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Although the specificities of the letter are never revealed to the audience, the moment of Cop 663’s acknowledgement of the letter allows for two scenarios: He won’t read it, thus the heartbreak will never be materialized OR he reads it and spirals into emotional pain. As twenty-two seconds of step-printing plays, only Faye and Cop 663 remain still, while the rest of the world turns. Yet, we can also imagine Faye’s longing for the cop, along with the realization her newfound crush is still emotionally invested in his previous relationship. In this lapse, we can imagine Cop 663 reminiscing on the life he had with the airline stewardess for the last 5 years. Instead of seeing a physical change to Cop 663 in this time of mourning, the audience can reflect on how the cinematographers feel about both Faye and Cop 663.
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Yet, the concentration of time that elapses when Faye presents the hand-written note to Cop 663 from his ex-girlfriend is just as listless as the feelings of romantic loss. It is worth pointing out that part two of the film follows much slower, romantic sequencing in comparison to the first. Cop 663 is also faced with the betrayal of love, in this case from an airline stewardess. In part two of the Chungking Express, Wong Kar-wai’s signature step-printing is back: fueled by the combination of slow motion, time-lapse, and motion blur in a single frame. When he realizes this is an impossible scenario, he searches through the city to find his next meaningful love, or at least to feel close to someone again: “ This was the closest we ever got. In a dream-like performance, Cop 223 wonders the city hoping his ex-girlfriend will chalk their break up to a practical joke.
Chungking express opening movie#
His love has ended their relationship and the second part of the movie shows Cop 223’s fight to stop the expiration of love and time. One, his affinity towards true love has backfired. The constant stream of neon lights, the hussle and bussle of the market (never failing to unveil the seedy undergrounds of the city), and the crowd of people is a common sight in Hong Kong food markets, yet Cop 223 is facing two struggles. The step-printing effect aids in both the film’s illusion of time and feeling of isolation. The scene is not in slow-motion or fast-motion, but a kind of different motion that is slow and fast at the same time. The visual effect places him clearly in the scene, but also removes him from it, as the background is blurry and almost seems as though he is not entirely in the same place as the background. In the opening scene of Chungking Express, when Cop 223 is running after a suspect, he is in focus, but the background isn’t, which makes his background look like a blurry string of neon lights behind/around him. The process, more simply, is basically the duplication of a film frame, creating an interesting type of motion that is hard to define without visuals, but easy to recognize when you see it. Step-printing uses an optical printer to repeat frames, so that in the end, the scene kind of looks like a flip-book. And perhaps, his approach and reason to this was in-part to reflect how he perceives time as moving at different speeds within his own career. While Hong Kong films, at least at the time, were known for their fast paced approach, Wong Kar-Wai created a film in Chungking Express that is both fast and slow. This manipulation of time is not meaningless however, the ways in which he does so is to reflect how time moves differently for different characters/situations, connecting us closer to their stories– instilling empathy in many respects. As the remainder of this post will discuss in different ways, Wong Kar-Wai manipulates time through film techniques that alter the speed of motion. The context in which he made the film – moving from editing a film that was long, slower paced in time, to producing a film that was quick paced in time, and then returning back to the slower paced one – is in various ways actually reflected in his treatment of time in Chungking Express.
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Just as a writer needs to take breaks at times to look at their work with an objective lense, he felt he needed to step away for a bit, and decided to use the time to put out a quickly produced / quick hitting film, which would become Chungking Express. According to Quentin Tarantino, Wong Kar-Wai was actually working on a different/epic movie, he had been editing for multiple years but had felt stalled in the process.
![chungking express opening chungking express opening](https://asianwiki.com/images/d/dc/Chungking_Express-p1.jpg)
The context in which Wong Kar-Wai actually made Chungking Express is interesting to note as it relates to the techniques he uses to alter speed of motion in the film. By Meagan Johnson, Emily Nagler, Dylan Kanaan, Joalda Morancy, and Haina LuĬalifornia Dreamin’-The Mama’s and the Papa’s (to supplement your reading)