Chungking Express (Blu-ray) (Criterion Collection) (US Version) Blu-ray Region A

Chungking Express takes its name from two colourful Hong Kong locations - the Chungking Mansions, a bustling hive of life that houses all sorts of characters involved in shady activities, and the Midnight Express fast-food bar, where several of these characters live their lives and pass each other on a day to day basis. In the first part of the film, we meet plainclothes cop #223, He Qiwu (Takeshi Kaneshiro), who has just broken-up with his girlfriend May. Unwilling to let go of the relationship, he sets the date of his 25th birthday as a time when, like the expiry date on the cans of pineapple he eats, he needs to accept that the expiry date of their relationship has also been reached. He meets a mysterious woman at a bar, a drug dealer (Brigitte Lin) wearing sunglasses and a blonde wig who has been set-up by her ex-partner. In one of those strange coincidences that occur in that part of the city, this unlikely couple of cop and drug-dealer cross paths and find in each other the motivation they need to move on.

The second story, only very loosely connected to the first part, sees another policeman known only as #633 (Tony Leung), who takes advice on his love-life from the owner of the Midnight Express snack-bar (Chen Jinquan). When his air-hostess girlfriend disappears on a rescheduled flight, he fears the worst and won't open the letter that has been left behind the counter for him. The owner's cousin, Faye (played by Cantonese pop-idol, Faye Wong) who works at the bar is curious about the handsome policeman and finds a set of keys in the envelope. Being somewhat of a romantic dreamer, spending her days at the food-bar playing California Dreaming by The Mamas and the Papas, she hatches a plot in her mind, visiting #633's house and surreptitiously injecting her own touches and personality into his place.

On paper, the plot descriptions of Chungking Express, as in most Wong Kar-Wai films, not only fail to capture what the films are about, they are actually make the films sound whimsical and trivial. But that is precisely what makes them so wonderful. In their own eccentric way, the stories that make up Chungking Express perfectly capture the fickleness of relationships, how people cope and move on, and how chance and coincidence play a large part in the way that people who normally pass each other on the street everyday can suddenly connect in unexpected ways. A lot of the success of Chungking Express must be therefore be attributed to the almost perfect cast who all deliver charismatic and sympathetic performances that capture the essence of these characters and the lives they lead.

Shooting, editing and releasing the film in just three months in improvised locations amid the seething hustle and bustle of downtown Hong Kong, the filmmaking process of Chungking Express is perfectly in tune with its subject matter. Wong Kar-Wai and cinematographer Christopher Doyle's dazzling, busy, blurry handheld camera (with Andrew Lau on second unit photography) capture the movement, colour and moments of magic that exist in the everyday lives of ordinary people - the little dreams, frustrations and coincidences that make up their lives. There are so many 'little moments' in this film and everyone will have their own favourites: Takeshi Kaneshiro's bar encounter with Brigitte Lin in her sunglasses and blonde wig; Tony Leung, devilishly handsome in his police uniform as he slips from the shadows into the light of the Midnight Express counter to the strains of California Dreaming; Faye Wong wrestling with a giant Garfield cuddly toy or dancing around in #633's apartment to her own Cantonese recording of a Cranberries song; or even just the sight of kitchen staff singing with a carrot. All these scenes capture the whole experience of falling in and out of love, of living and dreaming, and that's all Chungking Express is about.

DVD
Chungking Express is released in Korea by AltoDVD. The film is contained in an individual slimline cardboard digipack, held together with a slipcase displaying the poster artwork for each film on front and back. The DVD is encoded for Region 3 and is in NTSC format.

Video
The video quality is striking. I've seen the film before on a number of DVD and VCD editions - this would be the fourth edition of Chungking Express I've owned on DVD - and I've never seen either film look as good as they do here. I wouldn't have believed they could look this good, since even the previous best editions of the film still showed numerous tiny marks and scratches that I thought must have been inherent in the rough and ready nature of the making of the film. Not so. On this edition of Chungking Express, there are no marks or scratches on the film at all. If you have seen any other edition of the film on DVD, you can imagine exactly how big a difference that makes. What might not be evident from the screenshots accompanying this review however is just how fluid and stable the film now looks, with not a single flicker or digital artefact, perfectly detailing even the most blurred motion and time-lapse sequences of the film. Doubtlessly restored, the quality of the prints here reveals Chungking Express to be as clear and colourful as we have become accustomed to expect from Wong Kar-Wai in films like In The Mood For Love and 2046. Only blacks are relatively less well defined, not showing a great amount of shadow detail. Some might find the 1.78:1 aspect ratio of the transfer an issue, but in practice it appears to make very little difference to the composition of the film. Otherwise, the film looks outstanding and it is hard to conceive of it looking any better than it does here.

Audio
Perhaps more controversially, the original Dolby Digital 2.0 track has been dropped in favour of new Dolby Digital 5.1 and DTS 5.1 remixes. Considering the rights to the film belong to the filmmakers themselves and that the film has doubtlessly been restored by Jet Tone/Block 2 Pictures, I would expect that these would be official restorations and remixes of the original soundtrack. (Incidentally, the copyright date at the end of the credits is 1999, but I don't know what that indicates.) The surround mixes here are fabulous. There is a fair amount of hiss still audible on the dialogue track - evidently a consequence of the improvisational nature of the original analogue recording - but the dialogue is clear with none of the roughness, crackle and sibilance found on previous editions of the film. The central channel that contains the dialogue sounded slightly low in the mix on my sound set-up, particularly when the music score and other ambient effects, both of which play a major part of in the film, were being output on the other channels - but the overall effect of the new mixes is powerful and enveloping, as this film ought to be, with no noticeable re-recording or addition of new sounds or music cues. It's hard to hold any grudge against the non-inclusion of the original 2.0 mixes, which on any previous DVD edition has always sounded very rough and crackly.

Subtitles
English and Korean subtitles are provided in a clear white font and are of course both optional. They are good and in keeping with the traditional tone of the films, but not perfect. There are no annoying grammatical or spelling errors, but rather a few typos, dropping a couple of letters here and there - "rainning" for "raining" and "ou" for "out" for example. These are not frequent - two or three on Chungking Express.

Extras
The film comes with Korean Commentary track, which will not be of any use to English viewers. I would be curious about how anyone could provide a commentary for such an elliptical film as this, but without knowing what it consists of, I can't make any comment on the quality or appropriateness. Other than that we have a Trailer (2:44) for Chungking Express, letterboxed at a ratio of about 1.60:1, and a Trailer (2:43).

All editions present the film at a ratio of 1.78:1. There are slight but noticeable differences in the framing of each of the editions - the US edition being clearly zoomed in. The US Miramax edition is also the least accurate in terms of colour timing, the Korean to my eyes having moreover much more clarity, detail of tone, sharpness and lack of grain than the Artificial Eye release. The most evident difference between the Korean R3 and the other editions, is in the cleaning up of the thousands of tiny marks and scratches that riddled the film.

Overall
Initially undertaken as a filler project, Chungking Express and its follow-up Fallen Angels are far from throwaway films - Wong Kar-Wai and cinematographer Christopher Doyle rather take the opportunity to do something fresh and immediate, experimenting with spontaneous storytelling and filmmaking techniques that would lead the way towards the more intuitive and improvisational explorations of character and mood in Happy Together, In The Mood For Love and 2046. Both these groundbreaking films still hold that sense of fun, freshness and willingness to take chances that lies at the heart of the characters whose stories they tell. This is all the more evident when you are able to see the films in the full-colour, unblemished glory that the Korean DVD transfers provide. If this is how good Chungking Express and Fallen Angels can look, the prospect of Ashes of Time being restored to a similar level is almost too staggering to contemplate.

by Noel Megahey - DVD Times