My ten great movies #3: Chungking Express

According to legend, it took Wong Kar-Wai six weeks to make Chungking Express, from initial conception to final cut, during a break in the editing of his troubled martial arts epic Ashes of Time. If true, it’s the strongest possible example I can imagine of the role of luck and spontaneity in the creation of great works of cinema: nothing Wong has done since has been as insightful, beautiful, or moving, even as his films have disappeared down the rabbit hole of Kubrickian perfectionism. My Blueberry Nights, while minor, represented a step in the right direction: this is a man who needs to make a quick, stylish, unassuming movie at least once a year. Because while it might not rank at the top of my list, of all the movies I’ve ever seen, Chungking Express is the one I love the most, a vision of life that I want to believe, even if it only exists in the head of one of our most interesting directors.

A few years ago, on a trip to Hong Kong, I made a point of seeking out some of this movie’s emotional landmarks, especially a certain outdoor escalator. But in a sense, I already spent most of my twenties trying to recreate these moments, in another great city. The two stories in Chungking Express are a portrait of lonely lives, struggling to connect in tentative ways, mostly at night: a subject that might have seemed grim in the hands of a different director, but here becomes delightfully, irresistibly romantic. The discovery of beauty in everyday spaces—lunch counters, trains, cramped apartments—is one of cinema’s greatest strengths, and Wong is its most seductive recent practitioner. His other films, especially Fallen Angels, are invariably fascinating, but this is the one where all the stars aligned. It may never happen again, but thank God, it happened here.

Tomorrow: A thriller that outdid Hitchcock by way of Duchamp.