University of Cape Town – FAM1000S

Stylistic Analysis Essay

‘When the world is made of neon’:

A systematic deconstruction of the flamboyant stylings of Wong Kar-Wai’s Chungking Express (1994)

“All of the characters are as fragmented and individualized as the film is collaged; paradoxically, Wong [Kar-Wai] uses the effects not to tell individualized, disparate stories but to bring characters together.”- Telling commentary on Chungking Express in City On Fire Hong Kong Cinema (Stokes & Hoover, 2001: 195)

If you’ve even watched just one movie from the oeuvre of the Hong Kong filmmaker Wong Kar-Wai, this essay may come over as a disappointment. It means to explicate the overlapping nuances of one early scene in his early opus, Chungking Express(henceforth ‘CE’), so as to wholly represent the stylistic trademarks that have so jarringly coloured its director’s career. That is to say it will seem to reduce Wong’s work (and that of his two cinematographers here, Andrew Lau and Christopher Doyle) to nothing but a cinephile’s chocolate-box of gimmicks, when any attentive audience will let you know that a film like CE- “the Masculin féminin of the 1990’s” (Taubin, 2008)- is always distinctively more than the sum of its flashier parts. Of course, that won’t stop us from doing the most holistic analytical job we can, but what makes such a scientific procedure even more damnable is that CE itself is constructed- almost self-consciously so- in such a manner as to dissuade stylistic categorization.

You see, this is literally a film of two halves (though each is somewhat reflected into the other): two lovelorn policemen- Officers 223 and 663, respectively- in two iconic districts of an especially postmodern Hong Kong may each ‘fall in love’ with an enigmatic woman, but otherwise the similarities stop. The first is an anxious, subterranean neo-noir shot with a hand-held camera amongst drug-mules and logoramas; the second a screwball romance suffused with pop songs, stuffed animals and flashbacks, recorded by a playful Steadicam, and presented such that it “makes no sense as anything other than cinema.” (Koresky, 2014) The former is only 42 minutes, the latter a happily indulgent hour. The ending of the first is violently conclusive, the ending of the last ambiguous to a fault. And if you’d walked into the cinema as ‘Officer 223’ looks into the eyes of Faye, the Midnight Express’ waitress, to signal the hinge-moment of the two stories, you’d have absolutely no problem picking up on the rest of the movie. It is left, as an unforgettable puzzle, for the viewer alone to decide what actually connects the tales of either officer, if thematically, stylistically or even spiritually so1. However, our concern now has to be returned to stay with a particular scene from the first one: the hundred-and-forty-one-second2 ‘Garden Hostel’ scene showcasing Brigitte Lin’s blonde-wigged (and unnamed) femme fatale’s escape from the Indian agents her white drug-lord employer has sent to kill her.

Previously we had seen her organizing a cocaine-trafficking operation in the cosmopolitan blur of the Chungking tenements. Shoes, jackets and unmentionable places belonging to a set of Indian drug-mules had been lined and filled with new product and the femme fatale had gotten the party all the way to the airport before her charges had disappeared, without a trace, to her clear and honest surprise. Returning in anomie to her employer’s juke-joint, she is handed a sardine-tin with an expiry-date (May the 1st- a matter of hours) that will come to stand for her fate too, unless she can recover his lost merchandise. This motif of expiration directly echoes the superstitions of the concurrent story-strand of Qiwu- more commonly, Officer 223-, a plainclothes detective, just dumped on April 1st by his girlfriend of five years, who resolves to buy a can of Del Monte pineapples with an expiration date of May 1st (his 25th birthday and his girlfriend’s name-day) every day until all chance of a reunion, to his mind, is dashed. This comes to pass, and Officer 223 subsequently gorges himself on every can in one evening in his despair. In a few hours he will serendipitously come upon the femme fatale in a nightclub and experience a few strange hours of mutual rest and communion in a hotel room, but he will remain ignorant of her illegal profession, her

1 The first part does offer singular glimpses of each member of the second’s love triangle: Officer 663 leaning over a balcony in the train station, his old stewardess girlfriend waiting at the airport’s pick-up zone and Faye buying the giant Garfield doll in a toy store while the blonde femme fatale smokes outside. Make of that what you will.

2 19:53-22:14 is the span of it on my Criterion Collection Blu-Ray version.

name, the colour of the eyes behind her red sunglasses and especially her night’s preceding events.

But the viewer does know at least two of those, which brings in all manner of dramatic ironies to their platonic romance. Particularly, we know the scene in question, which, besides the fact that it exemplifies Wong Kar-Wai’s camera-style, is the most thrilling sustained action scene in the film, or indeed Wong’s oeuvre:

It is late in Chungking. The femme fatale, having failed to redeem herself, stumbles into the cold blue light of the garden hostel. She is shaking with anxiety, fumbling in her pocket for a cigarette. After sitting for a long, consoling drag- framed diagonally as in old noir- the clock & calendar that has kept track of all proceedings flicks over to 12:01 AM. We cut to the assassins gathering in the corridors nearby. We cut back to her, walking out her own corridor to the marketplace, soon shadowed by an unsubtle Indian boy. She comes out into the public warmth. The boy lunges from behind her with a gun. She sees him before we do and shoots just as quickly with the gun she’d so far kept hidden. Another boy lunges more wildly. She dispatches him just as calmly as the first and he is blown back into a fruit stand. The market suddenly realizes its own chaos and shots of the escaping crowd are followed by discordant cuts of the femme fatale being chased by dozens of shouting assassins back through the corridors, onto the street, down and up flights of stairs, into a train station and onto a last subway just before the doors close. The train is seen pulling away from the station to signal her escape.

When we discuss ‘Cinematic Style’, we mean the ‘How?’ in the depiction of all these merely scripted actions. So, how is the ‘world of the scene’ directed here and how does it “direct us” (in the words of (Bordwell & Thompson, 2010: 313))? This is what is meant by the term ‘mise-en-scene’- or “putting into the scene” to give its closest translation (Bordwell & Thompson, 2010: 118). It can be thought of as a compendium of all the elements that constitute the space of the scene, what the gaze of the camera considers. Here, it is- successively- the femme fatale, the shadowing, the crowd, the chase and the train. And in this listing we find a clear progression from clarity to anarchy, as the scene accelerates to match its actions and the details become as snatched and subjective as they would be to anyone involved in the chase itself. In hesitant long shot we watch for 26 uncut seconds as the femme fatale finds herself in the room’s grey, desolate space and gets around to lighting her cigarette. Then a further 30 in close-up is spent just watching her sit to smoke and gain her bearings. Having established this new ‘calm zone’ for both her and the audience, it is too suddenly assailed by the flip-clock’s imposition, thus indicating Danger in just one jump cut. The camera is shocked into movement along with the woman: shuddering up a constricting corridor to show her shadow’s arrival. Then we are in the kaleidoscopic blur of the market and the assailant makes his move as the woman moves out of the foreground frame. This is the last time a perspective will be established for longer than three seconds until the train pulls away. All that matters after her shots ring out is that the femme fatale’s sudden flight from the assassins is one continuous run that pulls the camera with her, so that we see glimpses of new surroundings –corridors, pavement, stairs, a rushing train- before we can comprehend where she might be escaping to. It is only when we reach the stable platform setting as the woman jumps aboard the train that we realize the chase has finished.

What Wong creates through this disorientation technique is a kind of decentered urban nightmare to match the discordant battle sequences of violence auteurs like John Woo, Sam Peckinpah and the Spielberg of Saving Private Ryan. The scene builds our attention by fragmenting its mise-en-scene until the only recognizably ‘stable’ things remaining are the people and their paramount imperatives. Of course, this technique is closely allied to the editing of the scene, and if there is a point where cinematic style becomes the substance of a movie, it’s where mise-en-scene and the cutting that introduces it grossly overlap. If ‘Editing’ is just “the coordination of one shot with the next” (Bordwell & Thompson, 2010: 223) then we can see it as the key to understanding how the relative (in)coherence of these minutes in Chungking are created. As mentioned, only one cut marks the first 56 seconds, and that a perfect synchronous cut-in to close-up to watch the woman relax and exhale. Then the clock flips and the tempo accelerates. When the chase begins, most presuppositions are forsaken. Running shots on a bright street cut to ones in the subway, the woman is shown rushing in one direction then immediately in the other and shots of the dispersing crowd and the arriving train are interjected into continuous footage. Needless to say, the 180-degree rule is broken by almost every exchanged shot. In a very literal sense, Wong and his editor can be seen to be emphasizing ‘disconnection’ as a principle of the city. For all the romantic solipsism and chance encounters of the film’s quieter moments, this scene, in microcosm, is the clearest evocation of the lack of coordination between the images seen and their constituent characters in the film.

And that same incoherency that typifies both the city and its people in Wong’s imagination is made doubly effective by our common inability to make out the subjects of the images themselves. Cinematography literally means, rather poetically, “writing in movement” (Bordwell & Thompson, 2010: 167) and Wong Kar-Wai’s famed distinctiveness as an auteur mostly comes from the fact that he- and his perpetual collaborator Christopher Doyle- have consistently pioneered their own lexicon of manipulated actions on handheld footage. In the shaky haze of the market and chase in this scene we particularly read a “stutter-step” effect that appears as “neither slow-motion nor fast-motion” but “other motion.” (D’Angelo, 2013) That is to say a kind of unearthly obscurity that affects the contours of the world so as to make every bright colour brighter, every quick movement feel like an action-shot and each jump-cut appear doubly discordant. It’s use here once again artistically reflects the conditions of Hong Kong pedestrianism: the neon is all-pervasive and continues to linger in your eyes and the glimpses you do get of other people come in quick, natural medium- and long-shots. Otherwise the colours are those of the street’s chaos and the framing depends on whose perspective the camera is imitating. So we jump from one tottering viewpoint to another throughout the chase as a way of showing how many different gazes are involved in the dramas that occur daily in Hong Kong.

Finally, with regards to the sound design, which seems to come as an accentuating external factor if not integral to the construction of this scene, the movement is distinctly one from soft, diegetic and ambient noises to an almost cacophonous non- diegetic mélange of synth-chords, Indian music and the wails of the racing crowd. The dissonance of the soundtrack follows the editing of the images very precisely. Only the fact that the first chords of the Indian song start playing softly just before the femme fatale finishes her cigarette shows that the soundtrack can anticipate her immediate danger and stray from adherence to the gathering energy of the scene. Particular momentary noises are emphasized as shocks: the click of the woman’s lighter, the flip of the clock intersecting with the loud bass note of an assassin opening a door and, of course, the gunshots, which really incite the chaos of the chase that follows. The ‘sound-layering’ technique thus implemented reflects the natural overlaps of music, traffic and language that typify both the rest of the film and city life in general, though here the song used is imbued with a Scorsese-like association of sudden violence, while the striking synth-chords that replace it can easily be compared to the scores of such other stylistically bipolar movies as Psycho andRequiem for a Dream. Like them, it builds suspense in a cultured and irresistible way.

Of course, one could and should go further into the contrasts that the film as a whole offers through its formal idiosyncrasies- it is essentially two very different movies for the price of one, after all- but by isolating one scene in its evident identity as an irreverent stylistic homage to the trademarks of one example of genre cinema (neo- noir as filmed and edited by a manic film scholar) we can gain an insight into Wong Kar-Wai’s defining sensibility as an auteur-filmmaker and go on to spy it throughout the rest of his work and the turns of his career. Having fully contextualized the film and attempted to explicate its own defining stylistic elements with reference to the greater concerns of cinematic depiction evident within it, I’d say the mysteries and intrigues of Chungking Express alone are enough to full many personal revisits and scholarly rediscussions.

Reference List:

Bordwell, David & Thompson, Kristin. 2010. Film Art- An Introduction. 9th Ed. University of Wisconsin: McGraw International Edition.

D’Angelo, Mike. 2013. How Wong Kar-Wai turned 22 seconds into an eternity. Available: http://thedissolve.com/features/movie-of-the-week/221-how-wong-kar- wai-turned-22-seconds-into-an-eternit/ [2014, September 7].

Koresky, Michael. 2014. Chungking Express- Work in Progress. Available:http://www.reverseshot.com/article/chungking_express [2014, September 7].

Stokes, Lisa Oldham & Hoover, Michael. 2001. City On Fire- Hong Kong Cinema. London, New York: Verso Books.

Taubin, Amy. 2008. Chungking Express: Electric Youth. Available:http://www.criterion.com/current/posts/766-chungking-express-electric-youth [2014, September 7].