(Credits: MUBI)
In 1997, Hong Kong filmmaker Wong Kar-wai won the ‘Best Director’ award at the Cannes Film Festival for his romantic drama Happy Together. The accolade came after his run of successful films throughout the late 1980s and early 1990s, two of which he believes are even more interconnected than their neighbouring release dates.
Chungking Express, Wong’s romantic comedy-drama set in Hong Kong, was released in 1994, and Fallen Angels – a stand-alone movie – was released a year later in 1995. Ostensibly, they were separate projects, but both films share a similar tone and narrative, and in an interview with Bomb Magazine, Wong entertains the idea that these movies are really one, longer piece.
Wong says in his interview, “To me, Chungking Express and Fallen Angels are one film that should be three hours long. I always think these two films should be seen together as a double bill. In fact, people asked me during an interview for Chungking Express: ‘You’ve made these two stories which have no relationship at all to each other, how can you connect them?’”
But philosophically, he thinks they have the same soul. “The main characters of Chungking Express are not Fay Wang or Takashi Kaneshiro, but the city itself,“ he explains, “The night and day of Hong Kong. Chungking Express and Fallen Angels together are the bright and dark of Hong Kong.” They are, in effect, a study of place.
Wong’s films are always beautifully atmospheric, exhilarating, and filled with vivid imagery, often with its protagonists yearning for romance—none more so than Chungking Express and Fallen Angels. Considering this, it is easy to make the connection between the two movies, but Wong insists that the connection is far deeper than their stylised feel.
He continued to explain: “I see the films as inter-reversible; the character of Fay Wang could be the character of Takashi in Fallen Angels; Brigitte Lin in Chungking could be Leon Lai in Fallen Angels. All of their characters are inter-reversible.“ In this regard, the protagonists can be seen as mere pawns in a play of the city.
“Also, in Chungking,“ he continues, “We were shooting from a very long distance with long lenses, but the characters seem close to us.“
If we were to explore more pragmatically, the official synopsis of Chungking Express reads, “Two melancholic Hong Kong policemen fall in love: one with a mysterious female underworld figure, the other with a beautiful and ethereal waitress at a late-night restaurant he frequents.” The synopsis for Fallen Angels, meanwhile, states: “This Hong Kong-set crime drama follows the lives of a hitman, hoping to get out of the business, and his elusive female partner.”
From the base premises alone, it does not take a master of cinema to connect the dots and get behind Wong’s sentiments on his own films’ interconnectivity. However, there is also a deeper link in the way the stories are managed and how time and place are as pertinent as any pivotal plot points. The inter-reversible nature of these films’ protagonists and antagonists when seen as location, time, and energy rather than simply just characters, only serves to better the viewing experience of each film individually, as we can appreciate Wong’s masterful filmmaking from a completely new perspective.
Related Topics
This post was originally published on here
