Wong Kar-Wai patterns an optimistic and humorous portrayal of romance in his film Chungking Express (Wong Kar-Wai, 1994). The film relates two romance stories taking place in Hong Kong, which at first glance appear disconnected. Its fragmented plot is carefully ornamented with parallelisms and motifs, resembling an intricate puzzle. An obvious correlation between the two stories insinuates that both male characters struggle with unsuccessful romantic relationships, whereas the female ones succeed in helping them escape from that state of oblivion. However, Wong’s elaborate exercise transcends itself from a mere cinephile game to a multi-layered illusive metaphor, by hijacking the comedy vehicle, yet without dispensing any part of the artistry of romance. Wong’s use of cinematography is a catalyst in composing such a tragicomic exaggeration of loneliness and desperate romance, through patterns of framing techniques, where perspective, camera angle and distance construct a view of the unavoidable embarrassment of falling in and out of love. Wong’s close-ups intensify the lonesome moments of the characters, the interplay of onscreen and offscreen space magnifies the omnipresence of the big city, and the combination of depth of field and framing anthropomorphise the characters’ favourite objects. 

The tragicomic nature of romance is cunningly depicted by Wong’s cinematography in two scene sequences in Chungking Express, where the camera invades the private moments of the two officers in their cramped apartments.

The sequence from the first story in which Wong first introduces officer #223 in his private space takes place at a turning point of the character’s conflict with love, when he comes to terms with the expiration of his relationship with May, by devouring 30 cans of pineapple that were carefully chosen to expire on his birthday, May the 1st. The scene opens with a close-up on a green-lighted fish tank full of goldfish, and the camera pans slightly to the left revealing #223 eating from the pineapple can and smiling to the fish. The cramped framing of #223 between the fish tank and the pile of cans emphasizes both the pressure of his vow to finish the expiring cans by the end of the day, as well as the small size of a big city apartment. As Bordwell (2013c: 186) teaches us, the spatial limitations of the frame have a strong influence on our perception of a scene, which is designed to indicate the invisible. In that fashion, the confinement impression created by the close-ups in Wong’s framing, stresses the offscreen ubiquity of the city of Hong Kong.

The entire scene portrays the last moments that connect him to his expiring relationship, however #223 is treating the situation rather lightly, by nodding to the fish, petting his dog and smiling away, while he is chewing the pineapple and sipping the juice from the can. His playful mood and dedication in finishing the cans indicates eagerness in achieving closure and moving on to a new life. At the final shot, the camera reframes to the fish tank and pans to the left, revealing the dog  - out of focus in the deep lens field, sitting on the stool where his master was sitting earlier and looking out of the window, whereas on the foreground the pile of the now emptied pineapple cans are in focus. The officer’s gradual movement away from the camera, and therefore away from the cramped spot with the cans and the fish tank, to his complete absence in the final shot, denotes his effort to escape from the desperation of an unsuccessful relationship. The image of the dog staring out of the window constitutes a potent onscreen/offscreen interplay, which adds weight on the absence of #223, and marks a decisive moment of acceptance of the necessity to change (Bordwell and Thompson, 2013a: 428). The predominantly static camera of the shot time-stretches the private and lonesome moments of the officer, and accentuates his gradual departure from the centre of attention, and thereafter his getaway from his own trapped reality. The scarce mobility of the frame, entirely devoted to the pile of cans, both at the beginning and the end of the scene, before and after they get emptied, contradicts the heavily exaggerated task of finishing 30 of them in one evening. This self-imposed suffering seems to originate from an eagerness to escape (Provencher, 2016: 37), and Wong’s humorous gimmicks of temporal and spatial pressure assist in offering #223 the possibility of emergence from a mind-numbing situation. 

The sequence of desperate lonesomeness appearing in the second story consists of a series of short shots in the flat of officer #633, depicting him in various moments talking to objects. A long exterior shot of the flat introduces the location of the scene, where the lighted bathroom window, delivers a strong offscreen space function, foreshadowing the presence of #633 in the bathroom. In the same opening image, the kitchen rag hanging on the window is at the centre of the frame, signalling a cry for help. For the rest of the sequence, Wong employs a series of metaphors that render an intimate atmosphere with the protagonist and amplify the chagrin of the lovelorn.

The first interior shot, starting from a dark wall in the flat and panning left to reveal officer #633 sitting on the toilet seat and talking to a bar of soap in a soothing tone, combines the element of surprise with intimacy, composing a highly comic tone. The sequence cuts to a close-up of a kitchen rag soaking wet and dripping in front of the window of the opening scene, and a right pan shows #633 in the kitchen, holding the rag, and trying to console it for “crying”. Wong initiates this scene with the rag as the focus piece and the window grilles in the background, constructing a sense of imprisonment for the gloomy rag, and a desperation for escape; but the officer still has to figure that out. The close-ups of his hands and torso add gravity to the character’s privacy (Bordwell and Thompson, 2013b: 193), whereas the rag becomes a protagonist, being instrumental in alleviating the officer’s pain, but most of all imposing a comically melancholic atmosphere.

The tragicomic symbolism of need for solace continues with a cut to #633’s profile, who is petting his stuffed animals while leaning against a pink-lighted fish tank full of goldfish. In the last part of the sequence, #633 stares at his ex-girlfriend’s hanging shirt, in what seems to be a point-of-view shot of the shirt, and finishes with him ironing it, in an attempt to warm it up and relieve it from feeling lonely and cold. In this sequence of semiotic images, Wong’s use of textuality in cinematography composes a poetic language ((Corrigan and White, 2015: 128), and his characters depictions imply ‘a kind of control over them, knowledge of them, or power to determine what they mean’ (Corrigan and White, 2015: 123). However, the strongest impact of the use of comic elements is the implication that the phenomenologically absurd world that the character lives in is more real than a perfectly rational life under control, or as Abbas (2016: 120) phrases it, Wong’s comedy ‘is based on the principle that the visible is not the intelligible’.

Wong uses repeatedly close-ups of the characters to emphasize the small size of the apartments, establish a sense of intimacy, and magnify their isolation and loneliness. However, this use of the camera in their private space does not create an intrusive feeling, but it rather serves as a substitute of the intimacy they lack in their lives; the camera becomes their supportive friend, who is there to pick them up when they fall. In the first sequence, the close-up of officer #223 and his reflection on the fish tank transpires a flirtatious mood, almost as if the character acknowledges the presence of the camera, or as if his narcissistic romanticism imagines that the lover is watching him. Wong repeatedly ‘dramatizes the side-long eye-play of flirtation … and takes seriously all youth’s conceits’ (Bordwell, 2013: 178). Similarly, the persistent stare of officer #633 in the high angle close-up shot towards the hanging shirt of his ex-girlfriend while smoking, creates a magazine-like seductive tone; if he seduces her shirt, maybe she will come back.

The mise-en-scène and cinematography motifs used in both sequences, such as the fish tank, the dog and stuffed animals, the small cramped apartments, the close-ups of the characters and the objects, and the shallow/deep lens focus in confined spaces, establish a parallelism between the two stories that narratively seem disconnected. Bordwell (2013a: 426) suggests that this split narrative structure has as main objective to drive the audience to come up with their own interpretation of the relationship between the two stories, and he proposes to take the film as ‘an exercise in comparative romance accounts’ (Bordwell, 2011: 180). However, the repeated use of double-takes and semiotic images develops a humorous tone, which acts as an empathetic and optimistic consolation of the characters’ struggle with love, and functions as a bait for creating an intimate relationship with the characters. Therefore, deciphering the signs and parallelisms becomes a futile task, and as Abbas (2016: 121) vigorously expresses ‘all explanations are inherently comic and hermeneutics turns into an exercise of “pataphysics”’.

As Wong’s recurring close-ups, parallel images and poetic metaphors juxtapose the humorous and melancholic attributes of falling in love, romance becomes one of the main characters in Chungking Express, embracing its victims with tenderness and tease. Provencher (2016: 35) aptly describes the optimistic way Wong demonstrates his characters’ misery in romance: ‘just like the gambler … characters are motivated by chance … and that is exactly the way they like it’. There is a determinism in the characters’ inability to take their lives seriously, and Wong adapts the most forceful way to portray it: agony in jest.

Filmography

Kar-Wai, Wong, Chungking Express, 1994. Film. HK/USA: Miramax. 

Bibliography

Abbas, A. (2016) ‘Wong Kar-Wai’s Cinema of Repetition’, in Nochimson, M. P. (ed.) A Companion to Wong Kar-Wai. UK: Wiley-Blackwell, pp. 120–122.

Bordwell, D. (2011) ‘Romance on Your Menu: Chungking Express’, in Hamel, M. (ed.) Planet Hong Kong: Popular Cinema and the Art of Entertainment. 2nd edn. Madison, Wisconsin, USA: Irvington Way Institute Press, pp. 180–185.

Bordwell, D. (2013) ‘Avant Pop-Cinema’, in Hamel, M. (ed.) Planet Hong Kong: Popular Cinema and the Art of Entertainment. 2nd edn. Madison, Wisconsin, USA: Irvington Way Institute Press, pp. 166–179.

Bordwell, D. and Thompson, K. (2013a) ‘Chungking Express (Chung Hing sam lam)’, in Film Art: An Introduciton. 10th edn. New York: McGraw-Hill, pp. 425–429.

Bordwell, D. and Thompson, K. (2013b) ‘Functions of Framing’, in Film Art: An Introduciton. 10th edn. New York: McGraw-Hill, pp. 191–195.

Bordwell, D. and Thompson, K. (2013c) ‘Onscreen and Offscreen Space’, in Film Art: An Introduciton. 10th edn. New York: McGraw-Hill, pp. 186–188.

Corrigan, T. and White, P. (2015) ‘Making Sense of the Film Image’, in The Film Experience: An Introduction. 4th edn. Boston, New York: Bedford/St. Martin’s, pp. 122–130.

Provencher, K. (2016) ‘Transnational Wong’, in Nochimson, M. P. (ed.) A Companion to Wong Kar-Wai. UK: Wiley-Blackwell, pp. 23–44.