Appreciating In the Mood for Love, a beautiful movie filled with dreamlike sepia tones, a beautiful score, and an overall stunning cinematography. The movie captures love between two neighbours in 1960’s Hong Kong. But for me, my favourite Wong Kar-Wai film is Chungking Express, a stylistically faster-paced film taking place in contemporary Hong Kong of 1994.
To me, Chungking Express does a better job of evoking a long-lost time and place, of taking you to a fast-paced ever-evolving city, and of depicting the lives (and quirks) of four central characters in the two intertwining stories as they look to escape their loneliness or fulfill their ambitions.
I’ve never been to that city, but this movie makes me feel as though I’d not only been there, but that I’d also been back, and have seen and felt that it’s all been paved over and replaced.
I can’t think of another movie that makes me recall a particular place and time quite like Chungking Express does. It’s a beautiful movie that gives the viewer a sense of connection with the central characters as well as this particular snapshot of the city they reside in.
