Creative Review-- Film

I want to share a film with people that might be a little more obscure than usual. I’ve not been to any of the creative review sessions yet but I think a lot of the films would have been heard of, whereas this might be less recognized.

Chung-King Express is a film made by Wong Kar Wai in 1994. This film was the beginning of the Chinese New Wave period. This basically means that before this film, the studios were all about creating the same generic films, and for China, this was Martial Arts films. This film explores Hong Kong in a different way. It was an art piece made by Wai while he was taking a break from filming the “generic” stuff, and turned out to be one of his best pieces.

The film is split in two, set around the same take-out joint in Hong Kong. The first story is about a cop who gets dumped by his girlfriend, only to fall in love with a woman at a bar. Unbeknown to him, she is a drug-dealer, and he never see’s her again after that night. The next is about a cop who has a secret love interest; the worker at the take-out accidentally ends up with his house keys and she sneaks in when he’s working and cleans for him.

These are stories with no stories. They just are. That’s kind of the cool quality that I like about them. There are no questions that need answering, it’s just life at that time. Wai films it with a great soundtrack and some colourful camera experimentation, and maybe there are some little hidden messages in there, but it’s entirely for the audience to interoperate it as to how they see fit!