My faith in Wong Kar Wai is being restored as I catch up with his earlier films that I never got around to watching. I loved Happy Together, and now I very much liked Chungking Express. My problem with his more recent films is that it seems like he’s too consciously creating these romanticized scenarios and throwing out substance from the films. I’d written him off after seeing his overpraised 21st century work because I thought they were nothing but style, and a style that I didn’t even like very much. I also didn’t like his use of music; he reminded me of Tarantino, gone soft. Though Chungking Express might have tired out ‘California Dreamin” for me for the next couple of years, his use of pop music in this and Happy Together feels more inspired and creative, and also less awkwardly and self-conscously ‘in’ (Cat Power and Norah Jones?), than his newer work. While my memory of In the Mood For Love is hazy, the two things that stick out in my mind are slow motion glances and that theme song that must have played twenty times in the film. My disappointment in that film still hasn’t completely worn off.
But other than the music, Chungking is more formally interesting than anything else I’ve seen by Wong so far. Not knowing anything about the film going into it, I was surprised by the abrupt shift into an apparently separate film altogether, dividing the film into two lovesick cop stories. The noirishness of the former half cuts into a more sunshiny telling of longing, brought in by Faye’s naive airiness and the nearly incessantly playing Mamas and the Papas track. Tony Leung’s Cop 663 is less dopey than Takeshi Kaneshiro’s Cop 223 from the first half of the film, but is still able to have a sense of humor about his romantic misfortunes. When he talks to all of the inanimate objects in his apartment as if they are having the same emotional reactions and feelings that he is experiencing, it’s funny and sweet without making him seem pathetic. Cop 223 is funny but also kind of obnoxious; it makes sense that he has trouble finding a girl that will stay with him.
I had the feeling that I was missing a few things while watching this that will make me like the film even more the next time I see it if I can pick up on them. I thought that the wrap-up at the end was either, or a combination of, rushed, muddled, or contrived. It felt weak considering how well placed everything before it had been. But still, there is a coldness that I get from all of Wong’s films, even the ones I like, that I think will prevent him from ever being one of my favorite filmmakers, but I’m still more than happy to occasionally dive into one of his films.