There are important years in the history of art. 1939, for example. In that year they were released gone With the Wind, The Wizard of Oz and others that, for better and for worse, marked the cinema of the future. Similarly, in 1994 two films were released whose influence continues to this day: Pulp Fiction Y Chungking Express. Both films are still as current as twenty-seven years ago, both explore the choral narrative, the game of references to the cinema itself and a frenzied image that continues to mark the great cinema of our time. What’s more, Chungking Express It has been restored and is being promoted in the world with the work of its creator: Wong Kar-Wai.
The start of Chungking Express it is accelerated. The director seems to guess a time (ours) when it is possible to shoot with a cell phone. And yet, the taste for composition, for colors and, in short, for the image, already foreshadows the sophisticated style of In the Mood for Love of 1997.
Color management is worth dwelling on. En Chungking Express yellow is present every time the director talks about love. In this and other senses the work has correspondences with My Blueberry Nights 2007. If in the first Wong identifies the love of the protagonist with yellow, in the second he seems to say that the love of the heroine is purple. Both films also revolve around a small restaurant in which the owner functions as a god Eros who invites lovers to transcend themselves and change. Because, yes, both films stage everything that changes people the phenomenon of love.
The story of Chungking Express seems minimal. Two policemen fall in love. The first of a drug dealer who everything goes wrong and the second of a saleswoman with short hair and a certain innocence that makes her grow in sensuality. It is also worth noting that neither of the two stories is there physical contact. In this, Wong Kar-Wai seems to follow to the letter that maxim of the protagonist of Nostalgia from Andrei Tarkovski, who affirms that in great love stories there cannot be, not even, a kiss.
On the other hand, Chungking Express is a comedy of situations in which the spectator laughs at himself when he identifies in his own case those fatal desires that never end up consummating. But, in addition, the mastery of the Hong Kong director is evidenced in the way the story runs around the meaning of time. Time as a succession of events and as a propitious moment. In the first sense, the filmmaker emphasizes that the hero of the first story is about to turn his birthday. And obsessed looking for preserves that expire that day. The boy is actually wondering about his own expiration. Because this is another theme of the movie: expiration. In the second sense, in that of the auspicious time, Chungking Express explores love as the coincidence offered at the right time. A mistake, a shower or an unpredictable wish changes the future of the relationship. But the end of this work is open and, for this reason, Wong Kar-Wai has announced regarding the re-release of his films, that he wants to shoot the second part of this magnificent film that, in its course around love and time, It raises us, as does Tarantino, a question about the meaning of making movies. On Chungking Express, Wong Kar-Wai asks us: has love cinema expired in this century?
Chungking Express this available on Mubi.
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