Caffeinated Clint
Colin Moore says “it’s cool to be in love”
By Colin Moore
It’s cool to be in love. But whatever the pleasure it might be even cooler to be single and in mourning, lounging about the streets of Hong Kong, and hanging off public payphones by sweaty foodstalls. Wang Kar Wai is the filmmaker to make it happen. “Chungking Express” is a three-pack of stories taking place in Chungking Mansions, Tsim Sha Tsui, the bargain basement guesthouse/hostel that Time Asia recently called the best example of globalization in action. After over 25 years of service, the building is said to house close to 4,000. The hodgepodge of businesses and cultures crammed there comes off from the opening frames. He Qiwu is a recent victim of love, a young street cop with a fresh pizza delivery boy face. He’s also going through a young man’s heartbreak, after splitting up with May, a girl we never get to see. From how he handles the split, it might be his first. He Qiwu needs a coping mechanism. He buys cans of pineapple from a local Circle K, one for everyday in April. His rationale is that everything expires: food, life, and love. If a month passes and they’re still apart, he’ll take it as a sign and they’ve both officially hit the skids. May 1st is also He’s birthday, making it doubly prophetic.
But knowing Kar Wai is knowing there’s always a lonelier person in the world. The mystery woman in the trenchcoat and blonde hairpiece seems burnt out from the start. For someone whose livelihood is made from drug running, she does her best to stand out in a crowd. But she seems too tired to care, the product of an empty lifestyle. We meet her as she’s setting up a group of East Indian lackies to run dope abroad. They ditch at the last second, leaving her short money, product, and in a bad way with her boss. Soon she’s being hunted on the streets for her blunder (a good time to change clothes, but no). She’s shot at and kills in self-defense (could take off the wig at least to blend in, but no). She escapes and plans a getaway, (with the coat off?…not exactly) but not before putting herself out in public and at risk again for the sake of whiskey (but changes her wig color at least, for safety?…nevermind). The bar she visits is where she and He meet. He tries a desperate series of lines on her. She’s too tough to bite, but misery loves company and they end up spending the night together, she passed out and he (He) eating salad. He leaves the next morning with a new hope. “Chungking” is a story about real feelings more than real events. People love, lose, cover up the truth with sunglasses or tins of pineapple, and survive until the next opportunity comes along. Cops and drug dealers, job aside, are both turned by same gears.
It’s a more hopeful alternative to the Coen Brothers’ latest, finally making it to Korean theaters this week. Guaranteed, the untied ending, more faithful to Cormac McCarthy’s vision than Hollywood’s, will make this audience gasp and groan. I’ll let you know. Javier Bardem is obviously unforgettable here as the exacting killer Anton Chigurh, but Josh Brolin too needs to be seen in this film. It’s amazing what a Goonie can do. Here he plays the far lessor of the stories two evils. Llewelyn Moss is a welder and hobby hunter who comes across the aftermath of a bloody drug deal. Bodies and old pickup trucks are all that’s left, and a sizable case of money. He takes it and deals with the consequences, rather maturely. “Baby things happen. I can’t take em back.” Like Nicholas Cage’s H.I. McDunnough in “Raising Arizona,” Moss is being pursued by a villain he shouldn’t be able to beat, Chigurh. But “No Country” differs in the filmmaker’s more fatalistic view of the world, more than even usual. Here the old saying still stands, “You can run but you can’t hide,” with an important add-on, “You can never really win either.” In “Arizona” Hi is able to survive a premature death by the two things almost every Coen Brothers hero has, dumb luck and resourcefulness. Brolin, unfortunately, is not.
But the notion that the future is out of our hands doesn’t only apply to Moss. After his final kill, Chigurh is rammed by a vehicle at quiet suburban intersection. He limps away, like a wounded dog with the fire suddenly nipped out of him. It’s no accident that he was taken down a notch by a random event, even less that he had a green light when it happened. It’s his comeuppance, and as he sits stunned on the curbside, the look in his eyes says he doesn’t like it one bit. Life happens to everyone, sooner to later. But back to Kar Wai.
If he seems a director with only one story to tell, at least “Chungking Express” tells it in a different way. The difference is speed and drive. “2046” and “In the Mood for Love” are stories of loneliness that crawl. “Chungking” features younger characters in cheaper clothing, but set in today’s world. The music and camera work are more alive than any Kar Wai film before or since. He abandons the tripod and any desire to show the trademark lush reclusiveness of his characters seen in later films. Tony Leung gives his usual best for Kar Wai as the film’s second law officer, this time a beat cop in uniform. When we meet him he’s involved with a stewardess…sorry, flight attendant. They break up and suddenly he’s a lost cause, talking to stuffed animals and towels, and showing worry for his bar of soap’s weight loss. He too is trying to make sense of this love thing.
Tarantino’s now defunct Rolling Thunder Productions presents the film. A DVD extra puts him in front of the camera where he explains, as only Quentin can, his involvement with the film, first as a fan, and then as an international distributor. Before Miramax pulled their financing in 1998, Rolling Thunder’s job was to present that harder-to-know selection of international, foreign, and exploitation films to a wider audience. Like Tarantino’s own “Pulp Fiction”, “Chungking” contains overlapping locations and characters, some of which pop their heads into frame before it’s actually their turn to. “Pulp” though connects its characters together over a wider range of streets and apartment hallways, restaurants and sicko rec-rooms. As Quentin will tell you, the energy of “Chungking” is high. What he doesn’t say is that it’s far too boppy to think of this world dangerous. Even when our trenchcoated friend shoots her sleezebag boss in cold blood, there’s nothing fearsome about it, though nor is it supposed to be. Just another forlorn day in a low rent hotel.
