Celebrating film anniversaries always seems ephemeral, but when a film has been part of your life for three decades, there are good reasons to pause, rewind, review, and reassess both the film and your memories of it. You notice new things. The movie’s changed, you’ve changed, and the world has changed. Revisiting Wong Kar Wai’s Chungking Express on the thirtieth anniversary of its release in 1994, I rediscovered a film that is itself obsessed with dates and numbers. Expiration dates on tins of pineapple. Police badge numbers. Distances between people brushing past one another in crowded markets.

It isn’t necessary to know the movie’s plot before reading this collection of creative writers, who I asked to respond to Chungking Express at age thirty using any genre, length, or style they preferred. If you watch or rewatch the film, you’ll see actors who look good in their work clothes sharing meals and attempting to connect, chasing dreams of love that always fall just out of their reach, living in a painful and gorgeous world designed to separate everyone and wreck the timing of their yearnings.

A movie that endures past its expiration date, like Chungking Express, doesn’t just bottle time, it changes our perception of it. The film does this with its signature filmmaking technique of step-printing, through which the picture often looks simultaneously still and in motion. The images in this film are a place where the viewer can live, even if, like me, they’ve never been to Hong Kong and don’t speak the languages in the film.

For the writers assembled here who know these locations better, it’s important to peel away the false impression that Wong’s city is the “real” Hong Kong (something Chungking Express never claimed for itself). The film creates a hall of mirrors in which these writers variously explore autobiography and fiction as they remix a movie that has become a touchstone for a generation of American filmmakers, from Quentin Tarantino to the Daniels and Barry Jenkins. Amidst this atmosphere of cinematic exaltation, it’s joyful to read how several generations of writers with connections to Hong Kong respond to the film with varying degrees of skepticism or playful subversion, talking back creatively to a canonized work of art that was never intended to be timeless or perfect, but that is now super-saturated in stifling nostalgia.

One gets the sense that Wong knew he was creating time capsules in his films of the 1990s from a city that would transform utterly, as it slipped away from British rule and the world he’d known growing up there in the 1960s after his parents emigrated from the Mainland. But Chungking Express was even more ephemeral than some of Wong’s other films. It was shot at breakneck speed without official filming permits in the slack weeks when another film was being completed. Today, Wong’s intersecting storylines of lovelorn law enforcement officers is less likely to amuse those in touch with the political realities of city life, but Chungking Express always had its own sell-by date stamped on its heart. I still fancy the film as a twentieth-century postcard from a world city aware of its own powerful pulse. 

In retrospect, the Hong Kong of Wong Kar Wai might be reimagined as a troubled center of an increasingly globalized world. His cinematic city was a place where loneliness and violence laid bare the confident 1990s dreams and myths of increasingly connected societies supposedly advancing together towards a shared utopian horizon of equality and prosperity that never arrived. History turned out otherwise, there and here (and everywhere else imperial Brits drew lines on their maps, it would seem). Uncorking this film thirty years later, while reading these writers’ open letters to the film, unleashes the bitter with the sweet. Has the elixir gone off in the bottle or has it aged like rare wine? I hope rewatching and reading about Chungking Express now provides glimpses into a past that might yet prove useful in attempting to think through the future.

—JMT