A Chungking Expression of a Better Idea of Love.

Master Auteur Wong Kar-wai's Chunking Express is widely considered one of, if not his most brilliant film. It has fervent fans amongst those who have had the pleasure of seeing it. Up until just recently, I had not. Watching ChungKing Express and this now being my third movie of Wong Kar-wai's, I was struck by how well it moved despite the non linear storytelling, and the audaciousness of his chosen narrative techniques, BUT what most stood out, what I loved more than anything was the way that Kar-wai frames love in general. It's a most sincere, thoughtful, sweet, all at once and you're also across time type of framing that seems to have been all but forgotten in cinema of late, given way to a simplistic dichotomy between paint-by-numbers meet-cutes and devastating glares into a more cynical look at not only love but its fleeting nature via “Revolutionary Road”, “Blue Valentine”, and most recently “A Marriage Story”.

By a standard evolving over the past 30 years, the dissolution of love or romantic relationships is almost by necessity an ugly business. Possession, evolution, and time( to name a few) induce rifts, rifts that are answered with anger , frustration, despondency, and rage. These things exist in Kar-Wai films as well but it’s what they end up saying, how they say it that differs. Wong Kar-wai sets love to a Kahlil Gibran mood, tone, and understanding which allows for the shifting , inconsistent, wave like nature of love. It's important to note here that I feel (like I sense that he may feel) that love is not particularly constant, in fact too many times I feel as though that consistency has become if not synonymous, a word commonly and often associated with love. My feeling is that love is the exact opposite of this and that what we refer to now as love is the result of a confusion of the way that we navigate the waters, the waves of love with the ocean itself. It’s a very patriarchal domineering approach. So that if something goes wrong if the wave doesn't crash in the direction we expected it to, if it doesn't flow or guide us to shore in the way that we desire, if it doesn't provide the sustenance WE feel WE need... Then something, or someone has to be blamed. We conquer the seas we dont give into it.

This is in almost total contrast from the way the bulk of Kar Wai's stories display a patience, a compassion a resoluteness, to the divide between people's designs and the actualities of love. That is not to say that the characters don't have designs or that they stop designing once they discover this divide, but that regardless of the fact that, those designs are based upon hope. Take for example He Qiwu ( Takeshi Kaneshiro) stocking up on cans of pineapple juice that expire May 1st in hopes that they will hold some kernel of a Fortune as to the fate of he and May the ex with whom he is infatuated with.

Once they have arrived to the destination of reality, then many of Wong Kar-wai's characters are peacefully resigned as to their romantic fate without any malicious will or attitudes towards their loves. Throughout the Wong Kar Wai movies I've seen, there are very few " I hate you, I hate I hate you, I love I love you I love you moments via “Baby Boy". Very few vitriol riddled standoffs wherein two partners lob a myriad of curse words and obscenities at each other. Very little of the mind of toxicity in amarriage story going on in his films, and I must say it's refreshing.

One of my favorite scenes chungking Express takes place between Tony Leon and Valerie Chow and a small convenience store where they coincidentally meet after a breakup and which Leon received relatively little closure as to why the relationship dissolved in the first place..

Smiles are exchanged , not glares, fighting words or even forced pleasantries. There is a genuine love for the love they once shared, and though there is clearly a longing for what might still be, they are both resolved to live in the present. Whether it is "Days of being Wild", or "In the Mood for Love" this is Wong Kar Wai. What I love about what I see or feel watching Wong Kar Wai films is an appeal to our better natures in love. An appeal to understand love and the loss of it in a deeper way that connects and bonds us rather than tear us apart, a greater ideal of love that flies high above rage, control, blame, and possession even when those things are present within his films.