How Wong Kar-wai’s 1994 ‘quickie’ film Chungking Express made Faye Wong a movie star – and Chungking Mansions a cultural destination
- Chungking Express, filmed in 6 weeks in 1994, was Wong’s celebration of the Hong Kong zeitgeist, he once said. It features the screen debut of singer Faye Wong
- Brigitte Lin was meant to be the star of the show, but Wong made much the bigger impression, and Tony Leung Chiu-wai won a best actor award for his role
The low-key, low-budget movie captures the energy and excitement of Hong Kong in the early 1990s. It was a time when anything seemed possible with hard work, and life moved so quickly there was scant time to think beyond everyday needs.
When Chungking Express was released, it simply reflected the time it was set in. Most of the local attention focused on Cantopop queen Faye Wong’s hyperactive performance as a zany youngster with an unusual approach to romance. But viewed today, it’s hard to watch it without feeling pangs of nostalgia for less gruelling times.
Wong did intend the film to be a kind of celebration of Hong Kong life in the early 1990s, the director said in an interview with Filmmaker Magazine.
“To me, Chungking Express is like the night and day of Hong Kong.
“Some people say ‘the film is about this or that character,’ but I say, ‘no, the film is about Hong Kong. It’s my love letter to Hong Kong’.”
Wong’s films are usually focused on characters and themes rather than storylines, and Chungking Express is perhaps the perfect example of that.
The idea plays out in two separate scenarios.
The camera notices them brush by each other, but the characters themselves aren’t aware of it. Later they find themselves getting drunk together.
The second, more successful scenario, features Faye Wong and Tony Leung in an obscure relationship which fails to launch into a romance.
The segment featuring the pair was shot in the Midnight Express snack bar in Lan Kwai Fong, Hong Kong’s late-night bar district, and also in cinematographer Christopher Doyle’s apartment. (Doyle graciously allowed his Mid-Levels apartment to be flooded for the shoot.)
The film’s wonderfully spontaneous, insouciant feel is down to the fact it was made quickly and for fun.
“Chungking Express was a quickie project, written and shot in six weeks, during a break in the post-production of Ashes of Time, a project which had really got Wong Kar-wai down,” former Variety critic Derek Elley, who wrote about the film at its Cannes Film Festival premiere, tells the Post.
“He hadn’t even finished writing the second half when he started shooting the first. He made Chungking Express as a kind of release from the pressures of making Ashes, his first ‘big’ film.
“It was a rapidly made, almost guerrilla, student film – an artistic counter-reaction to the size and weight of a big costume swordplay movie like Ashes of Time,” Elley says.
Part of the fun for locals came from watching the sequences set inside the Chungking Mansions location. Although it was a ritzy place in the 1960s, by the 1990s the labyrinthine and decaying tower blocks had become a crowded community of ethnic minorities, backpackers renting cheap rooms, salesmen hawking myriad cheap goods, and hole-in-the-wall restaurants.
Chungking Mansions was its own wild world, and it had a reputation for drugs, as depicted in the film’s first storyline. (Parts of the building were renovated in the 2000s.)
Wong had been fascinated by Chungking Mansions since he was a child, and was aware that no one had shot a film inside. The building was regarded as a fire hazard because of blocked fire escapes and bad wiring, and permits were not granted to shoot there.
Wong filmed without a permit and sent his assistant director to live inside the building prior to the shoot, to work out exit plans should trouble arise. Some denizens of Chungking Mansions ended up as performers in the film.
“This is the area that I know,” Wong said in an interview. “I shot in the area that I grew up. Chungking Mansions was the place for nightclubs [in the 1960s]. It had one of the best ones, called Bayside. When The Beatles came to Hong Kong, they held their press conference there. So this is a landmark.”
The handheld camerawork of Andrew Lau Wai-keung in the first section and Christopher Doyle in the second emphasises the small size of Hong Kong’s apartments and the crowded Chungking Mansions shopping areas.
Elley says that in spite of his having talented cinematographers, Chungking’s vision came from Wong himself.
“If you look at the totality of Chris Doyle’s work, beyond just his Wong Kar-wai films, you’ll see that he doesn’t have a style of his own – like any good director of photography, he’d supply what the director wanted and finesse it via lighting, and so on,” Elley says.
“He and Wong got on because they were both instinctive talents, making it up as they went along, within a broad framework. The first story was shot by Andrew Lau, who’d shot Wong’s As Tears Go By, and he was known for liking handheld photography,” says Elley.
Wong had intended Brigitte Lin, then Hong Kong’s reigning female star, to be the main draw of Chungking Express. He had asked her if she wanted to do a smaller contemporary film while they were shooting Ashes of Time, in which she played a dual role of a swordswoman and her brother.
Lin, who was bored with making period films, accepted – and then proceeded to perform wearing a wig and sunglasses, something which confused her Hong Kong fans. Faye Wong, who was nervous on set, as she had never acted before, turned out to be the star of the film.
More scenes of Lin had been shot, but they were excised after the film’s premiere. At that time, exhibitors had strict rules about the length of Hong Kong films, as they wanted to maximise the number of screenings in a day, so Wong had to make cuts.
“The length of Chungking Express at the premiere exceeded the requirements of the theatre, so we had to cut out 15 minutes,” Wong told City Entertainment magazine. “A lot of people said the scenes with Brigitte were boring, so we mainly cut these. The scenes with Faye Wong remained much the same.”
Music played an important part in the film, with repeated plays of The Mamas and the Papas’ 1965 hit California Dreamin’ and Faye Wong’s Cantonese version of UK indie band The Cranberries’ Dreams serving as emotional anchors within the mayhem.
In her Midnight Express scenes, Faye Wong is actually reacting to the music, which was played live in the background, rather than dubbed on in post-production. Wong thought this would calm the singer’s nerves.
“Wong chose California Dreamin’ because it had a hip, retro feel, was extremely catchy, and helped to paper over the improvisatory feel of the movie. He has always used music in this way, and he had a good eye and ear for the catchy,” says Elley.
In this regular feature series on the best of Hong Kong cinema, we examine the legacy of classic films, re-evaluate the careers of its greatest stars, and revisit some of the lesser-known aspects of the beloved industry.