Chungking Express

Even now there's a faint trace of that cheap but haunting theme music in my head, that summed up the movie so well.  Transience, emptiness, wistfulness -- actually that theme lacks a sense of fun (or maybe its cheap quality embodies that).  This movie gets slightly better each time I think about it, because the visuals have stuck with me.  The lighting is true to Hong Kong, realistic but luridly romantic at the same time.  Sally Yeh's blonde wig and dealings with the Middle Easterners stick out irrespective of whatever plot drove them.  I think there was a lot of stuff that happened in that movie, but I guess out of comfort the vast majority of my memories rest with Faye Wong and Tony Leung in and around that little snack shop.  I think the scenes between those two are classic, almost up there with Bogart and Bacall.  Can that sense of malaise and playfulness, the airplane flying around his apartment room, the notes being passed around and lost, be found in America, cultivated in American films?  I'm certain it's out there, and flashes of it show in Clerks and some Hal Hartley movies, but without the romantic verve.  I think it's that romantic sweetness that softens the cynicism and despair underlying the mood of Wong Kar-Wai's characters and setting, but I think the thing is we don't feel that despair nearly as much as our young Hong Kong counterparts, so our transience preoccupies itself with a lot of sex, violence, and pop-driven wisecracks.  So where can I find this kind of sweetness (I know it's somewhere)?  Why do I have the feeling that She's All That has what I'm looking for?

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