 Original Title: Chung Hing sam lam
Director: Wong Kar Wai
Runtime: 98 mins
Year: 1996
Country: Hong Kong
Language: Japanese / Mandarin / Cantonese / English
Subtitle: English
Colour: Colour
Speciality: Shot like a road movie in 23 days, but won accolades worldwide. Story of love, longing and urban isolation Quentin Tarantino, said: "I just started crying. I'm just so happy to love a movie this much.''
Palador DVD Code: PFE0033b1
Available As: Part of ‘Wong Kar Wai Box Set ’
The movie that awoke the world to a new master, Wong Kar Wai, Chungking Express is an impressionist splash of motion and colour. The first half is about a cop who has just broken up with his girlfriend of five years. Purchasing pineapple tins everyday, each with an expiry date of the 1st of May, he believes that at the end of that period, either the relation would expire, or he would be united with his lover. The second half is a story of another cop, who’s broken up with his flight attendant girlfriend. He chats with his apartment furniture, till he meets a new girl.
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Directed by - Kar Wai Wong | Writing credits - Kar Wai Wong | | CAST (in credits order) | | | Character | Actor's name | Woman in blonde wig (as Ching-hsia Lin) | Brigitte Lin | Cop 663 | Tony Leung Chiu Wai | Faye | Faye Wong | He Zhiwu, Cop 223 | Takeshi Kaneshiro | Air Hostess | Valerie Chow | Manager of 'Midnight Express' | Chen Jinquan | Richard (as Guan Lina) | Lee-na Kwan | Man | Huang Zhiming | The 2nd May | Liang Zhen | Man | Zuo Songshen |
Winner - Golden Horse Film Festival - Best Actor
Winner - Hong Kong Film Awards - Best Actor/ Best Director/ Best Film Editing/ Best Picture
Nominee - Hong Kong Film Awards - Best Actress/ Best Art Direction/ Best Cinematography/ Best Original Film Score/Best Screenplay/ Best Supporting Actress
Nominee - Independent Spirit Awards - Best Foreign Film
Nominee - Locarno International Film Festival - Golden Leopard
Winner - Stockholm Film Festival - Best Actress/ FIPRESCI Prize Competition
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A near-perfect fusion of form and style, content and substance. One of the great movies of its decade. Dan Jardine Apollo Guide
A movie that has Tarantino's brand of kinetic, eccentric energy but that's much more soulful. Joe Baltake Sacramento Bee
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This film was shot, edited and released while Kar Wai Wong was on hiatus from the shooting of his epic Dung che sai duk (1994).
The film was shot in 23 days.
The title is an amalgamation of two "landmarks" in Hong Kong. 1) Chungking Mansions, a drug-filled, rundown hostel populated by Indians, Pakistanis and Nepalese. 2) Midnight Express, a Indian fastfood store in Lan Kwai Fong, a major bar district populated by foreign yuppies (Tony Leung vists California, a bar located directly across the street from it).
Cop 663's apartment is in fact the apartment of Christopher Doyle.
Originally, there was going to be three parts to the film. The third part instead became Wong Kar-Wai's "Fallen Angels" film.
Although the film says it's "introducing" Faye Wong, her first film role was actually in "Beyond's Diary".
Wong Kar-Wai modeled Brigitte Lin's character after Gena Rowlands in John Cassavetes's "Gloria", and actress Greta Garbo.
The film's split structure came from the need to whip up the movie in short order.
The script for arose within the two month period when production on Wong Kar-Wai's film Ashes of Time was slow and was interrupted for those two months. Wong Kar-Wai need a script to fulfill his contract for a second feature. Chungking Express is that second feature.
Since Chungking Express was filmed in sequence or "like a road movie" as Wong Kar-Wai has said, Wong wrote each scene either the night before or on the morning on the day of filming.
Kaneshiro Takeshi spoke four languages himself in this film. His narrations were all in Mandarin, most of his live lines are in heavily-accented Cantonese, he spoke Japanese when he called one of his ex-girlfriends, and had one line of English when he apprehended a suspect (he said "hands up!" to him). He used all 4 when he approached Bridgett Lin's character. |
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