only one instantly smitten by the most soulful set of peepers in contemporary cinema.

There is, however, someone who is immune to his charms, and soon no.

663 is jilted just like no. 223. Faye, using the keys that his ex-girlfriend drops at the Midnight Express, begins visiting no. 663’s apartment while he’s walking the beat, to do a bit of housecleaning. Wong will use this home-invasion ploy to more carnal effect in Fallen Angels, but nothing else in his films comes close to the giddiness with which Faye applies herself to housework as transgression, swiveling to the beat of “Dreams” on the soundtrack, or her delirious shift from joy to anguish when, crawling around in no. 663’s bed, ostensibly to straighten the sheets, she finds a woman’s long black hair under the pillow. In her first major acting role, Faye Wong takes over the film and runs with it. Her comic timing and her impulsiveness recall Katharine Hepburn in Bringing Up Baby—an association underscored when she leaves a huge toy cat, in this case a Garfield doll (the director would never be so obvious as to make it a stuffed leopard), in no. 663’s apartment as a substitute for the large white teddy bear left there by his ex.

As in Bringing Up Baby, opposites attract. No. 663, like the Cary Grant character, is an introvert, while Faye, like the Hepburn character, is dizzyingly extroverted. He’s so lost in his own head that he talks to a bar of soap to keep himself company. Not only does no. 663 fail to notice that Faye is gaga over him, he’s unaware that she’s been secretly transforming his apartment, until they come face-to-face at his front door—she’s leaving, he’s arriving, and when she sees him she’s so discombobulated that she slams the door in his face. It may be the only laugh-out-loud moment in Wong’s oeuvre. The two actors have terrific chemistry: their brief scenes together are more than sexy; they have an innocence that never returns to Wong’s movies after Chungking Express—a fling of a film, where regret is fleeting and joy triumphs, though who knows for how long.

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COLOR ANALYSIS DENNIS HOPPER

1 A kaleidoscope of vibrant aesthetics and ecstatic romance, Chungking Express is like a terrific double-album: the first side hyper, the second evocative. While the stories are thematically related and, like the title, share the same quarters, each is ravishing in its own way.

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is an American author and film critic. She is a contributing editor for two prominent film magazines, the British Sight & Sound and the American Film Comment.

Chungking Express is an expressive and impossibly romantic journey accentuated by lush colours and pop music. Here, as in Wong’s other films, the colour schematic ties itself to mood, while music helps to indicate setting and character. The two colours that adorn Chungking are red and blue, brightly smeared in neon around the marketplace. A blue palette, as well as blues music accompanies the cops’ blue periods.

Brief interludes of unrequited passion usually come in moments that have red hues. When Faye transforms Cop 663’s apartment, she hides the blue sandals (representing his melancholy) with red ones. When the characters are in the middle ground of heartbreak, yellow tints are present – the gold hues of the bar where Cop 223 and the wig-wearer meet or the bright dress Faye wears at the Midnight Express, a spanish song playing in a Hong Kong film. Does anyone find that odd?

To watch a Wong Kar-Wai romance is to immerse oneself in a sensuous environment, filled with dreamy colours. The two stories in Chungking Express get separate cinematographers: Wai-keung Lau does the first segment, Christopher Doyle the second. The first half of the film pops, colours bouncing around the screen as the camera whips through a busy metropolitan scene. With miraculous photographic tricks, Cop 223 is in focus while he chases down an assailant in the dazzling opening. Blurry smears of colours rush by, out of focus, as he runs after the suspect. If the first half encapsulates the impulses of a metropolis in motion, the second half is more lush and dreamy, as the frantic pace slows down and the viewer can more clearly see the details of the crowded market.

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Fig. 1, 2 and 3 A blue palette, as well as blues music accompanies the cops’ blue periods. Brief interludes of unrequited passion usually come in moments that have red hues. When Faye transforms Cop 663’s apartment, she hides the blue sandals (representing his melancholy) with red ones.

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Fig. 4 When the characters are in the middle ground of heartbreak, yellow tints are present – the gold hues of the bar where Cop 223 and the wig-wearer meet or the bright dress Faye wears at the Midnight Express, a spanish song playing in a Hong Kong film.

2 The Essentials: Chungking Express (1994)

by Jordan Adler in The Balcony is Open, 2013.

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In the second story, Doyle uses a similar technique that Lau does. He focuses on the principal characters as passersby rush by them in droves, as if moving in fast-forward. One shot has Cop 663 drinking a black coffee in slow motion, as Faye watches, dazed, from behind the Midnight Express counter. This expressive camerawork observes people slowed down as they await the changes in their lives and their dreams to manifest, as they catch their breath against the rush of colour and compulsiveness. These moments of halted time amidst chaos is a motif of the film.

A kaleidoscope of vibrant aesthetics and ecstatic romance, Chungking Express is like a terrific double-album: the first side hyper, the second evocative. While the stories are thematically related and, like the title, share the same quarters, each is ravishing in its own way.

Chungking Express is an expressive and impossibly romantic journey accentuated by lush colours and pop music. Here, as in Wong’s other films, the colour schematic ties itself to mood, while music helps to indicate setting and character. The two colours that adorn Chungking are red and blue, brightly smeared in neon around the marketplace. A blue palette, as well as blues music accompanies the cops’ blue periods.

Brief interludes of unrequited passion usually come in moments that have red hues. When Faye transforms Cop 663’s apartment, she hides the blue sandals (representing his melancholy) with red ones. When the characters are in the middle ground of heartbreak, yellow tints are present – the gold hues of the bar where Cop 223 and the wig-wearer meet or the bright dress Faye wears at the Midnight Express.

WONG KAR-WAI + CHRISTOPHER DOYLE

Fig. 5, 6 and 7 Blurry smears of colours rush by, out of focus, as he runs after the suspect. If the first half encapsulates the impulses of a metropolis in motion, the second half is more lush and dreamy, as the frantic pace slows down and the viewer can more clearly see the details of the crowded market.

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GEOMETRIC ANALYSIS ABEL FERRARA

is an American author and film critic. She is a contributing editor for two prominent film magazines, the British Sight & Sound and the American Film Comment.

Chungking Express is an expressive and impossibly romantic journey accentuated by lush colours and pop music. Here, as in Wong’s other films, the colour schematic ties itself to mood, while music helps to indicate setting and character. The two colours that adorn Chungking are red and blue, brightly smeared in neon around the marketplace. A blue palette, as well as blues music accompanies the cops’ blue periods.

Brief interludes of unrequited passion usually come in moments that have red hues. When Faye transforms Cop 663’s apartment, she hides the blue sandals (representing his melancholy) with red ones. When the characters are in the middle ground of heartbreak, yellow tints are present – the gold hues of the bar where Cop 223 and the wig-wearer meet or the bright dress Faye wears at the Midnight Express, a spanish song playing in a Hong Kong film. Does anyone find that odd?

To watch a Wong Kar-Wai romance is to immerse oneself in a sensuous environment, filled with dreamy colours. The two stories in Chungking Express get separate cinematographers: Wai-keung Lau does the first segment, Christopher Doyle the second. The first half of the film pops, colours bouncing around the screen as the camera whips through a busy metropolitan scene. With miraculous photographic tricks, Cop 223 is in focus while he chases down an assailant in the dazzling opening. Blurry smears of colours rush by, out of focus, as he runs after the suspect. If the first half encapsulates the impulses of a metropolis in motion, the second half is more lush and dreamy, as the frantic pace slows down and the viewer can more clearly see the details of the crowded market.

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Fig. 1 and 2 His expressive camerawork observes people slowed down as they await the changes in their lives and their dreams to manifest, as they catch their breath against the rush of colour and compulsiveness. These moments of halted time amidst chaos is a motif of the film.

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FALLEN ANGELS 1995

墮落天使

FILM DATASHEET SYNOPSIS

MOVIE

Two tales of crimes intertwine in present-day Hong Kong. A coolly detached hitman wants to finally escape a life of violence – much to the dismay of his partner who is secretly besotted with him. Meanwhile, a mute ex-convict repeatedly encounters a girl during his nights of wreaking havoc.

Original Title: 墮落天使 Director: Wong Kar-Wai Writer: Wong Kar-Wai Country: Hong Kong Year: 1995 Duration: 99 min Genre: Crime, Drama, Romance

PRODUCTION

Production Company: Jet Tone Production Cinematographer: Christopher Doyle, Pun-Leung Kwan, Ping Bin Lee Executive Producers: Ye-chang Chan Producers: William Chang, Gilles Ciment, Jacky Yee Wah Pang Film Editor: William Chang, Kit-Wai Kai, Chi-Leung Kwong Art Director: Lim Chung Man Cast: Maggie Cheung, Tony Chiu-Wai Leung,

TECHNICAL SPECIFICATIONS

Sound Mix: Dolby Digital Color: Color Aspect Ratio: 1.66:1 Camera: Arriflex 35 BL4, Zeiss Lenses; Arriflex 535, Zeiss Lenses Filme Lenght: 2.801 m Negative Format: 35mm (Kodak Vision 500T, Vision 800T 5289) Cinematographic Process: Spherical Printed Film Format: Digital Cinema Package DCP 4K - 35 mm

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Fig. 1 Original poster of the movie Fallen Angels, 1995

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FALLEN ANGELS: THE ART OF LONGING STEVE ERICKSON

1 The narrative of Chungking Express comprises two separate and distinct stories.

Although they are thematically related, each has its own central characters and locations. (If you look sharply, however, you can catch glimpses of characters from the second part in a few shots in the first.) The first story harks back to the genre action elements of Wong’s first feature, As Tears Go By (1988), while the second section prefigures the romantic yearnings of his later films Happy Together (1997), In the Mood for Love (2000), and 2046 (2004).

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is an author of nine novels. He writes about film for Los Angeles magazine and is the editor of the national literary journal Black Clock, published by the California Institute of the Arts.

At the turn of the twenty-first century, Wong Kar-wai was the most exciting director in the world, and 2000’s In the Mood for Love is his greatest movie. Like the other Hong Kong directors of his time, Wong imbues everything the West regards as film cliché with a new glamour and fervor; but whereas in the cinema of John Woo and Tsui Hark this romanticism lurks behind an operatic violence, in Wong’s films love is never merely a distraction or a motivation or a fleeting promise of redemption but the dominating conflict. Even at their most melodramatic, Wong’s love stories are sometimes funny but rarely ironic, played out against a psychically adrift cityscape where lovers don’t have the luxury of irony.

Praising a particular work in an ever-growing oeuvre as “mature” is as condescending as it is meaningless, so let’s say that, Wong’s psychedelic noirs having peaked with Chungking Express (1994) and Fallen Angels (1995), In the Mood for Love is distinctive for its quieter classicism and looming sense of history. Occupying next-door apartments, Chow Mo-wan (Tony Leung Chiu-wai), a newspaperman, and Su Li-zhen (Maggie Cheung Man-yuk), an executive secretary, notice that their respective spouses are always out of town at the same time, and soon these forsaken partners of two adulterers flirt with the possibility of their own affair. “We won’t be like them,” they vow to each other, even as they take a hotel room—not to consummate anything but to collaborate on scenes they imagine from the other affair, as well as a series Chow is writing for his newspaper. Rehearsing illicit overtures and responses in the winding streets and throbbing corridors and pulsing

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stairways of a cloistered Hong Kong—as ravishingly shot by Christopher Doyle and Mark Lee Ping-bin—the two remain no more sure than we are of whose desire is being expressed; they’re compelled by the constraints they’ve imposed on themselves out of both a fragile honor and moral vanity, and they waver but not to the point of succumbing. Of course, this only turns up the temperature between them; sometimes nothing is more erotic than repression. Like many who’ve been cheated on, Chow and Su blame themselves, and deny themselves what they’re confident they don’t deserve.

There’s a devastating scene a third of the way into the film, when Su is so lonely that she reaches out to the woman next door, not yet suspecting that this neighbor is taking her husband from her. Or does Su sense this after all? Once the door closes, a passing comment by the other woman suggests that Su’s husband may be in that very room at that very moment, feet away from the conversation that’s just taken place; in some part of her mind she hasn’t yet registered, has Su subconsciously recognized one of the muffled voices through the wall?

Like the emotions that flicker across the exquisite mask of Cheung’s face, scenes in In the Mood for Love surface and then submerge back into the murk of memory and fate called coincidence. The couples move into their respective apartments on the same day; their belongings become mixed up in a way that anticipates how their lives will intermingle—or, we might wonder later, is it the other way around? Have their lives already intermingled before the moves ever take place, before the movie even starts? This is a film where all our initial assumptions circle back on

Fig. 1 Minimally plotted, each section of Chungking Express focuses on a lovesick cop who pines for his ex-girlfriend until another woman captures his attention.

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Fig. 2 Into his place steps uniform cop no. 663 (Leung), who routinely stops by the Midnight Express to pick up a chef salad for his flight attendant girlfriend.

themselves, where the crisscrossing hallways mark the coordinates of destinies already mapped. Is it, in fact, Chow and Su who were fated all along to be lovers, and out of fear and rectitude defy and lose one of the rare chances for happiness that life offers?

In retrospect, it seems unfathomable that Wong at one point planned to set In the Mood for Love in Beijing, or anywhere other than Hong Kong—an example of how sometimes fate knows better. Beginning with his debut feature, As Tears Go By, in 1988, Wong’s movies are about nothing if not this City of the Betwixt and Between, lost amid West and East, capitalism and communism, freedom and oppression, the vortex of a dying century draining into one being born, to which a displaced filmmaker moved as a child and grew to adolescence unable to speak Cantonese. Its mash-up culture engendering his obsessions with pop imagery, magical realism, and, finally, obsession itself, Hong Kong is an entropic city untethered in time and space, through which Wong’s characters float from film to film. Cheung’s Su first appears in Days of Being Wild (1990), which takes place just a year or two before In the Mood for Love and where she seems so much another woman that we can’t help wondering if she’s really a female of dual incarnations, not unlike Brigitte Lin’s literally named Yin and Yang in Wong’s Ashes of Time (1994).

The number of the hotel room where the two would-be lovers meet, 2046, is the year when the arrangement promised by China at the time of the 1997 British handover of Hong Kong, allowing the island to maintain its capitalist economy, is supposed to end. It’s also the title of Wong’s follow-up to In the Mood for Love, in which Leung returns as a

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2 Chungking Express, the title under which the film was released in the United States, is not a direct translation of the original Hong Kong title, Chung hing sam lam (Chungking Jungle). The U.S. title suggests the kind of synthetic space that only exists in dreams or movies—Chungking referring to Chungking Mansions, the primary location of the first section, and Express to the Midnight Express, the popular take-out restaurant around which the action of the second part revolves.

3 The darker aspect of the collective anxiety about the handover is reflected in the situation of Brigitte Lin’s blonde-wigged gangster.

Chow who’s become as detached as he is debauched, making a game of the same luck that’s treated his heart so capriciously. Sporadically involved with another woman who’s also named Su (played by Gong Li) and an escort played by Zhang Ziyi, who is now the occupant of room 2046 and whose powers of bewitching men are lost on the one man she wants, Chow wanders from conquest to conquest with a premeditated aimlessness, unable to lose his heart no matter how recklessly he gambles it. Taken together, Days of Being Wild, In the Mood for Love, and 2046 are a triptych, but In the Mood is the trilogy’s heart and the most autonomous of the three. Nothing Wong has made before or since (including 2007’s My Blueberry Nights) matches its hushed rapture.

For much of its filming, what would become In the Mood for Love was called Secrets, and without divulging too much to those who haven’t seen it yet, the movie ends with a secret, whispered into a hole in a wall and then, with the mud of the earth, sealed off from what we can hear or know. In the Mood’s two lovers are bound by the conviction that what divides them is the same sensual inertia that drove their spouses into each other’s arms. But watch Cheung walk to and from the noodle shop and you know this isn’t possible. There is nothing sensually inert about that walk. It would be lascivious, that walk, were it by any actress other than Cheung, or from any director other than Wong Kar-wai. Su’s body may keep a secret from Su but not from anyone who watches her, and long after the wounds of betrayal pretend to heal, long after she and her coconspirator in an eluded passion have separated, long after this serenely delirious movie is over, the secret of that walk haunts us as much as whatever it is that Chow has murmured in the dark.

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COLOR ANALYSIS COLIN PEH

1 A kaleidoscope of vibrant aesthetics and ecstatic romance, Chungking Express is like a terrific double-album: the first side hyper, the second evocative. While the stories are thematically related and, like the title, share the same quarters, each is ravishing in its own way.

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is a master in art, design and media at Nanyang Technological University, Singapore. His thesis studied the visual aspects of cinematographer Christopher Doyle’s cinema visual works.

The cinematography of the film evokes a sense of voyeurism for the audience. It brings a sense of intrusion into the character’s lives.

Fitting the narrative of the film as the plot is about hiding a secretive and illicit affair. The style of framing the characters were usually done in a narrow dark hallway along the corridor using mostly long shots with pillars in the foreground showing as though the camera and audience is hiding from a distance watching secretly from the distant.

There is a lot of back lighting and top lighting in various scenes to create strong silhouettes that highlight the characters’ inner torment.

Christopher Doyle uses a consistent colour palette of deep reds and blacks throughout In The Mood For Love (2000). The film signifying their heightened emotions with their colour palette.

Christopher Doyle uses rich primary colours such as red, blue and yellow to create a strong dynamic colour scheme for the film to heighten the emotions of the romantic melodrama. By using cool lighting as the background and environment ambience, the film is able to create a sense of isolation of the characters from the set design.

Throughout the film, the lighting is mainly from one source. You will notice that in every screenshot of the scene, the main source of lighting is from either a warm and practical overhead lamp along the corridor or a cool white overhead fluorescent in an office that serves as the main motivation of lighting for the performance.

Doyle uses a small practical overhead lighting to isolate the pocket of lights to control lighting and shadows resulting in a high contrast visual aesthetic. The use of a chiaroscuro lighting technique

WONG KAR-WAI + CHRISTOPHER DOYLE

Fig. 1, 2 and 3 A blue palette, as well as blues music accompanies the cops’ blue periods. Brief interludes of unrequited passion usually come in moments that have red hues. When Faye transforms Cop 663’s apartment, she hides the blue sandals (representing his melancholy) with red ones.

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1 Itten, Johannes, Faber Birren, and Ernst Van Hagen. The Elements of Colour. Chichester: Wiley, 1970, 45 2 Itten, Johannes, Faber Birren, and Ernst Van Hagen. The Elements of Colour. Chichester: Wiley, 1970, 42

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where Doyle uses a pronounced shadow work plays a great role in creating a dramatic underscoring of the narrative. Chiaroscuro and an even mid-key shadow effect also interact with a warm and cool lighting of the scene. Though it establishes the dark and secretive mood of the plot, the lighting carries a double function. It helps to suppress the warm orange colour lighting in the house scene and brings a much needed contrast to the cool bluish lighting thus creating a wider range of tonal qualities in the scene.

In The Mood For Love uses cinematography with art direction in set and wardrobe design to bring out the green tint in the film. In the scenes where there are green elements in the set and wardrobe, the story is often filled with a sense of guilt and revelation. There is a strong play of complementary colours in most of the scenes in the film. Doyle uses violet and yellow complementary colour combinations to create a harmonious balance. In the movie sequence, Doyle lit the characters with warm tungsten lighting so that the characters will have consistent skin tone against the cool violet environment.

Christopher Doyle uses two colours of opposite polarity to heighten the colour contrast of the image. In most of the sequences, Doyle uses a mixture of low-key lighting and projected complementary colours to heighten the moments. Doyle uses cold-warm contrast¹ and complementary colours in the planning of the lighting design. There is a colour harmony in his colour palette and strong selection of primary colours in his visual style.

The lighting strategy in the movie is done with a low-key lighting which emphasises a strongly shadowed profile. There is a juxtaposition of colour temperatures between the vivid warm accents in the foreground and rear. The colour temperatures reinforce each other in contrast to using colder colours². Contrast makes both the coloured illumination image forceful and visually translates character conflicts. Christopher Doyle uses colour psychology in which emotions are most present with red and orange which is the most emotive colour in the film. It represents passion, love, energy and danger. By using red as the main colour palette as an energising colour to help to intensify the environment and mood of the scenes. Christopher Doyle uses the strong primary colours along with the complementary colour combination of the costumes and sets design in In the Mood for Love (2000), making the film a visual masterpiece.

WONG KAR-WAI + CHRISTOPHER DOYLE

Fig. 5, 6 and 7 Blurry smears of colours rush by, out of focus, as he runs after the suspect. If the first half encapsulates the impulses of a metropolis in motion, the second half is more lush and dreamy, as the frantic pace slows down and the viewer can more clearly see the details of the crowded market.

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GEOMETRIC ANALYSIS CALVIN TAYLOR

Georgia Tech Business Student. Concentrating in Marketing and Certificate in Film Studies.

Enjoy all things Film/TV.

Wong Kar Wai’s film, “In the Mood for Love” stars Maggie Cheung and Tony Leung as a man and a woman who develop an affair after discovering the unfaithfulness of their respective spouses. The cinematography of the film evokes a sense of voyeurism for the audience; we feel like we are “spying” on the two characters as they develop their secret relationship. This sense of voyeurism and intrusion into the character’s lives is fitting due to the fact the film’s plot is about hiding a secretive affair. Voyeurism is achieved in the film primarily through two methods: by the framing and the positioning of the camera as well as through the camera’s eye-level tracking shots of the characters’ backside.

The framing and the positioning of the camera consistently convey the audience’s intrusion into these two characters’ lives. Many times the camera is positioned in such a way that there is a blurred object in the foreground of the shot, with the character in clear view in the background. The camera’s positioning leads to a partially obstructed view of the shot, creating a sense that the audience is spying on the characters through the use of a “hidden camera.”

The most common example of this type of framing is shown through shots framed behind windows and walls. However, this type of framing can also be interpreted in such a way that the characters are trapped and confined in the secrecy of their affair.

The film commonly uses mirrors to give us an indirect view, which again relates to the lack of an absolute, clear shot of the characters during their intimate moments.

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Fig. 1 and 2 Stills from the movie In The Mood For Love in which shows that the camera is at eyelevel with the actors and the frame created from two halves.

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HAPPY TOGETHER 1997

春光乍洩

FILM DATASHEET SYNOPSIS

MOVIE

Yiu-Fai and Po-Wing arrive in Argentina from Hong Kong and take to the road for a holiday. Something is wrong and their relationship goes adrift.

A disillusioned Yiu-Fai starts working at a tango bar to save up for his trip home. When a beaten and bruised Po-Wing reappears, meets the youthful Chang from Taiwan.

Original Title: 春光乍洩 Director: Wong Kar-Wai Writer: Wong Kar-Wai Country: Hong Kong Year: 1994 Duration: 102min/98min (Hong Kong) Genre: Comedy, Crime, Drama, Mystery, Romance

PRODUCTION

Production Company: Jet Tone Production Cinematographer: Christopher Doyle, Wai-Keung Lau (Andrew Lau) Executive Producers: Chan Pui-Wah Producers: Chan Yi-kan, Jeffrey Lau Film Editor: William Chang, Kit-Wai Kai, Chi-Leung Kwong Art Director: Wai Ming Yau Cast: Brigitte Lin, Tony Chiu-Wai Leung, Faye Wong, Takeshi Kaneshiro

TECHNICAL SPECIFICATIONS

Sound Mix: 4-Track Stereo/Dolby SR Color: Color Aspect Ratio: 1.66:1 (director specified for Criterion release)

1.85:1 (original ratio) Filme Lenght: 2.864 m Negative Format: 35mm (Agfa) Cinematographic Process: Spherical Printed Film Format: Digital Cinema Package DCP 4K - 35 mm

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Fig. 1 Original, rolled, one-sheet movie poster from 1994 for Happy Together

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THE BITTER ROMANTICISM OF HAPPY TOGETHER DOUGLAS LAMAN

1 The narrative of Chungking Express comprises two separate and distinct stories.

Although they are thematically related, each has its own central characters and locations. (If you look sharply, however, you can catch glimpses of characters from the second part in a few shots in the first.) The first story harks back to the genre action elements of Wong’s first feature, As Tears Go By (1988), while the second section prefigures the romantic yearnings of his later films Happy Together (1997), In the Mood for Love (2000), and 2046 (2004).

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is an American author and film critic. She is a contributing editor for two prominent film magazines, the British Sight & Sound and the American Film Comment.

Chungking Express (1994) was the Masculin féminin of the 1990s, a pop art movie about cool twentysomethings looking for love in the city that has replaced Paris as the center of the world-cinema imagination.

What Jean-Luc Godard did for “the generation of Marx and CocaCola” in the mid-1960s, Wong Kar-wai did for restless Hong Kong youth during the anxious decade that preceded the handoff to China.

Masculin féminin (1966) and Chungking Express were the first films in which their respective directors focused predominantly on characters who were around ten years their juniors. This generatio n gap imparts a sense of distance mixed with tenderness, and also focuses the films on the dominant issue for heterosexual young adults: how to negotiate the desire and confusion they feel vis-à-vis the opposite sex.

Made while Wong was taking a break from the lengthy, difficult post-production of his only martial arts period picture, Ashes of Time (1994), Chungking Express was intended as a money-generating quickie for the director’s Jet Tone company, and indeed the movie, which was made in three months, start to finish, has a wacky spontaneity that is unique in his oeuvre. Wong piled on the commercial elements: the first half is a nod to the gangster thriller, the second is pure screwball romance. The protagonists of both sections are cops, and the four main actors are all Asian box office attractions: pop music idols Takeshi Kaneshiro and Faye Wong, Hong Kong action/dramatic star Tony Leung Chiu-wai, and veteran actress Brigitte Lin Ching-hsia (the film’s only fortysomething star, coming out of retirement for a cameo appearance as a drug smuggler, fashioned as an homage to another middle-aged

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cult actress, Gena Rowlands in Gloria). Again comparing the film with Masculin féminin, the female leads in both are played by singers with youth culture followings. But unlike Masculin féminin’s Chantal Goya, a pop singer playing the role of a pop singer, Faye Wong in Chungking Express plays a waitress, albeit one who becomes identified with two songs—the Mamas and the Papas’ “California Dreamin’” and a Cantonese cover of the Cranberries’ “Dreams” by a singer named Faye Wong—which accompany her as she works. While the difference in strategy is minimal—at one point or another, both performers either lip-synch or dance to their own recorded voices—the difference between Godard’s and Wong’s depictions of the female characters is enormous.

The Goya character is monstrous in her narcissism and vacuity. On the other hand, Wong is as empathetic with Faye Wong’s waitress as he is with the cops played by Kaneshiro and Leung.

In Asia, the film didn’t disappoint, sweeping the Hong Kong Film Awards and doing well at the box office. In the United States, however, the turnout was disappointing, perhaps because Miramax, which distributed Chungking Express as a presentation by Quentin Tarantino’s Rolling Thunder company, was perplexed about whether to market it as an art film or an Asian exploitation flick. Nevertheless, the combination of filmmaking pyrotechnics and wistful romance proved irresistible to cinephiles. Chungking Express established Wong’s reputation as a major auteur, the most glamorous and enigmatic since Godard. It also marked a turning point in his work, a shift in direction that is actually signaled within the film, when the desultory underworld revenge narrative fades

Fig. 1 Minimally plotted, each section of Chungking Express focuses on a lovesick cop who pines for his ex-girlfriend until another woman captures his attention.

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Fig. 2 Into his place steps uniform cop no. 663 (Leung), who routinely stops by the Midnight Express to pick up a chef salad for his flight attendant girlfriend.

away and is replaced by a love story as simple as it is delirious. Writing in 1966 about Masculin féminin, Pauline Kael observed that “Godard has liberated his feeling for modern youth from the American gangster-movie framework which limited his expressiveness and his relevance to the nonmovie-centered world.” Wong makes the same move in Chungking Express, underlining the separation by placing it midway through the film.

The narrative of Chungking Express comprises two separate and distinct stories. Although they are thematically related, each has its own central characters and locations. (If you look sharply, however, you can catch glimpses of characters from the second part in a few shots in the first.) The first story harks back to the genre action elements of Wong’s first feature, As Tears Go By (1988), while the second section prefigures the romantic yearnings of his later films Happy Together (1997), In the Mood for Love (2000), and 2046 (2004). Ashes of Time, which Wong finally completed shortly after Chungking Express, is also a genre action picture but teeters on the brink of abstraction. (In the revised 2008 version, Ashes of Time Redux, Wong removes some of the stylistic links to genre, making the narrative even more abstract.) And Fallen Angels (1995), which Wong conceived as the third section of Chungking Express but spun off as a separate feature, is a hyperbolic amalgam of gangster violence and mad love, as ungeneric a noir as could be imagined, and not only because the frequent fish-eye-lensed close-ups turn its cast of beauties, male and female, into a bunch of banana noses. Wong’s reputation as an art-house director rests with the three later, increasingly operatic romances—Happy Together, In the Mood for Love, and 2046 —

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2 Chungking Express, the title under which the film was released in the United States, is not a direct translation of the original Hong Kong title, Chung hing sam lam (Chungking Jungle). The U.S. title suggests the kind of synthetic space that only exists in dreams or movies—Chungking referring to Chungking Mansions, the primary location of the first section, and Express to the Midnight Express, the popular take-out restaurant around which the action of the second part revolves.

3 The darker aspect of the collective anxiety about the handover is reflected in the situation of Brigitte Lin’s blonde-wigged gangster.

in part because genre films have never been fully accepted within the artfilm canon, and in part because Wong’s mastery of sensuous polyrhythms and lush visual and aural textures was not as fully developed in the earlier films.

Minimally plotted, each section of Chungking Express focuses on a lovesick cop who pines for his ex-girlfriend until another woman captures his attention. One might venture that the first section, which opens with one of Wong’s signature step-printed chase sequences, this one through the teeming corridors and blind alleys of Chungking Mansions—a warren of flophouses, cut-rate shops, and import-export “businesses” that is a haven to criminals and the poor of all nations—is something of a blind alley itself, one which Wong drops after less than forty minutes in favor of a more promising romantic situation. It’s as if the film itself is looking for love in the same way that its characters are—by trial and error. The protagonist of the first section is a plainclothes cop, officer no. 223 (Kaneshiro), who is seen running hard in that opening chase scene and in another, shorter chase where he makes a collar, pretty much the only exercise of his profession in the film. Mostly what no. 223 does is obsess about his girlfriend, May, who jilted him on April Fools’ Day. No. 223 has given May until May 1, his twenty-fifth birthday, to come back to him. He marks the days of this countdown by buying cans of pineapple (“May loves pineapple,” he tells us in voice-over), each dated to expire on May 1. If she doesn’t call him on his birthday, the relationship will expire as well. It is doubtful that May (whom we never see in the film) knows or, if she did, would care at all about this ultimatum.

But like objects in a dream, the pineapple cans, and their looming sell-by date, condense multiple meanings and associations. May was no.

223’s number-one girlfriend, but he must let go of his love for her (“When did everything start having an expiration date?” he muses) in order to move on to the next stage of his life, a transition marked by his birthday. Then there is the canned pineapple itself, whose mass-produced sweetness is as cloying as the puppy love no. 223 feels. In fact, with May 1 only hours away, he tries to feed some of the syrupy stuff to his dog, who, like May, manifests no interest in such an absurd ritual of devotion. But no. 223’s eating orgy—he downs all thirty cans—transfers his heartache to his tummy, so that in puking up the pineapple he is relieved of the past and immediately fancies himself in love with the next woman he meets.

Hovering over the web of associations that defines the psyche of no. 223 is another countdown: in 1994, the handover of Hong Kong to China was only three years away. Comic anxiety about sex and romance is a front for the deeper fear that political freedom—an entire way of life— has an expiration date in the near future. The most striking difference between Masculin féminin and Chungking Express is the constant political activity and chatter in the former and its total absence in the latter. While this difference reflects a change in youth culture from the

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4 But like objects in a dream, the pineapple cans, and their looming sell-by date, condense multiple meanings and associations. May was no. 223’s number-one girlfriend, but he must let go of his love for her (“When did everything start having an expiration date?” he muses) in order to move on to the next stage of his life, a transition marked by his birthday.

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1960s to the 1990s, it doesn’t mean that Wong is an apolitical director.

Rather, like Eastern European filmmakers of the Soviet era or, more to the point, like some of his Chinese mainland contemporaries, he smuggles politics into his films through metaphor. Thus the loaded meaning of the expiration date of canned goods.

The darker aspect of the collective anxiety about the handover is reflected in the situation of Brigitte Lin’s blonde-wigged gangster. When someone slips her a can of sardines dated May 1, she gets the message: time is running out for her. If she doesn’t deliver the drugs that her twotiming couriers have stolen, she will die. She and no. 223 run into each other—literally collide—in the opening chase sequence. A smart cop would spot that her wig, dark glasses, and trench coat are a disguise, but no. 223 doesn’t realize then, or when he picks her up in a bar exactly “fifty-seven hours later,” that she is potentially the collar of a lifetime. His vision clouded, like so many of Wong’s male protagonists, by déjà vu—by the nearly forgotten “impact” of their first encounter—he fancies himself in love with her. They wind up in a hotel room, where she instantly falls asleep and he consumes four chef salads (there is hardly a scene in the film that doesn’t involve eating), and then removes her shoes and polishes them before leaving. Their relationship is utterly chaste, and yet the small acts of tenderness they extend to each other free them both—her to take care of business and him to resume his search for love.

Chungking Express, the title under which the film was released in the United States, is not a direct translation of the original Hong Kong title, Chung hing sam lam (Chungking Jungle). The U.S. title suggests the kind of synthetic space that only exists in dreams or movies— Chungking referring to Chungking Mansions, the primary location of the first section, and Express to the Midnight Express, the popular take-out restaurant around which the action of the second part revolves. The Midnight Express has already figured in the first section: it’s where no.

223 goes to call his answering service (his password is “love you for ten thousand years”) to find out if there have been any calls from the elusive May. The proprietor tries to fix him up with one of his waitresses, who is also named May, but no. 223 isn’t interested. When he stops at the Midnight Express after his night with the mysterious blonde, May has moved on, and the proprietor suggests that no. 223 try the new waitress, Faye (Faye Wong). No. 223 accidentally sees an Indian man washing windows and responds, “Do you think I go out with guys?” Hopelessly confused—or maybe just a bit stupid—no. 223 proves himself not yet ready for love. He leaves the Midnight Express and is never seen again. As far as the narrative of the film is concerned, his story is over.

Into his place steps uniform cop no. 663 (Leung), who routinely stops by the Midnight Express to pick up a chef salad for his flight attendant girlfriend. Wong gives Leung, who will become his filmic alter ego, an entrance to die for. The shot is ostensibly from Faye’s point of

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view, but as no. 663 walks into close-up, she’s not the only one instantly smitten by the most soulful set of peepers in contemporary cinema.

There is, however, someone who is immune to his charms, and soon no.

663 is jilted just like no. 223. Faye, using the keys that his ex-girlfriend drops at the Midnight Express, begins visiting no. 663’s apartment while he’s walking the beat, to do a bit of housecleaning. Wong will use this home-invasion ploy to more carnal effect in Fallen Angels, but nothing else in his films comes close to the giddiness with which Faye applies herself to housework as transgression, swiveling to the beat of “Dreams” on the soundtrack, or her delirious shift from joy to anguish when, crawling around in no. 663’s bed, ostensibly to straighten the sheets, she finds a woman’s long black hair under the pillow. In her first major acting role, Faye Wong takes over the film and runs with it. Her comic timing and her impulsiveness recall Katharine Hepburn in Bringing Up Baby—an association underscored when she leaves a huge toy cat, in this case a Garfield doll (the director would never be so obvious as to make it a stuffed leopard), in no. 663’s apartment as a substitute for the large white teddy bear left there by his ex.

As in Bringing Up Baby, opposites attract. No. 663, like the Cary Grant character, is an introvert, while Faye, like the Hepburn character, is dizzyingly extroverted. He’s so lost in his own head that he talks to a bar of soap to keep himself company. Not only does no. 663 fail to notice that Faye is gaga over him, he’s unaware that she’s been secretly transforming his apartment, until they come face-to-face at his front door—she’s leaving, he’s arriving, and when she sees him she’s so discombobulated that she slams the door in his face. It may be the only laugh-out-loud moment in Wong’s oeuvre. The two actors have terrific chemistry: their brief scenes together are more than sexy; they have an innocence that never returns to Wong’s movies after Chungking Express—a fling of a film, where regret is fleeting and joy triumphs, though who knows for how long.

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COLOR ANALYSIS DANIEL SUNDVIK

is an American film critic. He is a film critic for the Chicago Sun-Times. Sundvik became the first film critic to win the Pulitzer Prize for Criticism.

All perception of colour is based on an interaction of colours, only when another colour is introduced to the scene is there an interaction of the colour to be seen. In order to understand Christopher Doyle’s colour design and visual style, the harmony and combination of colour schemes that Doyle uses in his film are studied, including the interaction of colour, visual phenomena and understanding how colours interact and changes with the lighting control of the scene. For this analysis, many film frames are studied and dissected many details, identifying the individual colour zones and colour design of Cinematographer Christopher Doyle.

By doing this analysis, this thesis seeks to understand Christopher Doyle’s visual style and colour strategies in the individual scenes. The analysis will be broken down into complementary colours, analogous colours, triadic, tetradic, square colour schemes and depth of colours. A colour wheel with the identified colours is included in each scene to aid the visual analysis. There are colour boxes to mark out the individual colour schemes and weightage of the scenes. The coloured mark out boxes in every diagram in this section are a good showcase of how Christopher Doyle plans and accomplishes his visual composition and direction for audience attention. Under the depth of colours, the common Pantones Colours among Christopher Doyle’s selected filmography can be identified and evaluated. Visualization is a medium between the data and the viewer. In order to fully understand Christopher Doyle range of work, an analysis of visual data was done by breaking down 258 films stills from 26 major scenes of the 5

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Fig. 1, 2 and 3 A blue palette, as well as blues music accompanies the cops’ blue periods. Brief interludes of unrequited passion usually come in moments that have red hues. When Faye transforms Cop 663’s apartment, she hides the blue sandals (representing his melancholy) with red ones.

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Fig. 4 Into his place steps uniform cop no. 663 (Leung), who routinely stops by the Midnight Express to pick up a chef salad for his flight attendant girlfriend.

2 It is a great film that bares many similarities to Wong Kar-Wai’s later masterpiece In the Mood for Love, and is a must watch for fans of his work.

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films and categorising them into sections according to their common colour themes and palettes. By adding the colour wheel into the compiled visual representations along with Pantone codes, it makes the creative more visible to the viewer. Wet pavement sparkles, focus changes accentuate characters, and ambient occlusion hides details with superb mood-setting power. Days of Being Wild is a marvel of photography without having any special effects to speak of. Everything happens as the camera chances upon it, and that’s a good thing. The Blu-ray currently isn’t very easy to get a hold of, but the movie is available for purchase from several digital storefronts if you look closely.

The film features a number of reoccurring elements in its shots, including: seductive shallow depth of field two shots that smoothly rack focus between characters, high-angle long shots which highlight the isolation of characters in empty night-time streets, shots which prominently contain a clock or watch within the mise-en-scène emphasising the passage of time, sweat on foreheads and fans trying to ease the lethargic heat, multiple mirrors and reflections, and shots which contain several frames within the frame which serve to trap the characters they contain. In terms of its colour palette, Days of Being Wild is dominated by infinite shades of green and blue, giving the film a distinct visual appeal as well as a mood of cool distance.

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Fig. 5, 6 and 7 Blurry smears of colours rush by, out of focus, as he runs after the suspect. If the first half encapsulates the impulses of a metropolis in motion, the second half is more lush and dreamy, as the frantic pace slows down and the viewer can more clearly see the details of the crowded market.

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GEOMETRIC ANALYSIS ABEL FERRARA

is an American author and film critic. She is a contributing editor for two prominent film magazines, the British Sight & Sound and the American Film Comment.

Chungking Express is an expressive and impossibly romantic journey accentuated by lush colours and pop music. Here, as in Wong’s other films, the colour schematic ties itself to mood, while music helps to indicate setting and character. The two colours that adorn Chungking are red and blue, brightly smeared in neon around the marketplace. A blue palette, as well as blues music accompanies the cops’ blue periods.

Brief interludes of unrequited passion usually come in moments that have red hues. When Faye transforms Cop 663’s apartment, she hides the blue sandals (representing his melancholy) with red ones. When the characters are in the middle ground of heartbreak, yellow tints are present – the gold hues of the bar where Cop 223 and the wig-wearer meet or the bright dress Faye wears at the Midnight Express, a spanish song playing in a Hong Kong film. Does anyone find that odd?

To watch a Wong Kar-Wai romance is to immerse oneself in a sensuous environment, filled with dreamy colours. The two stories in Chungking Express get separate cinematographers: Wai-keung Lau does the first segment, Christopher Doyle the second. The first half of the film pops, colours bouncing around the screen as the camera whips through a busy metropolitan scene. With miraculous photographic tricks, Cop 223 is in focus while he chases down an assailant in the dazzling opening. Blurry smears of colours rush by, out of focus, as he runs after the suspect. If the first half encapsulates the impulses of a metropolis in motion, the second half is more lush and dreamy, as the frantic pace slows down and the viewer can more clearly see the details of the crowded market.

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Fig. 1 and 2 His expressive camerawork observes people slowed down as they await the changes in their lives and their dreams to manifest, as they catch their breath against the rush of colour and compulsiveness. These moments of halted time amidst chaos is a motif of the film.

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IN THE MOOD FOR LOVE 2000

花樣年華

FILM DATASHEET SYNOPSIS

MOVIE

Two neighbors form a strong bond after both suspect extramarital activities of their spouses. However, they agree to keep their bond platonic so as not to commit similar wrongs.

Original Title: 花樣年華 Director: Wong Kar-Wai Writer: Wong Kar-Wai Country: Hong Kong Year: 2000 Duration: 98min Genre: Drama, Romance

PRODUCTION

Production Company: Jet Tone Production Cinematographer: Christopher Doyle, Pun-Leung Kwan, Ping Bin Lee Executive Producers: Ye-chang Chan Producers: William Chang, Gilles Ciment, Jacky Yee Wah Pang Film Editor: William Chang, Kit-Wai Kai, Chi-Leung Kwong Art Director: Lim Chung Man Cast: Maggie Cheung, Tony Chiu-Wai Leung,

TECHNICAL SPECIFICATIONS

Sound Mix: Dolby Digital Color: Color Aspect Ratio: 1.66:1 Camera: Arriflex 35 BL4, Zeiss Lenses; Arriflex 535, Zeiss Lenses Filme Lenght: 2.801 m Negative Format: 35mm (Kodak Vision 500T, Vision 800T 5289) Cinematographic Process: Spherical Printed Film Format: Digital Cinema Package DCP 4K - 35 mm

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Fig. 1 Photography of the original poster of the movie In The Mood For Love, 2000.

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IN THE MOOD FOR LOVE: HAUNTED HEART STEVE ERICKSON

1 The narrative of Chungking Express comprises two separate and distinct stories.

Although they are thematically related, each has its own central characters and locations. (If you look sharply, however, you can catch glimpses of characters from the second part in a few shots in the first.) The first story harks back to the genre action elements of Wong’s first feature, As Tears Go By (1988), while the second section prefigures the romantic yearnings of his later films Happy Together (1997), In the Mood for Love (2000), and 2046 (2004).

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is an author of nine novels. He writes about film for Los Angeles magazine and is the editor of the national literary journal Black Clock, published by the California Institute of the Arts.

At the turn of the twenty-first century, Wong Kar-wai was the most exciting director in the world, and 2000’s In the Mood for Love is his greatest movie. Like the other Hong Kong directors of his time, Wong imbues everything the West regards as film cliché with a new glamour and fervor; but whereas in the cinema of John Woo and Tsui Hark this romanticism lurks behind an operatic violence, in Wong’s films love is never merely a distraction or a motivation or a fleeting promise of redemption but the dominating conflict. Even at their most melodramatic, Wong’s love stories are sometimes funny but rarely ironic, played out against a psychically adrift cityscape where lovers don’t have the luxury of irony.

Praising a particular work in an ever-growing oeuvre as “mature” is as condescending as it is meaningless, so let’s say that, Wong’s psychedelic noirs having peaked with Chungking Express (1994) and Fallen Angels (1995), In the Mood for Love is distinctive for its quieter classicism and looming sense of history. Occupying next-door apartments, Chow Mo-wan (Tony Leung Chiu-wai), a newspaperman, and Su Li-zhen (Maggie Cheung Man-yuk), an executive secretary, notice that their respective spouses are always out of town at the same time, and soon these forsaken partners of two adulterers flirt with the possibility of their own affair. “We won’t be like them,” they vow to each other, even as they take a hotel room—not to consummate anything but to collaborate on scenes they imagine from the other affair, as well as a series Chow is writing for his newspaper. Rehearsing illicit overtures and responses in the winding streets and throbbing corridors and pulsing

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stairways of a cloistered Hong Kong—as ravishingly shot by Christopher Doyle and Mark Lee Ping-bin—the two remain no more sure than we are of whose desire is being expressed; they’re compelled by the constraints they’ve imposed on themselves out of both a fragile honor and moral vanity, and they waver but not to the point of succumbing. Of course, this only turns up the temperature between them; sometimes nothing is more erotic than repression. Like many who’ve been cheated on, Chow and Su blame themselves, and deny themselves what they’re confident they don’t deserve.

There’s a devastating scene a third of the way into the film, when Su is so lonely that she reaches out to the woman next door, not yet suspecting that this neighbor is taking her husband from her. Or does Su sense this after all? Once the door closes, a passing comment by the other woman suggests that Su’s husband may be in that very room at that very moment, feet away from the conversation that’s just taken place; in some part of her mind she hasn’t yet registered, has Su subconsciously recognized one of the muffled voices through the wall?

Like the emotions that flicker across the exquisite mask of Cheung’s face, scenes in In the Mood for Love surface and then submerge back into the murk of memory and fate called coincidence. The couples move into their respective apartments on the same day; their belongings become mixed up in a way that anticipates how their lives will intermingle—or, we might wonder later, is it the other way around? Have their lives already intermingled before the moves ever take place, before the movie even starts? This is a film where all our initial assumptions circle back on

Fig. 1 Minimally plotted, each section of Chungking Express focuses on a lovesick cop who pines for his ex-girlfriend until another woman captures his attention.

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Fig. 2 Into his place steps uniform cop no. 663 (Leung), who routinely stops by the Midnight Express to pick up a chef salad for his flight attendant girlfriend.

themselves, where the crisscrossing hallways mark the coordinates of destinies already mapped. Is it, in fact, Chow and Su who were fated all along to be lovers, and out of fear and rectitude defy and lose one of the rare chances for happiness that life offers?

In retrospect, it seems unfathomable that Wong at one point planned to set In the Mood for Love in Beijing, or anywhere other than Hong Kong—an example of how sometimes fate knows better. Beginning with his debut feature, As Tears Go By, in 1988, Wong’s movies are about nothing if not this City of the Betwixt and Between, lost amid West and East, capitalism and communism, freedom and oppression, the vortex of a dying century draining into one being born, to which a displaced filmmaker moved as a child and grew to adolescence unable to speak Cantonese. Its mash-up culture engendering his obsessions with pop imagery, magical realism, and, finally, obsession itself, Hong Kong is an entropic city untethered in time and space, through which Wong’s characters float from film to film. Cheung’s Su first appears in Days of Being Wild (1990), which takes place just a year or two before In the Mood for Love and where she seems so much another woman that we can’t help wondering if she’s really a female of dual incarnations, not unlike Brigitte Lin’s literally named Yin and Yang in Wong’s Ashes of Time (1994).

The number of the hotel room where the two would-be lovers meet, 2046, is the year when the arrangement promised by China at the time of the 1997 British handover of Hong Kong, allowing the island to maintain its capitalist economy, is supposed to end. It’s also the title of Wong’s follow-up to In the Mood for Love, in which Leung returns as a

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2 Chungking Express, the title under which the film was released in the United States, is not a direct translation of the original Hong Kong title, Chung hing sam lam (Chungking Jungle). The U.S. title suggests the kind of synthetic space that only exists in dreams or movies—Chungking referring to Chungking Mansions, the primary location of the first section, and Express to the Midnight Express, the popular take-out restaurant around which the action of the second part revolves.

3 The darker aspect of the collective anxiety about the handover is reflected in the situation of Brigitte Lin’s blonde-wigged gangster.

Chow who’s become as detached as he is debauched, making a game of the same luck that’s treated his heart so capriciously. Sporadically involved with another woman who’s also named Su (played by Gong Li) and an escort played by Zhang Ziyi, who is now the occupant of room 2046 and whose powers of bewitching men are lost on the one man she wants, Chow wanders from conquest to conquest with a premeditated aimlessness, unable to lose his heart no matter how recklessly he gambles it. Taken together, Days of Being Wild, In the Mood for Love, and 2046 are a triptych, but In the Mood is the trilogy’s heart and the most autonomous of the three. Nothing Wong has made before or since (including 2007’s My Blueberry Nights) matches its hushed rapture.

For much of its filming, what would become In the Mood for Love was called Secrets, and without divulging too much to those who haven’t seen it yet, the movie ends with a secret, whispered into a hole in a wall and then, with the mud of the earth, sealed off from what we can hear or know. In the Mood’s two lovers are bound by the conviction that what divides them is the same sensual inertia that drove their spouses into each other’s arms. But watch Cheung walk to and from the noodle shop and you know this isn’t possible. There is nothing sensually inert about that walk. It would be lascivious, that walk, were it by any actress other than Cheung, or from any director other than Wong Kar-wai. Su’s body may keep a secret from Su but not from anyone who watches her, and long after the wounds of betrayal pretend to heal, long after she and her coconspirator in an eluded passion have separated, long after this serenely delirious movie is over, the secret of that walk haunts us as much as whatever it is that Chow has murmured in the dark.

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COLOR ANALYSIS COLIN PEH

1 A kaleidoscope of vibrant aesthetics and ecstatic romance, Chungking Express is like a terrific double-album: the first side hyper, the second evocative. While the stories are thematically related and, like the title, share the same quarters, each is ravishing in its own way.

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is a master in art, design and media at Nanyang Technological University, Singapore. His thesis studied the visual aspects of cinematographer Christopher Doyle’s cinema visual works.

The cinematography of the film evokes a sense of voyeurism for the audience. It brings a sense of intrusion into the character’s lives.

Fitting the narrative of the film as the plot is about hiding a secretive and illicit affair. The style of framing the characters were usually done in a narrow dark hallway along the corridor using mostly long shots with pillars in the foreground showing as though the camera and audience is hiding from a distance watching secretly from the distant.

There is a lot of back lighting and top lighting in various scenes to create strong silhouettes that highlight the characters’ inner torment.

Christopher Doyle uses a consistent colour palette of deep reds and blacks throughout In The Mood For Love (2000). The film signifying their heightened emotions with their colour palette.

Christopher Doyle uses rich primary colours such as red, blue and yellow to create a strong dynamic colour scheme for the film to heighten the emotions of the romantic melodrama. By using cool lighting as the background and environment ambience, the film is able to create a sense of isolation of the characters from the set design.

Throughout the film, the lighting is mainly from one source. You will notice that in every screenshot of the scene, the main source of lighting is from either a warm and practical overhead lamp along the corridor or a cool white overhead fluorescent in an office that serves as the main motivation of lighting for the performance.

Doyle uses a small practical overhead lighting to isolate the pocket of lights to control lighting and shadows resulting in a high contrast visual aesthetic. The use of a chiaroscuro lighting technique

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Fig. 1, 2 and 3 A blue palette, as well as blues music accompanies the cops’ blue periods. Brief interludes of unrequited passion usually come in moments that have red hues. When Faye transforms Cop 663’s apartment, she hides the blue sandals (representing his melancholy) with red ones.

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1 Itten, Johannes, Faber Birren, and Ernst Van Hagen. The Elements of Colour. Chichester: Wiley, 1970, 45 2 Itten, Johannes, Faber Birren, and Ernst Van Hagen. The Elements of Colour. Chichester: Wiley, 1970, 42

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where Doyle uses a pronounced shadow work plays a great role in creating a dramatic underscoring of the narrative. Chiaroscuro and an even mid-key shadow effect also interact with a warm and cool lighting of the scene. Though it establishes the dark and secretive mood of the plot, the lighting carries a double function. It helps to suppress the warm orange colour lighting in the house scene and brings a much needed contrast to the cool bluish lighting thus creating a wider range of tonal qualities in the scene.

In The Mood For Love uses cinematography with art direction in set and wardrobe design to bring out the green tint in the film. In the scenes where there are green elements in the set and wardrobe, the story is often filled with a sense of guilt and revelation. There is a strong play of complementary colours in most of the scenes in the film. Doyle uses violet and yellow complementary colour combinations to create a harmonious balance. In the movie sequence, Doyle lit the characters with warm tungsten lighting so that the characters will have consistent skin tone against the cool violet environment.

Christopher Doyle uses two colours of opposite polarity to heighten the colour contrast of the image. In most of the sequences, Doyle uses a mixture of low-key lighting and projected complementary colours to heighten the moments. Doyle uses cold-warm contrast¹ and complementary colours in the planning of the lighting design. There is a colour harmony in his colour palette and strong selection of primary colours in his visual style.

The lighting strategy in the movie is done with a low-key lighting which emphasises a strongly shadowed profile. There is a juxtaposition of colour temperatures between the vivid warm accents in the foreground and rear. The colour temperatures reinforce each other in contrast to using colder colours². Contrast makes both the coloured illumination image forceful and visually translates character conflicts. Christopher Doyle uses colour psychology in which emotions are most present with red and orange which is the most emotive colour in the film. It represents passion, love, energy and danger. By using red as the main colour palette as an energising colour to help to intensify the environment and mood of the scenes. Christopher Doyle uses the strong primary colours along with the complementary colour combination of the costumes and sets design in In the Mood for Love (2000), making the film a visual masterpiece.

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Fig. 5, 6 and 7 Blurry smears of colours rush by, out of focus, as he runs after the suspect. If the first half encapsulates the impulses of a metropolis in motion, the second half is more lush and dreamy, as the frantic pace slows down and the viewer can more clearly see the details of the crowded market.

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GEOMETRIC ANALYSIS CALVIN TAYLOR

Georgia Tech Business Student. Concentrating in Marketing and Certificate in Film Studies.

Enjoy all things Film/TV.

Wong Kar Wai’s film, “In the Mood for Love” stars Maggie Cheung and Tony Leung as a man and a woman who develop an affair after discovering the unfaithfulness of their respective spouses. The cinematography of the film evokes a sense of voyeurism for the audience; we feel like we are “spying” on the two characters as they develop their secret relationship. This sense of voyeurism and intrusion into the character’s lives is fitting due to the fact the film’s plot is about hiding a secretive affair. Voyeurism is achieved in the film primarily through two methods: by the framing and the positioning of the camera as well as through the camera’s eye-level tracking shots of the characters’ backside.

The framing and the positioning of the camera consistently convey the audience’s intrusion into these two characters’ lives. Many times the camera is positioned in such a way that there is a blurred object in the foreground of the shot, with the character in clear view in the background. The camera’s positioning leads to a partially obstructed view of the shot, creating a sense that the audience is spying on the characters through the use of a “hidden camera.”

The most common example of this type of framing is shown through shots framed behind windows and walls. However, this type of framing can also be interpreted in such a way that the characters are trapped and confined in the secrecy of their affair.

The film commonly uses mirrors to give us an indirect view, which again relates to the lack of an absolute, clear shot of the characters during their intimate moments.

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Fig. 1 and 2 Stills from the movie In The Mood For Love in which shows that the camera is at eyelevel with the actors and the frame created from two halves.

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2046 2004

FILM DATASHEET SYNOPSIS

MOVIE

Wong Kar Wai’s loose sequel to In the Mood for Love combines that film’s languorous air of romantic longing with a dizzying time-hopping structure and avant-sci-fi twist. Tony Leung Chiu Wai reprises his role as writer Chow Mo-Wan, whose numerous failed relationships with women who drift in and out of his life.

Original Title: 2046 Director: Wong Kar-Wai Writer: Wong Kar-Wai Country: Hong Kong Year: 2004 Duration: 102min/98min (Hong Kong) Genre: Comedy, Crime, Drama, Mystery, Romance

PRODUCTION

Production Company: Jet Tone Production Cinematographer: Christopher Doyle, Wai-Keung Lau (Andrew Lau) Executive Producers: Chan Pui-Wah Producers: Chan Yi-kan, Jeffrey Lau Film Editor: William Chang, Kit-Wai Kai, Chi-Leung Kwong Art Director: Wai Ming Yau Cast: Brigitte Lin, Tony Chiu-Wai Leung, Faye Wong, Takeshi Kaneshiro

TECHNICAL SPECIFICATIONS

Sound Mix: 4-Track Stereo/Dolby SR Color: Color Aspect Ratio: 1.66:1 (director specified for Criterion release)

1.85:1 (original ratio) Filme Lenght: 2.864 m Negative Format: 35mm (Agfa) Cinematographic Process: Spherical Printed Film Format: Digital Cinema Package DCP 4K - 35 mm

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Fig. 1 Original, rolled, one-sheet movie poster from 2004 for 2046.

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2046: THE TRAGIC LOSS OF TRUE LOVE AMY TAUBIN

1 The narrative of Chungking Express comprises two separate and distinct stories.

Although they are thematically related, each has its own central characters and locations. (If you look sharply, however, you can catch glimpses of characters from the second part in a few shots in the first.) The first story harks back to the genre action elements of Wong’s first feature, As Tears Go By (1988), while the second section prefigures the romantic yearnings of his later films Happy Together (1997), In the Mood for Love (2000), and 2046 (2004).

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is an American author and film critic. She is a contributing editor for two prominent film magazines, the British Sight & Sound and the American Film Comment.

Wong Kar Wai’s loose sequel to In the Mood for Love combines that film’s languorous air of romantic longing with a dizzying time-hopping structure and avant-sci-fi twist. Tony Leung Chiu Wai reprises his role as writer Chow Mo-Wan, whose numerous failed relationships with women who drift in and out of his life (and the one who goes in and out of room 2046, down the hall from his apartment) inspire the delirious futuristic love story he pens. 2046’s dazzling fantasy sequences give Wong and two of his key collaborators—cinematographer Christopher Doyle and editor/ costume designer/production designer William Chang Suk Ping—license to let their imaginations run wild, propelling the sumptuous visuals and operatic emotions skyward toward the sublime.

The story evolves around the main character, Zhou Mo Wan who writes a novel about a mysterious train that leaves for a place called 2046 every once in a while. Everyone who boards that train has the same intention - which is to recapture their lost memories. It is said that in 2046, nothing ever changed. Nobody knows for sure if it was true, because nobody who went there had ever come back- except for one. He had been there but He chose to leave. He wanted to change.

“2046” is the number of an apartment where a journalist lives. It is also the title of his novel, which takes place in the future. And it is also the last year before the 50-year period the Chinese Government promised to let Hong Kong remain as it is...

Wong-Kar-Wai comes back 4 years after “In the mood for love” with another refined and delicate movie, although this one has not the same strength as the previous... Because the director wants

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to develop too many themes (love, the power of memories, the lack of communication, the importance of living now...). In the mood for love was maybe more focused on a love story and the impossibility of living it. 2046 is a sort of sequel, but we don’t understand very well where the director wants to lead us.

Apart from that, the film deserves to be watched because it is original, it explains that we don’t have to live the future in putting there the hopes which belonged to the past, otherwise life has a wasted meaning. The film is colourful and cinematography is excellent. Very slow, yes, but a film like this one follow its own poetry, images here are much more important than words.

Chungking Express (1994) was the Masculin féminin of the 1990s, a pop art movie about cool twentysomethings looking for love in the city that has replaced Paris as the center of the world-cinema imagination.

What Jean-Luc Godard did for “the generation of Marx and CocaCola” in the mid-1960s, Wong Kar-wai did for restless Hong Kong youth during the anxious decade that preceded the handoff to China.

Masculin féminin (1966) and Chungking Express were the first films in which their respective directors focused predominantly on characters who were around ten years their juniors. This generatio n gap imparts a sense of distance mixed with tenderness, and also focuses the films on the dominant issue for heterosexual young adults: how to negotiate the desire and confusion they feel vis-à-vis the opposite sex.

Made while Wong was taking a break from the lengthy, difficult postproduction of his only martial arts period picture, Ashes of Time (1994),

Fig. 1 Minimally plotted, each section of Chungking Express focuses on a lovesick cop who pines for his ex-girlfriend until another woman captures his attention.

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Fig. 2 Into his place steps uniform cop no. 663 (Leung), who routinely stops by the Midnight Express to pick up a chef salad for his flight attendant girlfriend.

away and is replaced by a love story as simple as it is delirious. Writing in 1966 about Masculin féminin, Pauline Kael observed that “Godard has liberated his feeling for modern youth from the American gangster-movie framework which limited his expressiveness and his relevance to the nonmovie-centered world.” Wong makes the same move in Chungking Express, underlining the separation by placing it midway through the film.

The narrative of Chungking Express comprises two separate and distinct stories. Although they are thematically related, each has its own central characters and locations. (If you look sharply, however, you can catch glimpses of characters from the second part in a few shots in the first.) The first story harks back to the genre action elements of Wong’s first feature, As Tears Go By (1988), while the second section prefigures the romantic yearnings of his later films Happy Together (1997), In the Mood for Love (2000), and 2046 (2004). Ashes of Time, which Wong finally completed shortly after Chungking Express, is also a genre action picture but teeters on the brink of abstraction. (In the revised 2008 version, Ashes of Time Redux, Wong removes some of the stylistic links to genre, making the narrative even more abstract.) And Fallen Angels (1995), which Wong conceived as the third section of Chungking Express but spun off as a separate feature, is a hyperbolic amalgam of gangster violence and mad love, as ungeneric a noir as could be imagined, and not only because the frequent fish-eye-lensed close-ups turn its cast of beauties, male and female, into a bunch of banana noses. Wong’s reputation as an art-house director rests with the three later, increasingly operatic romances—Happy Together, In the Mood for Love, and 2046 —

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2 Chungking Express, the title under which the film was released in the United States, is not a direct translation of the original Hong Kong title, Chung hing sam lam (Chungking Jungle). The U.S. title suggests the kind of synthetic space that only exists in dreams or movies—Chungking referring to Chungking Mansions, the primary location of the first section, and Express to the Midnight Express, the popular take-out restaurant around which the action of the second part revolves.

3 The darker aspect of the collective anxiety about the handover is reflected in the situation of Brigitte Lin’s blonde-wigged gangster.

in part because genre films have never been fully accepted within the artfilm canon, and in part because Wong’s mastery of sensuous polyrhythms and lush visual and aural textures was not as fully developed in the earlier films.

Minimally plotted, each section of Chungking Express focuses on a lovesick cop who pines for his ex-girlfriend until another woman captures his attention. One might venture that the first section, which opens with one of Wong’s signature step-printed chase sequences, this one through the teeming corridors and blind alleys of Chungking Mansions—a warren of flophouses, cut-rate shops, and import-export “businesses” that is a haven to criminals and the poor of all nations—is something of a blind alley itself, one which Wong drops after less than forty minutes in favor of a more promising romantic situation. It’s as if the film itself is looking for love in the same way that its characters are—by trial and error. The protagonist of the first section is a plainclothes cop, officer no. 223 (Kaneshiro), who is seen running hard in that opening chase scene and in another, shorter chase where he makes a collar, pretty much the only exercise of his profession in the film. Mostly what no. 223 does is obsess about his girlfriend, May, who jilted him on April Fools’ Day. No. 223 has given May until May 1, his twenty-fifth birthday, to come back to him. He marks the days of this countdown by buying cans of pineapple (“May loves pineapple,” he tells us in voice-over), each dated to expire on May 1. If she doesn’t call him on his birthday, the relationship will expire as well. It is doubtful that May (whom we never see in the film) knows or, if she did, would care at all about this ultimatum.

But like objects in a dream, the pineapple cans, and their looming sell-by date, condense multiple meanings and associations. May was no.

223’s number-one girlfriend, but he must let go of his love for her (“When did everything start having an expiration date?” he muses) in order to move on to the next stage of his life, a transition marked by his birthday. Then there is the canned pineapple itself, whose mass-produced sweetness is as cloying as the puppy love no. 223 feels. In fact, with May 1 only hours away, he tries to feed some of the syrupy stuff to his dog, who, like May, manifests no interest in such an absurd ritual of devotion. But no. 223’s eating orgy—he downs all thirty cans—transfers his heartache to his tummy, so that in puking up the pineapple he is relieved of the past and immediately fancies himself in love with the next woman he meets.

Hovering over the web of associations that defines the psyche of no. 223 is another countdown: in 1994, the handover of Hong Kong to China was only three years away. Comic anxiety about sex and romance is a front for the deeper fear that political freedom—an entire way of life— has an expiration date in the near future. The most striking difference between Masculin féminin and Chungking Express is the constant political activity and chatter in the former and its total absence in the latter. While this difference reflects a change in youth culture from the

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4 But like objects in a dream, the pineapple cans, and their looming sell-by date, condense multiple meanings and associations. May was no. 223’s number-one girlfriend, but he must let go of his love for her (“When did everything start having an expiration date?” he muses) in order to move on to the next stage of his life, a transition marked by his birthday.

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Rather, like Eastern European filmmakers of the Soviet era or, more to the point, like some of his Chinese mainland contemporaries, he smuggles politics into his films through metaphor. Thus the loaded meaning of the expiration date of canned goods.

The darker aspect of the collective anxiety about the handover is reflected in the situation of Brigitte Lin’s blonde-wigged gangster. When someone slips her a can of sardines dated May 1, she gets the message: time is running out for her. If she doesn’t deliver the drugs that her twotiming couriers have stolen, she will die. She and no. 223 run into each other—literally collide—in the opening chase sequence. A smart cop would spot that her wig, dark glasses, and trench coat are a disguise, but no. 223 doesn’t realize then, or when he picks her up in a bar exactly “fifty-seven hours later,” that she is potentially the collar of a lifetime. His vision clouded, like so many of Wong’s male protagonists, by déjà vu—by the nearly forgotten “impact” of their first encounter—he fancies himself in love with her. They wind up in a hotel room, where she instantly falls asleep and he consumes four chef salads (there is hardly a scene in the film that doesn’t involve eating), and then removes her shoes and polishes them before leaving. Their relationship is utterly chaste, and yet the small acts of tenderness they extend to each other free them both—her to take care of business and him to resume his search for love.

Chungking Express, the title under which the film was released in the United States, is not a direct translation of the original Hong Kong title, Chung hing sam lam (Chungking Jungle). The U.S. title suggests the kind of synthetic space that only exists in dreams or movies— Chungking referring to Chungking Mansions, the primary location of the first section, and Express to the Midnight Express, the popular take-out restaurant around which the action of the second part revolves. The Midnight Express has already figured in the first section: it’s where no.

223 goes to call his answering service (his password is “love you for ten thousand years”) to find out if there have been any calls from the elusive May. The proprietor tries to fix him up with one of his waitresses, who is also named May, but no. 223 isn’t interested. When he stops at the Midnight Express after his night with the mysterious blonde, May has moved on, and the proprietor suggests that no. 223 try the new waitress, Faye (Faye Wong). No. 223 accidentally sees an Indian man washing windows and responds, “Do you think I go out with guys?” Hopelessly confused—or maybe just a bit stupid—no. 223 proves himself not yet ready for love. He leaves the Midnight Express and is never seen again. As far as the narrative of the film is concerned, his story is over.

Into his place steps uniform cop no. 663 (Leung), who routinely stops by the Midnight Express to pick up a chef salad for his flight attendant girlfriend. Wong gives Leung, who will become his filmic alter ego, an entrance to die for. The shot is ostensibly from Faye’s point of view, but as no. 663 walks into close-up, she’s not the only one instantly

WONG KAR-WAI + CHRISTOPHER DOYLE

smitten by the most soulful set of peepers in contemporary cinema.

There is, however, someone who is immune to his charms, and soon no.

663 is jilted just like no. 223. Faye, using the keys that his ex-girlfriend drops at the Midnight Express, begins visiting no. 663’s apartment while he’s walking the beat, to do a bit of housecleaning. Wong will use this home-invasion ploy to more carnal effect in Fallen Angels, but nothing else in his films comes close to the giddiness with which Faye applies herself to housework as transgression, swiveling to the beat of “Dreams” on the soundtrack, or her delirious shift from joy to anguish when, crawling around in no. 663’s bed, ostensibly to straighten the sheets, she finds a woman’s long black hair under the pillow. In her first major acting role, Faye Wong takes over the film and runs with it. Her comic timing and her impulsiveness recall Katharine Hepburn in Bringing Up Baby—an association underscored when she leaves a huge toy cat, in this case a Garfield doll (the director would never be so obvious as to make it a stuffed leopard), in no. 663’s apartment as a substitute for the large white teddy bear left there by his ex.

As in Bringing Up Baby, opposites attract. No. 663, like the Cary Grant character, is an introvert, while Faye, like the Hepburn character, is dizzyingly extroverted. He’s so lost in his own head that he talks to a bar of soap to keep himself company. Not only does no. 663 fail to notice that Faye is gaga over him, he’s unaware that she’s been secretly transforming his apartment, until they come face-to-face at his front door—she’s leaving, he’s arriving, and when she sees him she’s so discombobulated that she slams the door in his face. It may be the only laugh-out-loud moment in Wong’s oeuvre. The two actors have terrific chemistry: their brief scenes together are more than sexy; they have an innocence that never returns to Wong’s movies after Chungking Express—a fling of a film, where regret is fleeting and joy triumphs, though who knows for how long.

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COLOR ANALYSIS DENNIS HOPPER

1 A kaleidoscope of vibrant aesthetics and ecstatic romance, Chungking Express is like a terrific double-album: the first side hyper, the second evocative. While the stories are thematically related and, like the title, share the same quarters, each is ravishing in its own way.

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is an American author and film critic. She is a contributing editor for two prominent film magazines, the British Sight & Sound and the American Film Comment.

Chungking Express is an expressive and impossibly romantic journey accentuated by lush colours and pop music. Here, as in Wong’s other films, the colour schematic ties itself to mood, while music helps to indicate setting and character. The two colours that adorn Chungking are red and blue, brightly smeared in neon around the marketplace. A blue palette, as well as blues music accompanies the cops’ blue periods.

Brief interludes of unrequited passion usually come in moments that have red hues. When Faye transforms Cop 663’s apartment, she hides the blue sandals (representing his melancholy) with red ones. When the characters are in the middle ground of heartbreak, yellow tints are present – the gold hues of the bar where Cop 223 and the wig-wearer meet or the bright dress Faye wears at the Midnight Express, a spanish song playing in a Hong Kong film. Does anyone find that odd?

To watch a Wong Kar-Wai romance is to immerse oneself in a sensuous environment, filled with dreamy colours. The two stories in Chungking Express get separate cinematographers: Wai-keung Lau does the first segment, Christopher Doyle the second. The first half of the film pops, colours bouncing around the screen as the camera whips through a busy metropolitan scene. With miraculous photographic tricks, Cop 223 is in focus while he chases down an assailant in the dazzling opening. Blurry smears of colours rush by, out of focus, as he runs after the suspect. If the first half encapsulates the impulses of a metropolis in motion, the second half is more lush and dreamy, as the frantic pace slows down and the viewer can more clearly see the details of the crowded market.

WONG KAR-WAI + CHRISTOPHER DOYLE

Fig. 1, 2 and 3 A blue palette, as well as blues music accompanies the cops’ blue periods. Brief interludes of unrequited passion usually come in moments that have red hues. When Faye transforms Cop 663’s apartment, she hides the blue sandals (representing his melancholy) with red ones.

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Fig. 4 When the characters are in the middle ground of heartbreak, yellow tints are present – the gold hues of the bar where Cop 223 and the wig-wearer meet or the bright dress Faye wears at the Midnight Express, a spanish song playing in a Hong Kong film.

2 The Essentials: Chungking Express (1994)

by Jordan Adler in The Balcony is Open, 2013.

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In the second story, Doyle uses a similar technique that Lau does. He focuses on the principal characters as passersby rush by them in droves, as if moving in fast-forward. One shot has Cop 663 drinking a black coffee in slow motion, as Faye watches, dazed, from behind the Midnight Express counter. This expressive camerawork observes people slowed down as they await the changes in their lives and their dreams to manifest, as they catch their breath against the rush of colour and compulsiveness. These moments of halted time amidst chaos is a motif of the film.

A kaleidoscope of vibrant aesthetics and ecstatic romance, Chungking Express is like a terrific double-album: the first side hyper, the second evocative. While the stories are thematically related and, like the title, share the same quarters, each is ravishing in its own way.

Chungking Express is an expressive and impossibly romantic journey accentuated by lush colours and pop music. Here, as in Wong’s other films, the colour schematic ties itself to mood, while music helps to indicate setting and character. The two colours that adorn Chungking are red and blue, brightly smeared in neon around the marketplace. A blue palette, as well as blues music accompanies the cops’ blue periods.

Brief interludes of unrequited passion usually come in moments that have red hues. When Faye transforms Cop 663’s apartment, she hides the blue sandals (representing his melancholy) with red ones. When the characters are in the middle ground of heartbreak, yellow tints are present – the gold hues of the bar where Cop 223 and the wig-wearer meet or the bright dress Faye wears at the Midnight Express.

WONG KAR-WAI + CHRISTOPHER DOYLE

Fig. 5, 6 and 7 Blurry smears of colours rush by, out of focus, as he runs after the suspect. If the first half encapsulates the impulses of a metropolis in motion, the second half is more lush and dreamy, as the frantic pace slows down and the viewer can more clearly see the details of the crowded market.

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GEOMETRIC ANALYSIS ABEL FERRARA

is an American author and film critic. She is a contributing editor for two prominent film magazines, the British Sight & Sound and the American Film Comment.

Chungking Express is an expressive and impossibly romantic journey accentuated by lush colours and pop music. Here, as in Wong’s other films, the colour schematic ties itself to mood, while music helps to indicate setting and character. The two colours that adorn Chungking are red and blue, brightly smeared in neon around the marketplace. A blue palette, as well as blues music accompanies the cops’ blue periods.

Brief interludes of unrequited passion usually come in moments that have red hues. When Faye transforms Cop 663’s apartment, she hides the blue sandals (representing his melancholy) with red ones. When the characters are in the middle ground of heartbreak, yellow tints are present – the gold hues of the bar where Cop 223 and the wig-wearer meet or the bright dress Faye wears at the Midnight Express, a spanish song playing in a Hong Kong film. Does anyone find that odd?

To watch a Wong Kar-Wai romance is to immerse oneself in a sensuous environment, filled with dreamy colours. The two stories in Chungking Express get separate cinematographers: Wai-keung Lau does the first segment, Christopher Doyle the second. The first half of the film pops, colours bouncing around the screen as the camera whips through a busy metropolitan scene. With miraculous photographic tricks, Cop 223 is in focus while he chases down an assailant in the dazzling opening. Blurry smears of colours rush by, out of focus, as he runs after the suspect. If the first half encapsulates the impulses of a metropolis in motion, the second half is more lush and dreamy, as the frantic pace slows down and the viewer can more clearly see the details of the crowded market.

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Fig. 1, 2 and 3 His expressive camerawork observes people slowed down as they await the changes in their lives and their dreams to manifest, as they catch their breath against the rush of colour and compulsiveness. These moments of halted time amidst chaos is a motif of the film.

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BIBLIOGRAPHY

CREDITS

Bibliografia, Wong Kar Wai. Texto da biografia sobre o diretor.

Cidade: Editora, 1999.

Jet Tone Production: (paginas de CE, AOT, FA, ITMFL, 2046)

Bibliografia, Christopher Doyle. Texto da biografia sobre o diretor.

Cidade: Editora, 1999.

Bibliografia, Primeiro Artigo. Texto do artigo do primeiro filme.

Cidade: Editora, 1999.

Tsui Siu Ming Production: (paginas de AOT) Scholar Films: (paginas de AOT) Pony Canon Inc: (paginas de AOT)

Bibliografia, Primeiro Artigo. Texto de análise de cores do primeiro filme. Cidade: Editora, 1999.

Paradis Films: (paginas de ITMFL)

Bibliografia, Primeiro Artigo. Texto de análise de geometria do primeiro filme. Cidade: Editora, 1999.

Prénom H Co. Ltd.: (páginas de HT)

Bibliografia, Primeiro Artigo. Texto do artigo do segundo filme.

Cidade: Editora, 1999.

Bibliografia, Primeiro Artigo. Texto de análise de cores do segundo filme. Cidade: Editora, 1999.

Bibliografia, Primeiro Artigo. Texto de análise de geometria do segundo filme. Cidade: Editora, 1999.

Bibliografia, Primeiro Artigo. Texto do artigo do terceiro filme.

Cidade: Editora, 1999.

Bibliografia, Primeiro Artigo. Texto de análise de cores do terceiro filme. Cidade: Editora, 1999.

Bibliografia, Primeiro Artigo. Texto de análise de geometria do terceiro filme. Cidade: Editora, 1999.

Bibliografia, Primeiro Artigo. Texto do artigo do quarto filme.

Cidade: Editora, 1999.

Bibliografia, Primeiro Artigo. Texto de análise de cores do quarto filme. Cidade: Editora, 1999.

Bibliografia, Primeiro Artigo. Texto de análise de geometria do quarto filme. Cidade: Editora, 1999.

Bibliografia, Primeiro Artigo. Texto do artigo do quinto filme. Cidade: Editora, 1999.

Bibliografia, Primeiro Artigo. Texto de análise de cores do quinto filme. Cidade: Editora, 1999.

Bibliografia, Primeiro Artigo. Texto de análise de geometria do quinto filme. Cidade: Editora, 1999.

Bibliografia, Primeiro Artigo. Texto do artigo do sexto filme. Cidade: Editora, 1999.

Bibliografia, Primeiro Artigo. Texto de análise de cores do sexto filme. Cidade: Editora, 1999.

Bibliografia, Primeiro Artigo. Texto de análise de geometria do sexto filme. Cidade: Editora, 1999.

Bibliografia, Primeiro Artigo. Texto do artigo do sétimo filme.

Cidade: Editora, 1999.

Bibliografia, Primeiro Artigo. Texto de análise de cores do sétimo filme. Cidade: Editora, 1999.

Bibliografia, Primeiro Artigo. Texto de análise de geometria do sétimo filme. Cidade: Editora, 1999.

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Beijing Film Studio: (paginas de AOT)

WONG KAR-WAI + CHRISTOPHER DOYLE

Block 2 Pictures: (páginas de 2046) Seowoo Film Company: (páginas de HT)

Original edition © 2021 Cobogó Edited by João Pedro Laginha, Isabella Flores, Mariana Lensoni and Victória Marino Project management by João Pedro Laginha, Isabella Flores, Mariana Lensoni and Victória Marino Design and layout by João Pedro Laginha, Isabella Flores, Mariana Lensoni and Victória Marino Printed in São Paulo ISBN 978-83-401-023-9 Cobogó Rua Gal. Dionísio, 53 - Humaitá 22271-050 Rio de Janeiro RJ cobogo.facileme.com.br/ (21) 98169-9172 comercial@cobogo.com.br

Other books from Photography in Cinema: Wim Wenders + Robby Müller Wes Anderson + Robert Yeoman David Lynch + Frederick Elmes Gaspar Noé + Benoît Debie Robert Bresson + Pasqualino de Santis Reiner Werner Fassbinder + Michael Ballhaus

This book aims to capture the undeniable leading role of Christopher Doyle’s visual design in cinema, focusing on the importance of cinematography in narrative storytelling through a case study this cinematographer’s creative work. The research will raise the important roles of colour, lighting and camera design in narratives by uncovering the different techniques that Christopher Doyle adopts in shaping our experience of the feature films by detailing aesthetic elements used in the films.

The research aims to capture the different colour strategies and lighting techniques. It will research on how technological and stylistic norms constraints shape Doyle’s visual strategies in designing colour in his scenes. How does colour strategy work along with the narrative of the film? Readers will be able to understand the importance of cinematography techniques in narrative storytelling and how the techniques have a sustained influence on screen aesthetic. As we move further into the digital age, there will be tools created to automate this color logging. It may be helpful for such tools to use some of the color analysis outlined in this thesis to provide aesthetic possibilities and understanding. The author goal is not to increase the validity of the thesis, but to broaden the study to encompass a broader range of purposes for future research.