(If you look sharply, however, you can catch glimpses of characters from the second part in a few shots in the first.) The first story harks back to the genre action elements of Wong’s first feature, As Tears Go By (1988), while the second section prefigures the romantic yearnings of his later films Happy Together (1997), In the Mood for Love (2000), and 2046 (2004). Although they are thematically related, each has its own central characters and locations. The narrative of Chungking Express comprises two separate and distinct stories. Writing in 1966 about Masculin féminin, Pauline Kael observed that “Godard has liberated his feeling for modern youth from the American gangster-movie framework which limited his expressiveness and his relevance to the non-movie-centered world.” Wong makes the same move in Chungking Express, underlining the separation by placing it midway through the film. It also marked a turning point in his work, a shift in direction that is actually signaled within the film, when the desultory underworld revenge narrative fades away and is replaced by a love story as simple as it is delirious. Chungking Express established Wong’s reputation as a major auteur, the most glamorous and enigmatic since Godard. Nevertheless, the combination of filmmaking pyrotechnics and wistful romance proved irresistible to cinephiles. In the United States, however, the turnout was disappointing, perhaps because Miramax, which distributed Chungking Express as a presentation by Quentin Tarantino’s Rolling Thunder company, was perplexed about whether to market it as an art film or an Asian exploitation flick. In Asia, the film didn’t disappoint, sweeping the Hong Kong Film Awards and doing well at the box office.
On the other hand, Wong is as empathetic with Faye Wong’s waitress as he is with the cops played by Kaneshiro and Leung. The Goya character is monstrous in her narcissism and vacuity. While the difference in strategy is minimal-at one point or another, both performers either lip-synch or dance to their own recorded voices-the difference between Godard’s and Wong’s depictions of the female characters is enormous. But unlike Masculin féminin’s Chantal Goya, a pop singer playing the role of a pop singer, Faye Wong in Chungking Express plays a waitress, albeit one who becomes identified with two songs-the Mamas and the Papas’ “California Dreamin’” and a Cantonese cover of the Cranberries’ “Dreams” by a singer named Faye Wong-which accompany her as she works. Again comparing the film with Masculin féminin, the female leads in both are played by singers with youth culture followings. The protagonists of both sections are cops, and the four main actors are all Asian box office attractions: pop music idols Takeshi Kaneshiro and Faye Wong, Hong Kong action/dramatic star Tony Leung Chiu-wai, and veteran actress Brigitte Lin Ching-hsia (the film’s only fortysomething star, coming out of retirement for a cameo appearance as a drug smuggler, fashioned as an homage to another middle-aged cult actress, Gena Rowlands in Gloria). Wong piled on the commercial elements: the first half is a nod to the gangster thriller, the second is pure screwball romance. Made while Wong was taking a break from the lengthy, difficult postproduction of his only martial arts period picture, Ashes of Time (1994), Chungking Express was intended as a money-generating quickie for the director’s Jet Tone company, and indeed the movie, which was made in three months, start to finish, has a wacky spontaneity that is unique in his oeuvre.
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This generation gap imparts a sense of distance mixed with tenderness, and also focuses the films on the dominant issue for heterosexual young adults: how to negotiate the desire and confusion they feel vis-à-vis the opposite sex. Masculin féminin (1966) and Chungking Express were the first films in which their respective directors focused predominantly on characters who were around ten years their juniors.
What Jean-Luc Godard did for “the generation of Marx and Coca-Cola” in the mid-1960s, Wong Kar-wai did for restless Hong Kong youth during the anxious decade that preceded the handoff to China.
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C hungking Express (1994) was the Masculin féminin of the 1990s, a pop art movie about cool twentysomethings looking for love in the city that has replaced Paris as the center of the world-cinema imagination.
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