The building contains a vast diversity of people from different parts of the world, so it's like a compressed Hong Kong.'Ĭhungking Mansions becomes a House of Fiction, with Wong dropping us into the centre of two stories that happen to touch on each other. The police department considered it to be overused with electricity so it's very dangerous, it could catch fire easily.
'When we researched the building we found there were over 200 hostels there, very shabby, and over 5,000 tourists every day. 'I've been curious about this building since I was very young,' explains Shanghai-born Wong, whose father used to manage a nightclub in the basement. The action is centred around Tsimshatsui, Hong Kong's tourist area, and particularly the building Chungking Mansions - a vast, crammed complex of shops, restaurants, bars and flophouses. A melancholy sort of screwball farce put through a formalist blender, it's the story of two lovelorn cops, two women and a lot of hanging around, but everything, explains the director, begins with the place itself. Set in a snack bar and its environs, Chungking Express is urban cinema par excellence - a story of crowds, crossed paths, stolen kisses and snatched takeaway meals.
Wong Kai-Wai's film Chungking Express, released this week, is Hong Kong from the inside, but with a similarly cosmopolitan perspective - the city refracted through an optic of fast food, Hollywood glamour and early new wave shooting style. That film - made by a director very much at home both in Hong Kong and the US - was at once an insider's and an outsider's view. Another place, however, that's beginning to take on distinctive contours for us is Hong Kong - largely from the huge volume of genre action movies that have become available on video here in the last few years, but also from the occasional legit production like Wayne Wang's underrated 1989 film Life Is Cheap But Toilet Paper Is Expensive, a tall tale of a Chinese-American cowboy lost in the Hong Kong labyrinth. Viewers in the West, whether or not they travel much in the real world, know their way pretty well around virtual versions of New York, Los Angeles and perhaps Paris - but certainly not London, which hasn't figured on cinema's imaginative map for a long time. F or most filmgoers, only three or four cities exist in the world at any given time.
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