The film’s two stories intersect very little – there are fleeting glimpses of Faye and cop #663 in the first story, and both cops patronise the Midnight Express snack counter – but the join is seamless and the mood of comic-romantic melancholy is remarkably consistent. We are still in Wong Kar Wai’s patented world of solipsistic characters, private quirks and obsessions, as explored in Days of Being Wild and Ashes of Time, but the people in Chungking Express are better adjusted to their own loneliness, and their fundamental cheerfulness is contagious. Its qualities are partly down to matching the pace of life in present-day Hong Kong – but they also reflect Wong’s new-found ability to see the funny side of the space between men and women.
It recaptures the emotional excitement and zest for cinema found in a movie like Jean-Luc Godard’s Bande à part three decades ago. Wong Kar Wai’s rapturous entertainment is not only the zingiest visit to Heartbreak Hotel in many years but also one of the first films of the 90s to feel genuinely fresh and original. And it’s just because my feelings for this movie run so deep… I’m just happy to love a movie this much.’ (Quentin Tarantino) I’ve seen Chungking Express several times, but the last time I just started crying, you know, tears just started falling during this movie, about three different times. Follow him on Twitter at on Facebook.‘I can honestly say, probably more than any other movie in the last two years, no movie spoke to me, got under my skin, just made me fall in love with it.
His projects include the Substack newsletter Books on Cities, the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema. Quentin Tarantino Picks the 12 Best Films of All Time Watch Two of His Favorites Free Onlineīased in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. The Secret of the “Perfect Montage” at the Heart of Parasite, the Korean Film Now Sweeping World Cinema How the French New Wave Changed Cinema: A Video Introduction to the Films of Godard, Truffaut & Their Fellow Rule-Breakers Jean-Luc Godard’s Breathless: How World War II Changed Cinema & Helped Create the French New Wave The Best 100 Movies of the 21st Century (So Far) Named by 177 Film Critics Note: The Criterion Collection now offers a Wong Kar-wai box set that features seven blu-rays, including 4k digital restorations of Chungking Express, In the Mood for Love, Happy Together and more. Having caught one such screening just last night, I feel like I’ve seen the future of cinema again. Chan in 1960s Hong Kong.” The recent 20th-anniversary restoration of In the Mood for Love and those of Wong’s other work are even now being screened around the globe. Evan Puschak, better known as the Nerdwriter, analyzes the movie’s power in the video essay “Frames within Frames.” Watching it, he says, “you can’t help but feel that you’re in the hands of somebody in complete control.” By restricting his cinematic language, Wong “echoes the restriction of action that plagues Mr. None of Wong’s films has made as much of an impact as 2000’s In the Mood for Love, the tale of a man and woman brought together - though not all the way together - by the fact that their spouses are cheating on them with each other. Of course, they came out of somewhere: Hong Kong, to be precise, a small but densely populated and economically mighty soon-to-be-former-colony whose distinctive cultural and industrial mixture produced a kind of modernity at once familiar and alien to beholders around the world. What’s more, they seemed to do it all of a sudden, having come out of nowhere. At that point, his pictures like Days of Being Wild, Chungking Express, and In the Mood for Love had already torn through global film culture, inspiring cinephiles and filmmakers alike to believe that an intoxicating range of cinematic possibilities still lay unexplored. “You’re just coming from the Wong Kar-wai film?” Brunette includes this story in his monograph on Wong’s work, which was published in 2005. “Oh,” replied TIFF Cinémathèque programmer (and respected authority on Asian cinema) James Quandt.
I’ve just seen the future of cinema.” So declared the American film critic Peter Brunette after stumbling, “still dazed,” from a screening at the 1995 Toronto International Film festival.