ChungKing Express

Is Chungking Express, a 1994 award-winning production of Wong Kar Wai, an expressed story of ChungKing Mansion in HK?

This is also my driving question in watching this movie. Well, the answer is yes and no. ChungKing Mansion appears in the beginning of the film, embodied with intensional shaky shots with the embarrassed-looking Indies and Pakistanis, but the building is not the focus. What, then, is the focus? If you have any previous experiences with Wong Ka Wai's movies, you know this is not an easy question.

It is a movie about the inevitable expiration of consumer products with expiring dates inscribed on the canned fruits; it is a movie about the predictable loneliness to spend your birthday at a definite time in the future. Yet it also a movie about the unexpected encounters with strangers at the crisscross intersections everywhere in a metropolitan city; it is also about the unpredicted gain and loss with human emotions and connections. In a city where relationships and romances are popularized and randomized by technology and material exchange, true love is not expedited; rather spurning is assisted by cell phones and beepers. Happiness is still obscured by opaque happenstances whereas sadness and despair are enhanced by precise calendars, reminding us the mechanical progression of time and the symbolized inevitable loneliness incurred on us.

If there is anything that keeps us alive in a self-destructive city, it is the indefatigable search and hope in finding truth and eternity. Keep on believing, as Angela Aki beautifully utters. Tony Leung finally met Faye Wong, a year after waiting for Wong's unplanned return from an adventure in California. Was this within his expectation? Probably not within the capacity of logical calculation, but an act of faith in yourself and in the eventual kindness of life.

Now, this is what ChungKing Express is about.