‘Joyous and uplifting’: why Chungking Express is my feelgood movie | Movies

Chinese language auteur Wong Kar-Wai is just not a director you’d instantly search out for a comfy feelgood expertise. His movies delve into loneliness, craving and doomed amorous affairs, carried alongside by a melancholy undercurrent. Chungking Categorical, the story of two Hong Kong cops reeling from being dumped by their respective companions, doesn’t deviate from these obsessions of his however the quirky romantic comedy additionally manages to be his most joyous and uplifting providing.The movie has a playful power and is brimming with offbeat humour. Tony Leung Chiu-wai and Takeshi Kaneshiro play the heartbroken policemen, each deep in denial over the top of their relationships. We watch them cope in very alternative ways with their heartache. Kaneshiro’s Cop 223 pines exterior his ex’s flat, buys cans of pineapple as a result of they had been her favourite meals and goes on jogs so his physique has no water left for tears.One night time, he comes throughout Brigitte Lin’s mysterious femme fatale in a dimly lit bar. Decked out in a bouncy blonde wig, sun shades and a trench coat, perpetually ready for each sunshine and rain, she has issues of her personal. Their encounter is advised as a noir-style crime caper that appears on the seedy underbelly of Hong Kong full with shootouts and runaway drug mules.The movie then strikes on to Leung’s Cop 663, whose story combines light-hearted romance with a splash of screwball comedy. He mopes at residence in his underwear after his girlfriend leaves him, giving objects round his flat a troublesome speaking to for letting themselves go. Cantopop singer Faye Wong performs a music-loving fast-food employee, additionally named Faye, who develops a crush on him and tries to work her means into his coronary heart by secretly cleansing his flat. It’s an act that’s much less home servitude and extra a crafty plot to alter somebody on a mobile stage with out them realising.If that every one sounds too zany and affected, it’s not. Chungking Categorical someway manages to be each gently whimsical and superbly profound whereas mining loads of laughs even within the desolate gloom of breakup despair. All 4 leads are unbelievably charismatic, and watching the 2 {couples} dance tentatively round one another is an unadulterated delight.I used to be 16 after I first noticed Chungking Categorical and regardless that I grew up in Surrey, there was one thing about its depiction of alienation and never fairly belonging within the large metropolis that resonated with me. Maybe as a result of I additionally felt the identical means as a second-generation Chinese language immigrant; my household was one of many few ethnic minorities residing on a really white council property. I’d borrow arthouse movies from my native library, dreaming of a extra thrilling life.My mother and father had been large followers of mainstream Chinese language blockbusters, martial arts epics and triad crime movies. After they introduced residence a VHS copy of Chungking Categorical, that they had no concept of the impression it could have on me. It wasn’t a lot a breath of contemporary air as a neon-hued twister obliterating every thing I knew about Hong Kong cinema.Through the years, I’ve rewatched all of Wong’s movies many occasions. I’m simply as captivated with his romantic masterpiece Within the Temper for Love and the moody drama Days of Being Wild, however Chungking Categorical is the one I return to essentially the most. It’s as effervescent because the Coca-Cola that’s blatantly plugged within the movie and as exhilarating because the Mamas & the Papas’ tune California Dreamin’ that Faye performs on repeat.It by no means fails to cheer me up. Each time I’m ridiculously charmed by the sight of Leung asking an enormous white teddy bear if he’s been in a battle, Faye dancing behind the snack bar counter brandishing condiments like glow sticks, and Kaneshiro making an attempt to hit on ladies in a bar by awkwardly asking them in the event that they like pineapple. The movie is simply so extremely candy, so astute about our inside lives, and so trendy in a means that also feels contemporary and thrilling even years later. Regardless of the disappointment on the coronary heart of Chungking Categorical, watching it appears like basking in daylight.Certainly one of my favorite traces from the movie comes from Cop 223, touched by a shock message, as he speculates: “If recollections could possibly be canned, would in addition they have expiry dates? If that’s the case, I hope they final for hundreds of years.” My love for Chungking Categorical won’t ever expire. Not like different, extra simple feelgood films, it doesn’t draw back from depicting the tough edges of city life and the way it can go away you feeling unmoored. Nevertheless it reveals how there’s all the time an opportunity to make a significant connection, hope rising like a rainbow after the rain, scattering the gray clouds from the sky.