{"id":314560,"date":"2021-08-03T17:21:45","date_gmt":"2021-08-03T14:21:45","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/en.buradabiliyorum.com\/an-ode-to-tony-leungs-face-in-chungking-express-film\/"},"modified":"2021-08-03T17:21:45","modified_gmt":"2021-08-03T14:21:45","slug":"an-ode-to-tony-leungs-face-in-chungking-express-film","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/an-ode-to-tony-leungs-face-in-chungking-express-film\/","title":{"rendered":"#An Ode to Tony Leung’s Face in ‘Chungking Express’ \u2013 \/Film"},"content":{"rendered":"

“#An Ode to Tony Leung’s Face in ‘Chungking Express’ \u2013 \/Film<\/strong>”<\/p>\n

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\"\"<\/p>\n

(Welcome to\u00a0<\/i>T<\/i><\/b>he Daily Stream<\/i><\/b>, an ongoing series<\/a> in which the \/Film team shares what they\u2019ve been watching, why it\u2019s worth checking out, and where you can stream it.)<\/i><\/p>\n

The Movie<\/strong>:\u00a0Chungking Express<\/em><\/p>\n

Where You Can Stream It<\/strong>: Criterion Channel<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

The Pitch<\/strong>: Two separate love stories unfold amid the bustling noise of Hong Kong. At night, a cop (Takeshi Kaneshiro<\/strong>) mourns his break-up with a woman named May when he runs into a beautiful blonde woman (Brigitte Lin<\/strong>) who happ<\/a>ens to be a drug smuggler. During the day, Tony Leung<\/strong> is a police officer also nursing his wounds over a break-up with his flight attendant girlfriend (Valerie Chow<\/strong>) when a manic pixie snack bar worker\u00a0(Faye Wong<\/strong>) gains an obsession with him.<\/p>\n

Why It\u2019s Essential Viewing<\/strong>: Is there any filmmaker who better captures cinematic yearning than\u00a0Wong Kar-wai<\/strong>? The Hong Kong director\u2019s languid pacing, moody lighting, and deep saturated colors all convey a heightened sense of\u00a0being<\/em>\u00a0\u2014 one that comes with falling in love, or even, falling out of love. But Wong\u2019s cinematic odes to unrequited love wouldn\u2019t be as exceptional if it weren\u2019t for the performers \u2014 one of his most frequent collaborators being Tony Leung. Now, I could wax on all day about Leung\u2019s range as an actor either in Wong\u2019s swooning romances or in hard-hitting Hong Kong action flicks, but I\u2019m here to talk about Leung in\u00a0Chungking Express<\/em>. Specifically, his face in the final scene of\u00a0Chungking Express<\/em>.<\/p>\n

If you were to search\u00a0Chungking Express<\/em> on Google, you would be forgiven for thinking that Takeshi Kaneshiro and Brigitte Lin were the main leads of this film, with Faye Wong coming in at a close third. Those three dominate the cultural imprint of the film, frequently gracing the posters and images that are circulated by those nostalgic for Wong\u2019s very specific snapshot of 1994. But Leung quietly gives the most striking performance of the film, as the jaded police officer who stoically recovers from a break-up, catching the attention of Faye, a snack bar worker (Wong) who comes into the possession of his apartment key.<\/p>\n

Their flirtations are hardly more than a whisper \u2014 he orders the same thing every day, she stares at him from across the counter. Gradually, as Faye\u2019s secret attempts to cheer him up by sprucing up his apartment start to work, he\u2019ll chat with her as she\u2019s bringing supplies to the store, and help her carry the heavy baskets she\u2019s been saddled with transporting. But before anything can get started between the two of them, she disappears just as quickly as she appeared in his life, taking a plane to California and leaving him with nothing more than a boarding pass drawn on a paper napkin.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

All this time, Leung\u2019s nameless policeman had drifted in and out of his scenes, with a slightly faraway look \u2014 almost cold and distant if not for Leung\u2019s natural charm. Through Faye\u2019s\u00a0surreptitious actions, he starts to loosen up, and by the time they\u2019re reunited in the final scene of\u00a0Chungking Express<\/em>, he\u2019s almost uncharacteristically warm. And this is where Leung\u2019s incredible performance all comes to a head.<\/p>\n

Faye returns to the snack bar, where she finds Leung\u2019s policeman in the midst of renovations. He\u2019s blasting her song\u00a0\u201cCalifornia Dreamin’\u201d for the umpteenth time, and when he sees her, it\u2019s almost as if he thinks that he\u2019s still dreaming. He can hardly believes she\u2019s there, and his eyes follow her every move, a beaming grin threatening to be unleashed from his face. Instead, he flashes this crooked smile that disappears after a split second, as if he were trying his best to suppress it. In that smile is a world of emotions: ecstatic joy, nervousness, wariness, a little bit of melancholy. It almost doesn\u2019t matter what the two of them are saying to each other \u2014 they flirt a little in that strange, roundabout way, chatting about the shop and California before Leung\u2019s (still nameless!) character asks about the paper boarding pass. What matters is these two people reunited, brimming with this anxious, excited emotion that we can see in Faye\u2019s restless movements and Leung\u2019s face as he follows her, wide-eyed and unblinking \u2014 because if he blinks, she might disappear again.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s here that Leung pulls off one of my favorite kind of acting performances: one in which someone looks like they\u2019re not acting at all. Some actors might go big and show all their emotions on their faces or through their movements, but Leung instead chooses to not just go small, but to visibly hold back everything his character wants to say or feel. It\u2019s not showy and it\u2019s not flashy, but it\u2019s completely, wonderfully human.<\/p>\n

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Source<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

“#An Ode to Tony Leung’s Face in ‘Chungking Express’ \u2013 \/Film” (Welcome to\u00a0The Daily Stream, an ongoing series in which the \/Film team shares what they\u2019ve been watching, why it\u2019s worth checking out, and where you can stream it.) The Movie:\u00a0Chungking Express Where You Can Stream It: Criterion Channel The Pitch: Two separate love stories…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":314561,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"fifu_image_url":"https:\/\/www.slashfilm.com\/wp\/wp-content\/images\/chungking-express-1.jpeg","fifu_image_alt":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[17],"tags":[1570,1361],"class_list":["post-314560","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-social-mediaa","tag-features","tag-movies"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/314560","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=314560"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/314560\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/314561"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=314560"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=314560"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=314560"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}