The level of invention in the plotting and the film language is almost profligate.'ĭue to scheduling conflicts, the two halves of Chungking Express were shot by two cinematographers: the first, by Andrew Lau, and the second, by the Australian Christopher Doyle, who has worked in Hong Kong cinema for decades and with Wong Kar-Wai many times. one of the first films of the '90s to feel genuinely fresh and original. Variety said it 'recalls the freshness of the French New Wave in its cinematic playfulness.' Sight and Sound called it 'rapturous entertainment.

The film's blend of urban disconnection, melancholy romance, tongue-in-cheek humor, edgy visual style and hyperkinetic editing all registered with critics as well. When I saw Chungking Express, I felt we were going down the same road.' Wong Kar-Wai, he said, 'is the most exciting director that's come along since I've been a professional filmmaker. Tarantino was a big booster of Hong Kong cinema in general, and this film blew him away when he saw it at a European festival. Instead, they prefer to talk to themselves or to objects.'Ĭhungking Express was released in the United States as the first film under Quentin Tarantino's Rolling Thunder banner, a division of Miramax. They don't reveal their feelings to other people. 'The story is about people living in a very lonely city,' said Wong Kar-Wai. In the second, another lovelorn cop, recently dumped by a flight attendant, crosses paths with a restaurant cook. In the first, a blonde female drug dealer oversees a smuggling job while a cop suffers the loss of a girlfriend. The film, set in nighttime Hong Kong, is comprised of two distinct stories, each revolving around characters who meet by chance-or fate. I wanted to make something very straightforward, very simple.' I worked during the day writing the scene and then we'd shoot it at night. 'I wanted it to be something like a road movie,' the director said.

At times, I felt like I became a film student again, and the experience was immensely refreshing and enlightening.'

The only thing that I could fall back on was my creative intuition. He worried that the level of meticulousness required by Ashes of Time had damaged his 'creative instinct.' Chungking, he said, was 'like going back to the basics of filmmaking. So, before he started the editing process on Ashes of Time, he made Chungking Express as a quickie, taking less than three months from inception to release. That film, a lavish costume drama with a big cast and budget, had taken over two years to write, prepare and direct, and after its production wrapped, the Hong Kong filmmaker felt the need for a palate cleanser. Share Chungking Express (1994) was Wong Kar-Wai's third feature to be released but the fourth to be filmed, after Ashes of Time (1994).

Chungking express movie summary