Sightlines · how to watch
How to watch Chungking Express
1994 · Wong Kar-Wai · Chungking Express on Sightlines
5 things to watch and listen for on a first viewing, without spoilers, and 4 more once you have seen it. Each names something you can see or hear, the pattern it belongs to, and what noticing it gives you. How these keys work.
On a first viewing
Watch the crowds smear past a person standing still. (camera)
Wong and Christopher Doyle get this in the lab, repeating selected frames so motion multiplies and ghosts. A man holds at a snack counter and the whole of Hong Kong liquefies behind him.
Payoff: Being passed by your own life stops being a feeling here and becomes something you can watch happen. In the reading: movement of world. The reading calls this movement of world: the figure holds still and the world around him does all the moving.
Listen for how loudly California Dreamin' plays at the stall. (sound)
Faye Wong puts it on again and again behind the counter, loud enough to bury conversation. The music lives inside the scene rather than over it, and the Cranberries turn up the same way.
Payoff: The song says what she will not. A wish for somewhere else, played at volume instead of spoken.
Look at the expiration dates on the pineapple cans. (setting)
The first cop buys thirty tins that all expire on the first of May, one for every day since he was left. A supermarket shelf turns into a calendar of a breakup.
Payoff: Desire here manufactures its own deadlines. Counting is what he does instead of acting. In the reading: fetish. The reading calls the can a fetish: one small object charged with the whole force of a drive.
Look at how narrow the corridors and stairwells are. (staging)
The first story lives inside Chungking Mansions, a warren of hostels, shops and passages full of people from everywhere. The camera is handheld because a tripod would not fit. Strangers pass within inches.
Payoff: The Chinese title calls this a forest. People stand close enough to touch and still do not meet. In the reading: espace quelconque. The reading calls these any-spaces-whatever: zones you cannot map and can only feel, cut loose from where a plot would happen.
Watch Tony Leung talk to his soap and his towel. (performance)
Cop 663 conducts his whole emotional life out loud with household objects, and Leung plays it bemused and domestic rather than sad. Behind her counter, Faye Wong never stops moving.
Payoff: Two ways of waiting sit side by side. One man addresses his furniture. One woman dances instead.
Once you have seen it
Notice how a face stays sharp while the city blurs. (camera)
Doyle shoots wide angle from inches away, with focus shallow enough to peel a face off the street behind it. The lens crowds the frame and the background dissolves into color.
Payoff: Each face gets held alone with one feeling at a time and never gets to release it into a deed.
Track the single moment the two stories touch. (structure)
They run one after the other rather than intercut. Cop 223 passes the Midnight Express stall as the second story opens, and that is the whole connection between them. Mood joins the halves, not cause.
Payoff: The film is built out of lives brushing past each other. The join between the stories is as slight as the joins inside them.
Watch what Faye changes in the apartment each visit. (staging)
New soap, a different fish, furniture nudged, labels swapped. She renovates a man's life while he is out, and he goes weeks without registering any of it.
Payoff: Love gets conducted entirely through objects, because neither of them can say any of it out loud yet.
Track what actually happens to the crime plot. (structure)
There is a drug deal, a search through the Mansions, a woman in a blonde wig with a gun. The thriller machinery is real, and it settles itself off screen while the camera is elsewhere.
Payoff: Wong keeps the genre skeleton and drains it. The film spends its attention on the waiting instead.
Carry this in: Watch the smear. A man holds still at the counter while the city decides not to wait for him.