HONG KONG DREAMIN'

Mid 90's Hong Kong was a vibe.

The end of history met with late-stage capitalism and had a ball.

But that's all over now.

And yet, while it lasted it was kind of beautiful, like drinking chilled grass jelly on a hot summer night while the rotor blades of a fan whirr and blow cold air in your face.

Somehow, nothing better evokes that time than Wong Kar Wai's Hong Kong double movie bill of sorts, Chungking Express (1994) and Fallen Angels (1995) which are like day and night to one another in tone.

For me Chungking Express will always be Faye Wong secretly cleaning Tony Leung's apartment each day in her lunch break as she dances to a Canto cover version of The Cranberries' 'Dreams' while Fallen Angels is He Zwei (Takeshi Kaneshiro), an aggressive mute stealing ice cream vans late at night and holding reluctant customers hostage in them like a semi-psychotic HK Willy Wonka.

Although Chungking has many nocturnal scenes, it feels far lighter both visually and in overall mood than Fallen Angels, which, as a loose sequel to Chungking, feels like the edgy older brother, with its threat of violence far more ever present and the loneliness of the characters drawn even more intensely.

The common motif in both films, however, seems to be that of lone characters, be it a cop, a snack bar worker, an assassin or an entrepreneur looking for companionship and searching for a place to belong, whether it be for just the night or longer term as it is for Faye and her dreams of California.

Love it seems is also hard to find in Wong Kar Wai's mid 90's Hong Kong where characters often seem to pass each other like ships in the night, only occasionally finding safe harbour in brief fleeting moments shared together as, for example, the sublime final scene of Fallen Angels where He Zwei drives Michelle Reis pillion through Tunnel Cross Harbour tunnel into the early breaking dawn of the city.

Stylistically, the films both capture how much of the night time in a major modern city can be a sort of dream-like bardo, a place where emotional drifters, like neon vampires, can come out to search for what they're really looking for, their true feelings having been hidden during the day.

And for the characters in Chungking and Fallen Angels their desire to find a sense of belonging in an increasingly alienating modern world where the internet has yet to rear its ugly head now seems genuinely romantic.

And as I now look back on these magical films in the year 2022 with some form of historical perspective, you might even say they were the last cinematic dance of freedom before Hong Kong was handed back to Bejing in its official transfer of soverignity on July 1st 1997.

POSTSCRIPT

It was 1995. I was 17 years old. I remember like it was yesterday having spent an entire day hibernating in bed fast asleep as the onset of winter became increasingly apparent outside my window. It was a Friday as I recall and I was finally drawn out of my slumber by a knock at the door.

A few of my friends had arrived to pick me up for a late afternoon/early evening screening of Fallen Angels at Gloucester Guildhall. We were excited, having already caught the WKW bug after the success of Chungking Express the year before.

Somehow, the timing now seems perfect. I had mostly avoided the day only to come out in darkness just like the characters in Fallen Angels into this magic land of late night Hong Kong as if I, too, were an extension of that very same universe.

I won't lie. At the time it didn't quite measure up to Chungking on first watch, but one thing I distinctly remember was that ending, so perfect and dreamlike, I felt the same euphoria watching it as falling in love for the first time.

And where else but a Wong Kar Wai movie could The Flying Pickets have been immortalised on celluloid so suprisingly and so exquisitely.

As I said ...

Mid 90's Hong Kong was a vibe.