5 January 2009
Chungking Express (1994)
In my mind, I always get Chungking Express confused with Wong Kar-Wai’s other movie Fallen Angels. I guess it’s a cops and guns kind of conflation, but it doesn’t really matter. Having watched Chungking Express, I am now sure I’d only seen the expired pineapple sequence, having somehow missed entirely Tony Leung’s segment or just forgotten about it completely (which seems unlikely, since its quirks kind of overshadow the first section’s). 
There’s a lot of the same sweet extraction of stillness that seems to linger at the margins of the frame, which is far more prevalent in In the Mood for Love than it is here, but there’s the same feeling of longing that can be so present you can almost touch it. But there’s a tendency for Wong Kar-Wai to attach weird metaphorical resonance to concrete objects that makes things a little too pat — expired pineapple, I’m looking at you. This reminded me almost verbatim of the conversation about keys/pie in My Blueberry Nights which is liked only by idiots and apologists. The difference might be that the pineapple thing is supposed to be funny in addition to its tinged-with-loneliness thing, whereas the pie/keys thing was outrageous because it was so earnest. I’m also having the thought thought that I might be tending toward giving the pineapple thing a pass because I read it in subtitles, where that kind of thing can seem a little more cheesy when read, versus how its spoken in Chinese and the dreaded disconnect between knowing what was originally written and how it was translated, though Criterion states they’ve added a new and improved subtitle translation.
The essay that Criterion provides, by Amy Taubin, examines the extent to which Wong Kari-Wai is indebted to Godard, and the music recalled for me Breathless and to some extent Masculin Feminin (pop!), but instead of mixing the tragedy with satire, Wong Kar-Wai seems to going for a cute Audrey Hepburn type aloofness that carries it along. The ending of both sequences leaves a little to be desired, I think – there’s certainly something to be said for abandoning one love for another you may never think you’ll get to see if you come go through with the one you have, but when she comes back from America things start getting conflated in weird ways that artifically tie together the two sections of the film (her sunglasses, her outfit, etc.).