CHUNGKING EXPRESS: Paranoia Agent

This review was requested by Nate Biagiotti. Many thanks to Nate for supporting Post-Credit Coda through our Patreon.

Director: Kar-Wai Wong
Writer: Kar-Wai Wong
Cast: Brigitte Lin, Tony Chiu-Wai Leung, Faye Wong, Takeshi Kaneshiro, Valerie Chow, Jinquan Chen
Runtime: 102 mins.
1994

Chungking Express is a movie about intimate urban encounters. The ways we brush elbows with entire universes that we will never know. The jittering pace and the frenetic energy of a busy day or an exciting night in the city, manifested by a choppy framerate that blurs pedestrian movement and turns the film's incredible fluorescent light design into sickly rainbow smears. The city is the main character, maybe the only character.

That city is Hong Kong, though it's as much about Every City as it is about the particularities of HK. The movie settles us in with some noir voiceover from our supposed protagonist, known only as Cop 663. Beat cop, lovelorn romantic, a mysterious woman of crime in a blonde wig... Chungking has all the ingredients of a tidy little thriller. Then it takes those ingredients, throws them at the wall, and does a little softshoe routine to smear them across the kitchen tiles.

And I don't mean that in a bad way. Every time the film coaxes us into believing we understand something about its genre trappings, it shifts into an unexpected register. We see Woman in Blonde Wig's plot play out, sure, but all it leads to is an evening of existential drunkenness. We see Cop 663 come to terms with his relationship problems, but his path intertwining with Woman in Blonde Wig amounts only to an anticlimactic scene in a hotel room buffeted by boredom and uncertainty. The hardboiled voiceover is made a mockery by elliptical dialogue about pineapples and jogging that Cop 663 later uses as pick-up lines in a bar, as if his inner monologue was merely a rehearsal. One thing's for sure, our inner worlds sure sound different when we speak them aloud.

The film then opens up in an astonishing way that shows Chungking Express's understanding of inner life as a refraction of outer life. The noir tone is abandoned for pop music and light romantic drama, and so to do our protagonists shift. Now we are following a woman named Faye who lives a double life by hanging out in someone else's apartment during the day, and a different cop, Cop 223. This cop is a creature of habit with a charming tendency to talk to his belongings like people. The doubling and tripling stacks up: two cops both falling for women at the Midnight Express bodega, two potential love interests named May, a former flight attendant love interest who is replaced by another love interest who plays at being a flight attendant then actually does become a flight attendant... it's enough to make you think you missed something important, or that you must have mistook one character for another.

This 'mistaking' is central to the point of Chungking Express. City life is a cocktail of dreams, desires, identities... in short, collective imagining. When we engage with each other in this imagining, we can't help but project our thoughts and feelings onto others, and vice versa. It's like a new hit pop song, an earworm so viral that it forces its way through our ears, into our unconscious mind, across the radiowaves, in our public spaces, via our voice... when a pop song takes over, it provides a lens through which we all begin to imagine differently. This exact extended metaphor is hammered home in the film with the song "California Dreaming." The song keeps cycling around, and around, and around, creating and remixing meaning with each new occurrence, invading homes and altering preferences, even dictating enormous life decisions like where in the world to make a home... a song is a dream, and a song about a dream is a dream of a dream, and a movie about a song about a dream....

3.5 / 5  BLOBS