“She didn’t have any acting training, so when we began the film she was actually very nervous… To help her I said, ‘Capture the rhythm of Faye, let’s play this music. “Even though Faye Wong was a singer, she was not an actress,” Wong Kar-Wai said. I looked to see Cop 663 scramble to the vanished window. Faye Wong rode the escalator in front and above me, in her small, round sunglasses and yellow shirt. On the sofa in his police uniform pants and white tank top, I watched him cut his model airplane through the apartment’s thick air. Tony Leung’s apartment building was torn down years before I arrived, but when I rode the escalator, I could still picture Leung’s Cop 663 sitting in the building’s gap. Guitars shimmer, bass expands, and drums crescendo into what is supposed to feel like elation, and depending on the ride, on which day, if it was morning or night, I could feel something close to that euphoria. I played a cover of the Cranberries’ “Dreams” sung by the film’s lead, Faye Wong, on each of my escalator rides. The Central Escalator’s flat, connected metal sheets cut through Hong Kong’s Central District and climb between buildings for a half-mile, between chasms brimming with neon signs that transmute the escalator’s plexi-glass to pale yellow. The escalator in Chungking Express moves by the apartment of Tony Leung’s character, Cop 663, where he flies his model airplane between his fingers in a directionless and broken figure eight. “And oh, my dreams, it's never quite as it seems / Never quite as it seems.”Ĭhungking Express is desire, loss, hope, and despair split in two and emblazoned in whirling images of canned peaches, umbrellas, model airplanes, and Hong Kong’s Central Escalator. I found it, and it was the constant, erratic energy of loneliness, but it didn’t look the same, feel the same as the movies. I wanted to feel the energy of cinematographer Christopher Doyle’s images. Movies that sent shockwaves of hope through my body. I travelled to Hong Kong to see where my favorite films were made, where Wong Kar-Wai filmed his masterpieces, movies that reshaped how I saw film, reshaped how I thought about image and texture and song. I want to live in the ten minute increments of a film reel, before and after: black. I want to adjust my model farmhouse like Tarkovsky, everything perfected while the real one remains in the background, quiet and solitary. To let the film roll until the moment is found and edited around. I want to structure life like a film, to double-back and reshoot significance. My mind’s projector double-exposes most moments behind blank eyes. The real farmhouse depicted in the film towers a few hundred feet behind, past pools of water beneath a leafless tree, almost out of frame. Behind Cantonese text, Tarkovsky adjusts a model farmhouse on a spongy marsh. One, of Andrei Tarkovsky’s The Sacrifice.
Chungking express opening movie#
Jet-lagged, I slept through half the movie.Īfterwards, I bought various Hong Kong-version movie posters. Sound bleeds through, swells and blossoms, and edges dissolve like a bled-through bandage where bass vibrates through everyone together. Back to ragged cloth and depressed armrest cushions where elbows settle in and plastic digs into forearms.
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The way the other room’s sound plucks you from the movie back to your seat. The way sound leaks from the next screening room. I said I did, and that I looked forward to the four hours in a room, comforted by a film I had already seen. When I bought the ticket, the cashier asked if I knew the film’s length. On my first night in Hong Kong, I walked thirty minutes to Broadway Cinematheque where the theater was playing Edward Yang’s Taiwanese film, A Brighter Summer Day. “And the sky is grey / I've been for a walk / … Stopped into a church / I passed along the way / Well, I got down on my knees / And I pretend to pray.” Sunlight gathered and dissolved those hard cut lines until they were gone and I was through, lurching between the canyoned forest road, green leaves reflecting heavy sun. The single row of light serpentined along the ceiling, the clean pattern of tiles flowed green and white. These captured stills superimposed on my tunnel. A couple drones through the tunnel, their faces spread, their eyes squinting and delirious.
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In this moment, I remembered Wong Kar-Wai’s film. I sat alone in the front-top of a double-decker bus, and I moved slowly towards the tunnel’s light-diffused opening. I didn’t ride towards a tunnel exit’s oblivion. I wasn’t on a motorcycle and no cigarette dangled from my lips. I passed through Hong Kong’s Aberdeen Tunnel smothered in Fallen Angels’ green filter, but I wasn’t stretched the same. I love movies / I wanna be in my own movie / I wanna be.”
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The hopes and the dreams / Don't give credit to the real things /. “The meaning of life doesn't seem to shine like that screen /.