On Films I Want to Watch

Chungking Express (1994) was the Masculin féminin of the 1990s, a pop art movie about cool twentysomethings looking for love in the city that has replaced Paris as the center of the world-cinema imagination. What Jean-Luc Godard did for “the generation of Marx and Coca-Cola” in the mid-1960s, Wong Kar-wai did for restless Hong Kong youth during the anxious decade that preceded the handoff to China. Masculin féminin (1966) and Chungking Express were the first films in which their respective directors focused predominantly on characters who were around ten years their juniors. This generation gap imparts a sense of distance mixed with tenderness, and also focuses the films on the dominant issue for heterosexual young adults: how to negotiate the desire and confusion they feel vis-à-vis the opposite sex.

Made while Wong was taking a break from the lengthy, difficult post­production of his only martial arts period picture, Ashes of Time (1994), Chungking Express was intended as a money-generating quickie for the director’s Jet Tone company, and indeed the movie, which was made in three months, start to finish, has a wacky spontaneity that is unique in his oeuvre. Wong piled on the commercial elements: the first half is a nod to the gangster thriller, the second is pure screwball romance. The protagonists of both sections are cops, and the four main actors are all Asian box office attractions: pop music idols Takeshi Kaneshiro and Faye Wong, Hong Kong action/dramatic star Tony Leung Chiu-wai, and veteran actress Brigitte Lin Ching-hsia (the film’s only fortysomething star, coming out of retirement for a cameo appearance as a drug smuggler, fashioned as an homage to another middle-aged cult actress, Gena Rowlands in Gloria). Again comparing the film with Masculin féminin, the female leads in both are played by singers with youth culture followings. But unlike Masculin féminin’s Chantal Goya, a pop singer playing the role of a pop singer, Faye Wong in Chungking Express plays a waitress, albeit one who becomes identified with two songs—the Mamas and the Papas’ “California Dreamin’” and a Cantonese cover of the Cranberries’ “Dreams” by a singer named Faye Wong—which accompany her as she works. While the difference in strategy is minimal—at one point or another, both performers either lip-synch or dance to their own recorded voices—the difference between Godard’s and Wong’s depictions of the female characters is enormous. The Goya character is monstrous in her narcissism and vacuity. On the other hand, Wong is as empathetic with Faye Wong’s waitress as he is with the cops played by Kaneshiro and Leung.

In Asia, the film didn’t disappoint, sweeping the Hong Kong Film Awards and doing well at the box office. In the United States, how­ever, the turnout was disappointing, perhaps because Miramax, which distributed Chungking Express as a presentation by Quentin Tarantino’s Rolling Thunder company, was perplexed about whether to market it as an art film or an Asian exploitation flick. Nevertheless, the combination of filmmaking pyrotechnics and wistful romance proved irresistible to cinephiles. Chungking Express established Wong’s repu­tation as a major auteur, the most glamorous and enigmatic since Godard. It also marked a turning point in his work, a shift in direction that is actually signaled within the film, when the desultory underworld revenge narrative fades away and is replaced by a love story as simple as it is delirious. Writing in 1966 about Masculin féminin, Pauline Kael observed that “Godard has liberated his feeling for modern youth from the American gangster-movie framework which limited his expressiveness and his relevance to the non-movie-centered world.” Wong makes the same move in Chungking Express, underlining the separation by placing it midway through the film.

The narrative of Chungking Express comprises two separate and distinct stories. Although they are thematically related, each has its own central characters and locations. (If you look sharply, however, you can catch glimpses of characters from the second part in a few shots in the first.) The first story harks back to the genre action elements of Wong’s first feature, As Tears Go By (1988), while the second section prefigures the romantic yearnings of his later films Happy Together (1997), In the Mood for Love (2000), and 2046 (2004). Ashes of Time, which Wong finally completed shortly after Chungking Express, is also a genre action picture but teeters on the brink of abstraction. (In the revised 2008 version, Ashes of Time Redux, Wong removes some of the stylistic links to genre, making the narrative even more abstract.) And Fallen Angels (1995), which Wong conceived as the third section of Chungking Express but spun off as a separate feature, is a hyperbolic amalgam of gangster violence and mad love, as ungeneric a noir as could be imagined, and not only because the frequent fish-eye-lensed close-ups turn its cast of beauties, male and female, into a bunch of banana noses. Wong’s reputation as an art-house director rests with the three later, increasingly operatic romances—Happy Together, In the Mood for Love, and 2046—in part because genre films have never been fully accepted within the art-film canon, and in part because Wong’s mastery of sensuous polyrhythms and lush visual and aural textures was not as fully developed in the earlier films.

Minimally plotted, each section of Chungking Express focuses on a lovesick cop who pines for his ex-girlfriend until another woman captures his attention. One might venture that the first section, which opens with one of Wong’s signature step-printed chase sequences, this one through the teeming corridors and blind alleys of Chungking Mansions—a warren of flophouses, cut-rate shops, and import-export “businesses” that is a haven to criminals and the poor of all nations—is something of a blind alley itself, one which Wong drops after less than forty minutes in favor of a more promising romantic situation. It’s as if the film itself is looking for love in the same way that its characters are—by trial and error. The protagonist of the first section is a plainclothes cop, officer no. 223 (Kaneshiro), who is seen running hard in that opening chase scene and in another, shorter chase where he makes a collar, pretty much the only exercise of his profession in the film. Mostly what no. 223 does is obsess about his girlfriend, May, who jilted him on April Fools’ Day. No. 223 has given May until May 1, his twenty-fifth birthday, to come back to him. He marks the days of this countdown by buying cans of pineapple (“May loves pineapple,” he tells us in voice-over), each dated to expire on May 1. If she doesn’t call him on his birthday, the relation­ship will expire as well. It is doubtful that May (whom we never see in the film) knows or, if she did, would care at all about this ultimatum.

But like objects in a dream, the pineapple cans, and their looming sell-by date, condense multiple meanings and associations. May was no. 223’s number-one girlfriend, but he must let go of his love for her (“When did everything start having an expiration date?” he muses) in order to move on to the next stage of his life, a transition marked by his birthday. Then there is the canned pineapple itself, whose mass-produced sweetness is as cloying as the puppy love no. 223 feels. In fact, with May 1 only hours away, he tries to feed some of the syrupy stuff to his dog, who, like May, manifests no interest in such an absurd ritual of devotion. But no. 223’s eating orgy—he downs all thirty cans—transfers his heartache to his tummy, so that in puking up the pineapple he is relieved of the past and immediately fancies himself in love with the next woman he meets.

Hovering over the web of associations that defines the psyche of no. 223 is another countdown: in 1994, the handover of Hong Kong to China was only three years away. Comic anxiety about sex and romance is a front for the deeper fear that political freedom­—an entire way of life—has an expiration date in the near future. The most striking difference between Masculin féminin and Chungking Express is the constant political activity and chatter in the former and its total absence in the latter. While this difference reflects a change in youth culture from the 1960s to the 1990s, it doesn’t mean that Wong is an apolitical director. Rather, like Eastern European filmmakers of the Soviet era or, more to the point, like some of his Chinese mainland contemporaries, he smuggles politics into his films through metaphor. Thus the loaded meaning of the expiration date of canned goods.

The darker aspect of the collective anxiety about the handover is reflected in the situation of Brigitte Lin’s blonde-wigged gangster. When someone slips her a can of sardines dated May 1, she gets the message: time is running out for her. If she doesn’t deliver the drugs that her two-timing couriers have stolen, she will die. She and no. 223 run into each other—literally collide—in the opening chase sequence. A smart cop would spot that her wig, dark glasses, and trench coat are a disguise, but no. 223 doesn’t realize then, or when he picks her up in a bar exactly “fifty-seven hours later,” that she is potentially the collar of a lifetime. His vision clouded, like so many of Wong’s male protagonists, by déjà vu—by the nearly forgotten “impact” of their first encounter—he fancies himself in love with her. They wind up in a hotel room, where she instantly falls asleep and he consumes four chef salads (there is hardly a scene in the film that doesn’t involve eating), and then removes her shoes and polishes them before leaving. Their relationship is utterly chaste, and yet the small acts of tenderness they extend to each other free them both—her to take care of business and him to resume his search for love.

Chungking Express, the title under which the film was released in the United States, is not a direct translation of the original Hong Kong title, Chung hing sam lam (Chungking Jungle). The U.S. title suggests the kind of synthetic space that only exists in dreams or movies—Chungking referring to Chungking Mansions, the primary location of the first section, and Express to the Midnight Express, the popular take-out restaurant around which the action of the second part revolves. The Midnight Express has already figured in the first section: it’s where no. 223 goes to call his answering service (his password is “love you for ten thousand years”) to find out if there have been any calls from the elusive May. The proprietor tries to fix him up with one of his waitresses, who is also named May, but no. 223 isn’t interested. When he stops at the Midnight Express after his night with the mysterious blonde, May has moved on, and the proprietor suggests that no. 223 try the new waitress, Faye (Faye Wong). No. 223 accidentally sees an Indian man washing windows and responds, “Do you think I go out with guys?” Hopelessly confused—or maybe just a bit stupid—no. 223 proves himself not yet ready for love. He leaves the Midnight Express and is never seen again. As far as the narrative of the film is concerned, his story is over.

Into his place steps uniform cop no. 663 (Leung), who routinely stops by the Midnight Express to pick up a chef salad for his flight attendant girlfriend. Wong gives Leung, who will become his filmic alter ego, an entrance to die for. The shot is ostensibly from Faye’s point of view, but as no. 663 walks into close-up, she’s not the only one instantly smitten by the most soulful set of peepers in contemporary cinema. There is, however, someone who is immune to his charms, and soon no. 663 is jilted just like no. 223. Faye, using the keys that his ex-girlfriend drops at the Midnight Express, begins visiting no. 663’s apartment while he’s walking the beat, to do a bit of housecleaning. Wong will use this home-invasion ploy to more carnal effect in Fallen Angels, but nothing else in his films comes close to the giddiness with which Faye applies herself to housework as transgression, swiveling to the beat of “Dreams” on the soundtrack, or her delirious shift from joy to anguish when, crawling around in no. 663’s bed, ostensibly to straighten the sheets, she finds a woman’s long black hair under the pillow. In her first major acting role, Faye Wong takes over the film and runs with it. Her comic timing and her impulsiveness recall Katharine Hepburn in Bringing Up Baby—an association underscored when she leaves a huge toy cat, in this case a Garfield doll (the director would never be so obvious as to make it a stuffed leopard), in no. 663’s apartment as a substitute for the large white teddy bear left there by his ex.

As in Bringing Up Baby, opposites attract. No. 663, like the Cary Grant character, is an introvert, while Faye, like the Hepburn character, is dizzyingly extroverted. He’s so lost in his own head that he talks to a bar of soap to keep himself company. Not only does no. 663 fail to notice that Faye is gaga over him, he’s unaware that she’s been secretly transforming his apartment, until they come face-to-face at his front door—she’s leaving, he’s arriving, and when she sees him she’s so discombobulated that she slams the door in his face. It may be the only laugh-out-loud moment in Wong’s oeuvre. The two actors have terrific chemistry: their brief scenes together are more than sexy; they have an innocence that never returns to Wong’s movies after Chungking Express—a fling of a film, where regret is fleeting and joy triumphs, though who knows for how long.

In Céline Sciamma’s unabashedly romantic and fiercely political film Portrait of a Lady on Fire (2019), two women fall in love and set each other free, if for only a few glorious days or weeks. It is one of the most unforgettable depictions of love foresworn, of lesbian love, of any true love, in cinema. Around the besotted lovers, the film envisions a social contract defined by a strong sense of community among women, no matter their age or class. It takes place in the late eighteenth century, but it also speaks to our own time, as many women continue to call for intersectional solidarity in their fight for equality. It is no accident that here the engine of this revolution is art. Sciamma, who grew up outside Paris and would bike into a neighboring town to go to the movies, creates a provincial world in which art—both as a technique governed by solemn tradition and a practical tool for remaking one’s world—is a part of daily life, and in which the artist’s gaze is reciprocal, not one-sided. Similarly, the film presents the act of falling in love not through the (quintessentially male, one might say) lens of conquest and possession but through one of equality between the two lovers, creating a reality in which each can truly see the other.

The preoccupations with longing and looking—who is gazing and who is returning the gaze—are not new for Sciamma, nor is the centering of a kind of character not often seen on-screen. The director’s previous three features are poignant contemporary coming-of-age stories: In Water Lilies (2007), an adolescent girl experiences her first lesbian crush. In Tomboy (2011), a young child, Laure, tests the bounds of sexuality and gender. Girlhood (2014) is the story of a teenage French-African girl who finds a way of navigating the violence and poverty of her life by joining an all-female gang. Although Sciamma’s stories often tell of yearning—and always from a queer, female point of view—the director is far from a fatalist: in her films, love paves the way to personal growth and creates a keen sense of one’s own self-worth. Like Portrait of a Lady on Fire, Water Lilies and Tomboy both revolve around intense looking. And in Tomboy, Laure’s portrait being drawn is a painful reminder of just how powerful it can be to be seen by another. Another memorable moment of recognition takes place in Girlhood, when the heroine, Marieme (Karidja Touré), watches her best friends dance to Rihanna’s “Diamonds.” Here, the young black women claim their spots as divas, agitators, rebels, rather than people shunted off—by the education system and by the men around them—into roles of caregivers or sex workers. When the reserved Marieme turns from observer to participant and joins the dance, it is a thrilling instance of feminine jouissance: sensual, luminous, radiating warmth. This vision of joyous sisterhood returns in Portrait of a Lady on Fire, Sciamma’s first period film, in which she shows us that although desire leaves us vulnerable and exposed, it also defies solitude.

The film takes place on an isolated island off the northern coast of France. A young painter, Marianne (Noémie Merlant), has been hired, ostensibly as a walking companion for an obdurate heiress, Héloïse (Adèle Haenel). Marianne’s real job, however, is to paint a bridal portrait of Héloïse without arousing the suspicion of her model, who is resisting being married off to rescue the family’s fortunes and thus refuses to pose. Héloïse has been brusquely pulled from her happy life in a Benedictine convent by her countess mother to marry a wealthy Milanese man previously engaged to her older sister, who committed suicide by jumping off a cliff. “In her last letter, she apologized,” Héloïse will say of her sister, “for leaving me her fate.” Marianne arrives on the island soaked, having dived into the water to rescue her painting supplies after the rocking boat knocked them overboard. A bit later, she sits naked by the fire at her new residence, facing her dripping canvases. In this scene, Sciamma deliciously evokes the female nude as a sexually charged subject in painting. It is intensely pleasurable to look at Marianne, but her own pleasure, in the warmth and in her tobacco, and her sense of liberty are equally striking. The moment also prefigures a metaphorical denuding. Governed by her training in portraiture, Marianne begins with rigid notions of composition, which Héloïse will come to challenge.

Sciamma has referred to Portrait of a Lady on Fire as a “manifesto about the female gaze.” Few directors have embraced the idea of women’s autonomy as radically as she has; in this film, the consequences of men’s authority are omnipresent, but women take the reins, and their isolation becomes a measure of their freedom. Indeed, the film creates, for a time, a world in which its main characters can exist nearly free of male scrutiny. For a long, exquisite stretch, Marianne and Héloïse do almost nothing but look at each other: the artist observing the subject, the subject beginning to return her gaze, their relationship unhurriedly developing and deepening and taking on erotic tension.

Sciamma presents the romance between Marianne and Héloïse within a frame of Marianne’s memories of it. The film begins some unspecified time after its main events, with Marianne’s female pupils sketching their teacher in class, and then discovering her portrait of Héloïse, skirts ablaze. Near the conclusion, Marianne views in a salon a portrait of Héloïse, now a wife and mother, by another artist. It seems that Marianne has managed to make a life of considerable freedom for herself, although she remains haunted by the love that might have been.

But even though we barely glimpse men in the film, their power to control the fates of women can never fully be shaken off. Because of her aristocratic status, Héloïse has no choice but to ultimately marry her wealthy suitor, and the lovers’ time together must end. Marianne has a fairly unusual degree of independence for a woman in the 1770s—making her own living as a portrait painter, traveling alone, living alone, it seems—but we can guess that this liberty has been made possible at least in part by the success of her artist father, the training he gave her, and the fact that she will inherit his studio. We learn that she has submitted her work for exhibition under his name. And indeed, Marianne must internalize the male gaze when making portraits of women like Héloïse for men’s consumption.

Héloïse’s mother is the film’s fierce miniature study of the ways women have often had to internalize patriarchy and act to further its aims. Valeria Golino as the countess is a lovely, albeit stern, enforcer of the Lacanian law of the father. The fact that no man is physically present to command her actions (we are told nothing of the count) makes her tormented efficacy all the more arresting—and devastating. For her, the isolation of the rocky island represents exile, offering none of the feminine intimacy it does the lovers, or the maid Sophie and the community of village women, members of which we briefly meet at an outdoor celebration and in an abortion scene. “She was waiting for me,” the countess says wistfully of the imposing visage in her own bridal portrait. The painting idealized her, an idealization that has turned bitter, if we consider that its favorable impression led to her entrapment. The austerity of the landscape and the family residence reinforces our initial impression of the place as a wintry prison (I kept thinking of Napoleon on Elba, and of windswept moors and dark interiors in Victorian novels). It is the countess’s absence for most of the film that allows for Marianne, Héloïse, and Sophie’s cozy idyll, though they know it must end with her return and the completion of the portrait.

Sciamma and the cinematographer Claire Mathon, who also photographed Mati Diop’s Atlantics (2019), convey beautifully the island’s unstable climate. The acuteness of the sunlight outdoors reminds me of the divine brightness in Paul Gauguin’s Vision After the Sermon, painted in Brittany, not far from the movie’s setting. Natural light seems to permeate the film from the start, indoors as well as out. The choice to use digital cameras allowed Sciamma and Mathon to capture interior scenes in much lower light than might otherwise have been possible, contributing a great deal to the painterly quality of the images. A cool light seeps into the study where Marianne sets up her canvases when she must paint at night, from her mind’s eye, and into Marianne’s visions of Héloïse emerging from the dark in a white gown. The startling glow of that whiteness—like that of the peasants’ bonnets in Gauguin—is almost blinding. The film weaves a series of oppositional ambiences: wet and dry, fiercely lit and swathed in shadows, warm and cold. On Héloïse’s first walk with Marianne as chaperone, the dunes are buffeted by strong, dry winds. And yet the morning mist offers a welcome shelter from the glare of the sun, and creates images that echo the early one of the wet canvases. That coolness is offset by the warmth of the fireplace in the kitchen where Marianne, Héloïse, and Sophie pass much of their time in close camaraderie, playing cards, cooking together (in a subversion of the expectations of their class), and telling stories. Fire appears as domestic hearth, as premonition of passion (especially in the bonfire scene in the village), and, again, as a homely, comforting blaze, during the abortion that Marianne and Héloïse help Sophie to procure.

Sciamma imbues the abortion scene with uncanny intimacy. Sophie’s holding the tiny hand of the midwife’s baby during the procedure is one of the fiercest feminist gestures I’ve seen in film in recent years. “Look,” Héloïse commands Marianne. Back at the mansion, they pull a mattress to the floor, and by the fire’s glow, Marianne paints Sophie, still flushed from pain, with Héloïse posing as the midwife. Héloïse’s order suggests that art can be an act of solidarity—a meaningful encounter with another. But perhaps it also means that art cannot be truly great without risk, of breaking new aesthetic ground or of touching a raw nerve. Sciamma has said that a line in L’événement, a memoir by the French writer Annie Ernaux about an illegal abortion she had in 1963, was an inspiration for this scene in Portrait of a Lady on Fire. “I do not believe there exists a Workshop of the Backstreet Abortionist in any museum in the world,” Ernaux writes wistfully. Paint what we really see, Héloïse seems to be telling Marianne—a potent challenge.

Although Héloïse steps behind the canvas of her own portrait to judge its attributes, Marianne does not relinquish all her artistic authority. Only one hand wields the brush. Héloïse’s brilliance lies in recognizing her latent power as an inspiration and source, and demanding that her physical, earthy presence, and her despair, not be denied by art but instead allowed to fuel and dictate its form. Marianne’s disquietude about capturing the essence of her subject—does it lie in the sculptural folds of the dress, the slanting of the light, the positioning of the hands, the forceful softness of the earlobe?—communicates representation as not just an aesthetic quest but also a philosophical one. Each time Marianne steadies her gaze, her muse’s piercing blue eyes defiantly peer back at her. “Is this how you see me?” Héloïse asks incredulously, after her first portrait is finished. It is the muse speaking up that sets off the transformation of the relationship between her and the artist into a true meeting of the minds, which can then bloom into passion.

This daring to look, and look back, is represented in the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice, which Marianne, Héloïse, and Sophie read and discuss. Did Eurydice bid Orpheus to turn around for her own sake, rather than just in order to free him? And did his genius owe as much to their tragic parting as it did to his talent? The muse is inextricable from the sense of loss. Marianne, too, has visions of Héloïse at her back. In these apparitions, Héloïse’s gown shimmers with the luscious light of El Greco’s garments, or of the gowns in John Singer Sargent’s portraits of society women. It’s a dazzle that is also ghostly. It hints that perhaps art itself is a kind of haunting—a transmutation of life into something else, an antidote to death. Once Héloïse’s betrothal is sealed and she submits to trying on her wedding gown, Marianne promptly departs; at the last minute, Héloïse bids her to turn, so that her image, as the lost beloved, can be fixed in Marianne’s mind.

The two lovers almost meet again, twice. Attending a painting salon, Marianne—the only woman painter there—comes across that portrait of Héloïse as a married woman and mother. This formal image of maternity is far from the humbler, truer painting of the scene inside the midwife’s hut that they recreated together. Later, Marianne sees Héloïse again, at a concert in Milan, and cannot take her eyes off her. As the camera slowly closes in on Héloïse—crying silently, giving in to desolate spasms, and then beginning to laugh—Sciamma and Mathon forge, in this sublime finale, a bristling vision of womanhood. Héloïse, in her prime, seems to take full stock of her loneliness, but her recollection, like Eurydice’s, is inhabited by the once sweet presence of her lover. She bathes in Vivaldi’s notes, perhaps remembering the risk that she once took. Thanks to this image, I’ll never look the same way at the paintings, by Mary Cassatt and others, of lone women in opera houses and concert halls. I’ll always wonder how many ardent fires burned—how many were extinguished—before the last soaring note of whatever music they were hearing. And yet Portrait of a Lady on Fire offers enduring images not just of longing, or of resilience, but also of creation. Héloïse suffers, but she also exults—she is her own creation and creator. Her vision sets her world ablaze.