"Change of flight. Your plane cancelled. Here's your key. Bye."Air Hostess
重慶森林 - Chungking Express (1994) is beautiful poem to love.
Directed by Wong Kar Wai.
Starring, Faye Wong, Brigitte Lin, Valerie Chow, Tony Leung Chiu Wai and Takeshi Kaneshiro among many others.
Wong's film about love reminds me of Jean-Luc Godard's masterpiece, A Bout de Souffle - Breathless (1960) . Kar Wai was inspired by Godard and his use of Jump Cuts, montages, unique camera angles and plots that meander. I love the way love is expressed throughout the film silently by characters as they remember their lovers by objects they still possess. According to Quentin Tarantino in his video comments on the film below, Wong intended to have three stories. Instead he made the third story into a film called, Fallen Angels (1995). Personally, I would have made each story of the two remaining stories into separate films. Kar Wai tends to focus more on one story when he has to deal with more than one storyline. This can be seen in both the stronger last story here and with his recent visual masterpiece, The Grandmaster (2013) in which two stories are intertwined to muted outcomes. The remaining two stories in Chungking Express do not suffer and are brilliant in their own rights, but I would have like to have seen the two stories on their own.
Watch in the scene below how each character is immersed silently in their own deep thoughts reflecting upon the emotions that love drowns them in, while life moves fast forward before them in the foreground. What a brilliant, imaginative way to capture our selfish, egocentric inner life in the midsts of the entire human cosmos.
Trivia - Christopher Doyle's apartment was used in the film as the dwelling for cop 663.
Note - If you would like to view Chungking Express to rent or buy please click on the link below the comments. It is sponsored by Google, so it is the safest and most secure way to get a copy for your film library.
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