From Chungking Express to In the Mood for Love

I loneliness

      Loneliness seems to be an eternal theme of Wong Kar-Wai's films. After watching Chungking Express and In the Mood for Love, I feel that everyone is lonely in his or her own little universe. Loneliness is unavoidable at all times. These two films just tell us that how we grow up with loneliness in this wild world and how we walk away from the young dream like Chungking Express and walk into the reality as In the mood for love.

            A lyric of a Chinese song goes: This is a season of love, people are shameful for being alone. However, we often do not know what loneliness really means until two people are in love together. Especially after we get used to someone’ company, the emptiness due to his or her departure can never be replaced.

     Therefore, Wong Kar-Wai Chose different forms to show how loneliness exists in our life, either dreams or reality.

     Chungking Express’s Chinese name is Chungking forest. Actually, Chungking is a city in the southwest China and some also say it refer to the Chungking Mansions in Hong Kong. It gives me an image that some lonely people living in a city surrounded by forests.

The characters in the film met and fell in love with each other dramatically in Hong Kong, a huge forest. Cop 223, the leading man in Chungking Express is eating pineapples with an expiration date of May 1st, wondering whether there is anything which would never expire in the world. He keeps running, telling himself that running vaporizes the water from his body so that he will not cry. His behavior is a weird, just like every young man may act after breaking up with their lover.

When the days are young, we care about nothing but love. We are sentimental and so easy to feel lonely. We travel around the whole city just in order to find some warmth and comfort. Youth is indeed a beautiful dream.

In terms of In the mood for love, it is closer to reality. Its Chinese name is called Floral Times, which is the same as an old and classic song of China in 1930s. It is absolutely romantic to me.

The leading actor and actress both are in the mood for love at their floral times. The man finds the woman living next to him attractive and she also feels the same way as him, but they cannot really love for some reason. Knowing their spouses have betrayed them, they agree to keep their bond platonic so as not to commit similar wrongs.

Their ending may be not perfect, which is similar to many people in the real world. Wong Kar-Wai used his genius to make this simple tale resonate with audience. With time going by, their floral times also never come again. After the elegiac tale of doomed romance ends, we can only feel the loneliness of reality.

      Wong Kar-Wai captures the core of the film with the beautiful slow-motion scenes where they are walking up and down the stairs in silence. That mesmerizing scene also shows the loneliness of characters. Even though they are not in solitude, audience cannot stop to feel their complex emotions beneath the peaceful surface.

Everything will eventually come to an end. Every period of love will be expired. Only loneliness can be everlasting.

II He/She

 One of the distinctive marks of Wong Kar-Wai’s films is the real and unique characters. From Chungking Express to In the Mood for Love, we can find the changes of ourselves when we are growing up.

      Cop 223 in Chungking Express is an absolute freak. He does not believe that his love was expired so he keeps eating his ex-girlfriend’s favorite canned pineapple, saying weird words that others cannot understand.

     "Every day you have opportunity to meet and pass so many people. You may probably know nothing about them, but they may become your friends one day."

     “When we get closest to each other, the distance between me and her is only 0.01 cm. 57 hours later, I fell in love with this woman.”

      Every day we interact with all kinds of people and we can influence someone's life unconsciously. The next minute whom we will meet is a maze. Will we fall in love with him or her? We may be surprised to find that the monologue of this lonely man should be the same as ours. 

      The mysterious woman whom 223 loved was a drug dealer. She lived in this city jungle with disguise, using changeless wig, sunglasses and raincoats to deal with day and night, rainy and sunny day.

     "Don't know when to start, I became a very careful woman. Every time I wear a raincoat, I would wear sunglasses. You will never know when it will rain and when the sun will rise."

      I cannot help to thinking about people living with disguise just as her in the city.  Life make us gradually become very careful people, learning to use a mask to deal with all the uncertainty in life. There is no knowing that when do we lose our genuine expression, which may be the cost of growth.

       Cop 663 is just an ordinary man, eating at the same tea restaurant every day and buying food in “Midnight Express” every night. At the same time, he is a rejected lover and talked to everything in his house to express his sadness after breaking up. Suddenly, a girl fell in love with him.

       She is a short-hair girl with deep crystal eyes. She always dances along with the music California dreaming while working. In her dream filled with sunshine, she slips into his house quietly and changes his place little by little. Until the day he meets her in his house, he finds his heart is changed by her as well. Here their love story begins.

       Many people may have the same experience like her, falling in love with somebody secretly. Neither do they care whether he or she knows their love nor do they require a perfect result. Love just makes people feel alive.

       However, reality also makes people be different. Just as the couple in In the mood for love. They are not as young as the characters in ChungKing Express any longer. They have their own spouses and they know that they are not supposed to be together.

       He once asks her: “If I have one more ticket, will you go with me?” Then he regards her silent as rejection and goes to Singapore alone, leaving her to continue her boring life in Hong Kong. I am thinking if he could be a bit more firm and brave at that time, would the ending be different?

 III New Wave

      Cinema is a visual language and director is the one who creates it. Wong Kar-Wai is indeed a great director for he has successfully developed his own sense of cinema. We can feel his special atmosphere and the mood of Hong Kong in these two films.

      New wave films are not stick to one pattern. They often convey a kind of strong local emotion, reflect the reality of society and make audience think about themselves. Wong Kar-Wai is a good representative of Hong Kong new waves. The style of his films is very indebted to the style of the French New Wave in the early 1960s, with the great use of the available lighting and mobile, hand-held cameras, extraordinary plot, the full use of music and so on.

      Love, loneliness, charming music, unique camera techniques, and particularly the surprising stories combine to make an amazing deviation from the standard Hollywood movie. Chungking Express is full of interesting characters brought to life by the film's excellent cast.    Moreover, it is filmed in impressionistic splashes of motion and colors, which creates romantic atmosphere. The music stands out especially as the song California Dreaming comes to be symbolic ideology of the characters' desire to be free and fearless. Audiences all are lost in the infectious music, flying to the dream land California. Moreover, the storytelling is based on the long complementary monologue, which makes this film be poetic.

As for In the Mood for Love, the plot is simple as well as the storytelling. The dialogues between the characters are always few words probably because the eastern emotions of the characters are beyond words. Mrs. Chan’s beautiful Chinese dresses, the classic music, and the overall dizzyingly romantic atmosphere of this film evokes a nostalgia feeling, taking us back to the 1960’s Hong Kong. Especially Mrs. Chan changes more than 20 tight and delicate cheongsams, which not only shows her graceful figure but also bounds her emotions.

Eventually, all these elements in these two films combined in a perfect way under the direction of Wong Kar-Wai, giving audiences the feeling called love.