Two melancholic Hong Kong policemen fall in love: one with a mysterious underworld figure, the other with a beautiful and ethereal server at a late-night restaurant.
17 Jun Chungking Express (1994)
Discontinuous
Several experiments in this film, and I took some trouble in sorting them out.
The first thing you’ll notice is the discontinuous camerawork, accentuated by low (never high) angles and strobeflashframes. This element by itself is sophomoric filmschoolism.
Then you have the plot tags and storyline. The tags are banal: expiration dates, references to flight. This is all just too childish.
But there is a real, interesting idea here in the narrative structure, the notion of two half-stories instead of a ‘whole’ one. It works because the first story is obviously incomprehensible, then he turns to a second story. You are fooled into believing you understand it too, with an apparent transfer of blindness from us to the cop (633).
But look again. There is another layer that both stories support, and not just platitudes about angst. Unfortunately, the rental tape has Tarantino mugging away, pretending to be cool while reading his lines. And you know, I suspect that old Quentin isn’t as bright as Kar-wai, that he is hypnotized by the trivial, knows there’s something deep in the narrative structure, but misses it.
If you are a student of layered narratives (Joyce, Nabokov), you may enjoy this, but ignore the film school games.
Posted in 2000
Added in 2025. I’m leaving the original comment, though I am a bit ashamed of it. As I move the older comments from IMDB, I am surprised at the span of insightful to just plain stupid. But you have to respect the process.
Since that comment, I have fallen into the way he uses the language, pulling both into intimacy and urges, while at the same time inventing an abstract cinematic distance. I’ve also followed his cinematographer — an Australian originally who learned the camera in Hong Kong. The team went on to make a film so translucent I have it on my list of musts. What we have here is more relaxed in style with more eager energy in the characters. It helps to know the script was written only before shooting.
Posted in 2025
Ted’s Evaluation — 3 of 3: Worth watching.
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