Cinematic Waffle

by Yağmur Zubaroğlu

Hey there! I have been looking for a creative way to help you all get through this dark and rainy November. I found the answer in Hong Kong cinema. Neon lights, fast phases, saturated colours: Chungking Express (Wong Kar-Wai, 1994) is your cure this month. A photo-novel. True pulp fiction.

In Chungking Express, Wong Kar-Wai tells us two parallel love stories. Running through the busy streets of Hong Kong, we meet Blondie, Faye, Cop 223, and Cop 663. Blondie guides us through the intricacies of fakery and fraud while Cop 223 shows us how to properly go through a miserable breakup. Cop 663, the cool dude, talks to his kitchen towels and teddy bears at night, and Faye is always ready to create chaos. Foolish heartbreaks, love from afar, cheerful melancholy, that warm feeling when you look out of the window when it’s raining – they’re all included in this masterpiece.

The genius director Wong wrote the film’s script to take a break from the hideous montage process of Ashes of Time (1994), an extremely high-budget film that he had been working on for years. The filming process for Chungking Express was extremely short: write in the morning, film at night, repeat. Funnily enough, the masterpiece-to-be Ashes of Time was overshadowed by the beauty of the last-minute miracle Chungking Express. Hong Kong cinema was introduced to the West thanks to this film. If you do end up watching Chungking Express, or if you have seen it already – in which case, well done – you might realise that it resembles Tarantino films. That is because Tarantino was rightfully obsessed with Wong Kar-Wai, especially with this particular film.

Wong tells us heart-warming love stories through film noir iconography, creating the perfect film noir parody. Emerging from the post-war US, film noir is characterised by the feeling of loneliness and lack of belonging in big cities. These discomforts are visualised by temporary places such as cheap motels, rental rooms, gas stations, isolating restaurants, and any other lonely and miserable places you can think of. In this film, Wong’s characters are losing their sense of belonging, they are lost in the fast city life, just like classic film noir characters. We don’t know anything about their background– not even their names!

Chungking Express is somewhere between a happy-ever-after and a melodrama. The film is incredibly fun, but never funny. How can a film be this sad and simultaneously be our November cure, you ask? That is the magic of Wong Kar-Wai. The film starts with Cop 223’s never-ending obsession for cans of pineapples with the expiration date of exactly 1 May 1994, longing for his ex-girlfriend May who loved pineapples. Even after our friend finds himself another love to obsess over – the one and only mysterious Blondie – the image of the expiration date keeps recurring.

Chungking Express was filmed in 1994, only three years before Hong Kong’s transfer to China from the UK. In this period of uncertainty in Hong Kong, the film addresses the shifting concept of belonging. As it turns out, belonging can be defined in many ways. As times of change come around the corner, Chungking Express captures the last minutes of heartbreaks and last minutes of love set in the backdrop of this vibrant city.

On that note, how about the expiration date of love? We promise each other not to change, but how can we stay the same when everything around us is changing constantly? In Chungking Express, we see characters catching and letting go of moments they hold dear. They have the tedious task of having to keep up with the incredibly fast pace of Hong Kong, so they change constantly with the city. Everything always moves, and sometimes, when you are lucky enough to turn the right corner at the right time…

And at last, Cop 223 asks, “If memories could be canned, would they also have expiry dates?” Cinema is a collection of canned moments, and in the case of Chungking Express, there is no expiration date.

P.S. "California Dreamin’" will never be the same after watching this one.