Wong Kar-Wai
Honk Kong Express

"California dreamin, California dreamin, On such a winters day..."

The song by The Mamas and The Papas stays in your head, accompanying the days of a beautiful Japanese girl, who waves her slender arms with her mind always elsewhere. She listens to it continuously, she says, to 'keep the thoughts out of her head'. In a district of Hong Kong, California represents the unattainable opposite that one is always searching for, just like in the love stories that are told.

This small great masterpiece by director Wong Kar-Wai presents two unresolved love stories, among borderline characters, where an apparent lover follows an apparent disinterested one, without any happy ending and without any tragedy. Like in other oriental films (Ferro 3), in this film too, the characters float on reality, often behaving in an objectively irrational manner. A young policeman, trapped in the grip of loneliness, seeks comfort in a 'dark lady', who in the initial sequences of the film is shown engaged in every kind of trafficking and mischief. A dazed girl without plans falls for (almost because 'she had nothing else to do') another policeman, who is also alone but accustomed to his solitude, talking to household objects as if they were his friends. The stories don't show much more, yet, this is certainly not the usual minimalist oriental film...

The director Wong Kar-Wai manages to capture and move like few others, and he does it by reinventing the dynamics of the story shot after shot, without repeating himself, never falling into banality, and at the same time without gratuitous tracking shots and camera movements. This is one of the very few films where the relationship between shots and their editing elicit reactions that go beyond the simple narrative. Many aesthetic choices reminded me of the films of the nouvelle vague. Asymmetric reverse shots, games with infinite shots in spaces of just a few square meters, scenes where the character is shown from afar from multiple points, as if the camera wanted to sneakily peek into the protagonist's life and at the same time highlight the presence of the lens with shots rarely used in contemporary cinema yet not gratuitously 'revolutionary'. Even though many scenes are shot with a handheld camera, it never devolves into a banal music video, just as the editing is never unnecessarily tight and technically exaggerated (we are far from the style of Old Boy in short). It is a film with one foot in modern oriental cinema (surreal characters - situations inexplicably at the limit) and one foot in the great French cinema of the '90s. America is almost absent, except for the song by The Mamas and The Papas.

It should also be noted that it features photography certainly not up to par. The low cost of the film is evident primarily in this aspect, which perhaps unintentionally, further renders the atmosphere of the narration retro.

At the end, I wanted to watch it again immediately, just to appreciate the shots again, and this hadn't happened to me in a very very long time. Unmissable for those who love auteur oriental cinema (...and/or European...).