Wong is a director as cosmopolitan as the city he depicts. David Bordwell writes in Planet Hong Kong:

“At last Hong Kong found its exportable festival filmmaker, the one director no intellectual need be ashamed to like. Wong is cosmopolitan.”

He is a director compared to the bestselling Japanese writer Haruki Murakami, and has himself admitted a fondness for literature, and the greater influence it has over him than cinema. And he is a filmmaker promoted in the United States by Quentin Tarantino no less, and compared to the legendary new-wave French filmmaker Jean-Luc Godard. It are these comparisons to Godard — comparisons made due to Wong’s emphasis on visual and stylistic innovations over content — that I wish to focus on.

Bordwell has also described Wong as the most artistically adventurous, and perhaps most important, of contemporary Hong Kong filmmakers. His style is something he terms “avant-pop”. This is to say that a film like Chungking Express falls somewhere between mainstream entertainment cinema and the experimental avant-garde cinema of the French new-wave. It’s interesting to note that not only does Wong Kar-wai have a background in mass entertainment (writing soap operas and suspense serials), but also in graphic design. French director Cocteau has been quoted as saying that “cinema is still a form of graphic art”. Like this French avant-garde sensibility, Wong Kar-wai writes in pictures, and his work is indebted to French new-wave cinema such as 1960’s Breathless. Despite being heavily idiosyncratic, Wong’s films take popular norms as points of departure, in the same way that Godard drew upon the Hollywood noirs in his production of Breathless. Though it may be a intimate and seductive love story, Chungking Express also borrows ingredients from the film noir genre: the city, policemen and criminals, and bittersweet love stories. Wong uses these popular forms of cinematic entertainment as jumping off points to launch his film into experimentation.

Take for instance, the coffee drinking scene. Cop 663 drinks in slow-motion, whilst Faye motionlessly watches, but the people on the streets still swarm past at speed. Wong achieved this by shooting at 8 frames a second, with Tony Leung lifting his cup of coffee extra slow whist Faye Wong remained stationary. This allowed the moving crowd in the foreground to move quickly when the shot was projected at the normal rate of 24 frames a second. In post-production, the shot was further slowed down by printing multiple copies of single frames creating a sense of slow motion, and enhancing the distinction between the fast foreground and the slow background in the finished product. It is this beautiful and innovative shot that perfectly captures the moment time appears to slow down in comparison to the rest of the world during a moment of intimacy. For Wong, style is substance.

It is his heavily stylised films that have often led to Wong being described as an MTV director by other jealous Chinese directors. Though the correlations can be seen — an emphasis on music and style — it is in fact truer to say that music videos have been inspired by Wong’s films, as opposed to the other way round. Despite being a heavily stylised and narratively simple film, a featuring a fantastic breakout performance from pop-star Faye Wong, Chungking Express provides a lot more emotional depth than one of her music videos. Much of the film’s simplicity and experimentalism equally comes from its unusual production. It was shot in 23 days without a written script, Wong effectively making it up as he went along, often only writing scenes the night before, or on the day of shooting. As is the case for many of Wong’s films (take In the Mood for Love for instance), the film is made up of ideas assimilated from his own cast and crew, as well as his own memories and experiences. There is nostalgia here, both collective and personal. Thus, not only does this allow the film to appear organically spontaneous but gives the film a fresh sense of intimacy.

It is this spontaneous style that gives the film its content. Wong and his cinematographers, Wai-Keung Lau and Christopher Doyle (each cinematographer shot the first and second story respectively), often choose to shoot their characters and scenes obscured by the mise-en-scène of theirs spaces: through doorways and windows, and in the reflections of mirror. It is this framing technique that not only displays and transforms the confined spaces of the metropolis, but offers up new perspectives and ways of looking at things, creating a polyphony that is enhanced by the film’s numerous voice-overs. The vibrant colours and blaring tunes create a texture to the city, as if Wong is looking at the city through a kaleidoscope. And the film’s multiple narratives has ambitions of capturing this multifarious texture. Wong Kar-wai says:

“The two stories are quite independent. What puts them together is that they are both love stories. I think a lot of city people have a lot of emotions but sometimes they can’t find the people to express them to.”

Through doubled motifs, webbed parallels and echoic time structures, is able to bring the independent stories together as a panorama of Hong Kong and city-living. In a kaleidoscope, “the fragments usually tumble into a coherent pattern,” writes Bordwell.