corktown common
Thursday, July 18, 2024

Chungking Express

With the short films A Hundred Joys and She Stoops to Conquer

Celebrating its 30th anniversary year, esteemed auteur Wong Kar-Wai’s Chungking Express is an ode to the romance, danger, and melancholy of the night shift. Set in and around Hong Kong’s busy underground malls and 24-hour food stalls, the film tracks a loosely connected constellation of nocturnal workers on the job, slacking off, and seeking connection beyond the daily grind. Kar-Wai structures the film around two parallel storylines: in the first, we are introduced to a heartbroken young policeman (Takeshi Kaneshiro) who wanders the nighttime city and finds himself in love with an enigmatic blonde-wigged femme fatale (Brigitte Lin) caught up in an underground smuggling ring; in the second, another lovelorn cop (Tony Leung Chiu-Wai) catches the eye of a hip, charming fast food employee (Faye Wong, perhaps the original pixie dream girl) who proceeds to idiosyncratically integrate herself into every aspect of his life. The narrative overlaps, duplications, and rhymes across both stories are rendered in audiovisually audacious style, with cinematography suffused in lush neon light, hazy slow motion, and an irrepressible pop-rock soundtrack.

Local filmmaker Amanda Ann-Min Wong’s documentary short A Hundred Joys is a poetic ode to Toronto’s East Chinatown community, with a particular focus on the small shops and intergenerational business owners that help make up its distinct, resilient cultural identity. As much about memorializing the past as looking ahead to the changes that inexorably come with the passing of time, Wong’s slowly drifting camera captures a warm vignette of a community in transition. Elsewhere in Toronto, local filmmaker Zack Russell (2024 TOPS Spotlight Filmmaker, whose documentary feature Someone Lives Here is also highlighted in this programme) takes us on a phantasmagoric nightlife journey in his fiction short She Stoops to Conquer. When a struggling cabaret performer meets a real-life doppelgänger of her on-stage persona (played by beloved Canadian character actor Julian Richings), things start to get weird. Russell channels Kar-Wai’s hyper-stylized aesthetic and preoccupation with chance encounters to shine a neon light on the perils of performance.