Chungking Express

May I take the opportunity to once more tout the virtues of Wong Kar-Wai's filmmaking. It is not just that I am fodder for cult films. After watching Chungking Express today I noticed the themes that pass through this one, In The Mood For Love and 2046. Good cult filmmakers tend to operate within a confined area of interest, repeating its exploration and expression in varying but unmistakable ways across the filmmaker's oeuvre - or at least the cult clusters of it. Wong's is the immortal transience of love, the subjectivity of its experience, the chance encounters that occasion them and untie them once more, and the dynamics that allow them to be fulfilled or doom them. Cult filmmakers are defined by their obsessions.

I was going to say cult filmmakers' works, but in the case of Wong I thought better of it ...

Chungking Express - perhaps slightly less so than 2046 - is a flawed work, less tied to a grand vision and the precision of its execution than the logic of its themes. One gets the sense that the movie was going to have more of the first set of characters, and then suddenly "within six hours she had fallen in love with someone else", and this narrator and the girl he met the previous night disappear from the movie to continue in the new setting with different characters. Nevertheless, in my opinion the second part of the movie is better than the first and the actors also carry it better.