Review of Chungking Express (1994) by Jonny B — 09 Nov 2011

Chinese director, Wong Kar-Wai's 1994 movie, 'Chungking Express', hit me with a tsunami wave of beauty, knocked me out, and I believe I experienced Stendhal Syndrome. It then follows that 'Chunking Express' is up there with the classics of the last fifty years.

There's an urgency, a go-to-the-streets-and-shoot mentality, coupled with a melancholic love story. The characters have curious styles and traits that are explained or explored either lyrically or with complexity and love.

The performances are layered, filled with intensity, and the eccentric characters are developed so well they're now in my books as classic movie characters - especially the Woman in Blonde Wig. Wong Kar-Wai's direction brings out strong emotional performances, sets up dreamy romanticism juxtaposed with a gritty filtered realism, and uses the most out of locations he likely found in a hurry.

Even in 1994, Wai showed the signs of new voice in cinema that needed to be heard as much as Godard did with 'Breathless' and 'Alphaville'. The whole of Wong Kar-Wai's masterpiece is a rich experience from the characters to the colours to the editing and to the story.

It encompasses a love for classic and foreign cinema while managing to be wholly original, alive, and more than anything, needed. And with Chris Doyle I have to say 'Chunking Express' is stylish unlike any Asian movie out there: texturally exploding with colours, neon purples, an array of filters, creative vantage points and uses of zoom, erratic tracking shots, compositions that only Doyle can imagine and create, lighting that serves the story or scenes in unusually illuminating ways, dolly shots on speed, and unconventional and often poetic camera movements - Doyle brings a rock star attitude to photography and I couldn't be more mesmerized by his talent, it's rare.

I can watch this movie endlessly and still find new fascinating things in everything, down to the smallest details, akin to reading a work of classic literature by, say, Kafka. 'Chunking Express' is finally, and above all, a work of art that challenges pre-existing techniques of filmmaking and storytelling and works so well it's almost suffocating.