Identity and Chungking Express (page 2)

Looking to the film itself, from the very first shot of Chungking we are thrown into a world where identity is complex, not as it first seems. The camera follows Brigitte Lin’s smuggler, staccato shot rhythm and the film’s characteristic blurred, low frame-rate chase-style breaking up her fleeting image, already obscured by shades and a wig. She winds her way through mazes of shops and dwellings, the faces of Indians flying past. This area is the Chungking Mansions area of Kowloon, recognisable to many by its mix of inhabitants from the Indian subcontinent. Though Brigitte stands out, she doesn’t look as though she is lost or an outsider - she moves confidently as the camera tries to keep up, and eventually a curtain is thrown across our view and the film’s title appears.

According to WKW, the Chungking Mansions area was virgin territory for filmmakers. He is probably right. Hong Kong’s films are often remarkably insular, considering the territory holds such a mix of cultures. Despite the number of Indians and other races living in downtown Kowloon, they were somewhat under-represented in films and television. The few film depictions which did exist consisted of little more than comic stereotypes: mysterious maharajahs and oddballs with Peter Sellers-style funny accents. But in Chungking we see real people, where they really live - looking in on the camera as if the viewer is the outsider.

But WKW isn’t trying to remake Look Who’s Coming To Dinner - there is no big issue to push and in the end the story doesn’t centre on the Indians per se. But they are in the background in both halves of the film. One may question the depiction of their ghetto in the first half, but WKW is simply being honest: as so little reaches the surface, there is an entire underworld where people are simply struggling to survive. WKW doesn’t try to push a ‘right’ way of viewing this underworld, or to try to correct any prejudice we may have - he simply gives us a view of this world.

Of course, we are following a character played by Brigitte Lin - a native of Taiwan who, via the Hong Kong movie circuit, became one of ‘Chinese’ Asia’s most famous faces - and so the idea of identity centres on her personally. In a sense, she is an icon synonymous with the identity of a modern, popular Chinese culture, and so the Hong Kong audiences instinctively claim her as their own. This isn’t something that WKW debunks. In the end, we do follow her as our own when she has to fight for survival. Yet we cannot quite dismiss the idea that her identity is mutable - from the first shot cautious and furtive, moving into her lair and away from the surface, visible world of ‘native’ Hong Kong. Initially, she is more protected in the underworld of the Indians, their bond spelled out in US dollars. In the end, she fights Indians who are out to put a ‘deadline’ on her. Between these two positions there is no ‘correct’ depiction - no condescending attitude that Brigitte has misplaced her trust. She lives in an underworld where trust is a liability, identity merely a shifting part of the machinery of illicit industry. The very idea of drug smuggling - the hallmark of ‘baddies’ in so many Hong Kong action movies - is not used as an evil concept in itself in Chungking. Instead, it ties in with the very idea of false identity: a surface identity which shifts with occasion.

And the Indians themselves, we never get to know them. When Brigitte is chased by other Indians, these are only agents out to eliminate her. When she goes out questioning Indians to find the missing smugglers, she converses in English and Cantonese: ‘Have you seen these people.’ There is such a variety of people that Brigitte cannot simply say ‘those Indians’ as she tells us in voiceover. We only know them as ‘those Indians’ and, unable to use this label when searching amongst Indians, she tries to grasp at their identity by pointing at passports, or saying ‘they have children with them’. The generalisation of identity has reached such a point the we could be talking about anyone.

WKW doesn’t indulge us in an open comparison between this and the idea of a Hong Kong identity, or its relative position with a Chinese identity. But it is clear that limiting an identity to nationhood limits perception to peoples rather than individuals. And Hong Kong is so swelled with peoples and individuals that the question of a Hong Kong identity alone is bewildering. Apart from geography, what could such an identity be cemented by? Law? Not for the many illegal immigrants (Indian, Chinese or otherwise) trying to survive unseen. Chineseness? Definitely not, as it is impossible to ignore the mix of cultures existing in Hong Kong, be they the thousands of Caucasian business migrants of Central, or the ghettos of other Asians dotted around Hong Kong and Kowloon.

Instead, WKW leaves any search for a socio-political identity in the background, whilst in the foreground we have a more personal look at individual identity. Brigitte’s character appears practically in disguise, but when audiences identify her as the movie star, they say ‘it’s Brigitte Lin’. But her film identity is as a nameless smuggler or, for Takeshi Kaneshiro’s naive cop, a target for his affections. He doesn’t identify the very aspect of her which his job should alert him to. For him, her identity is never more than a detail in passing: ‘Your friend in room 702,’ as the pager message puts it. This attitude to identity is a spill-over from WKW’s work on Ashes Of Time, where characters are often only referred to as ‘that person’. These phrases are not only uncertain, they are also concepts that are inherently mutable: how can you define a person as ‘that person’ always, when at any time the phrase can apply to anyone? Or, equally, the person in room 702 is not something that will remain as a fixed measure of identity. This focus on mutable concepts ties in with Brigitte’s voiceover as Takeshi tries to get to know her: ‘People will change.’

It is Takeshi’s character who gives the film’s first voiceover, which manages to summarise the concept of an individual in contact with the world: ‘We rub shoulders with each other everyday...’ we are strangers now, but Takeshi gives the possibility that we may know one another in the future, how our relative identities may shift. He then takes the step of introducing himself to us, giving us a name, his job and his police number. Later on, we learn a little more of him as we see him trying to call up (in a roundabout way) his ex-girlfriend. Again, he provides us with information - about his habit of waiting for his girlfriend. His ‘habit’ is a personal trait, something which marks out his individual identity, yet here it is in flux as his girlfriend has recently broken up with him.

WKW probes the very idea of what the girlfriend means to him, how her existence affects his own identity. On the one hand, we are talking about individuals who were, at some point, perfect strangers (as acknowledged by the opening voiceover). Yet as we see Takeshi, we are made to question if his girlfriend, or perhaps more crucially his idea of his girlfriend, has become a part of his own identity. This throws up the very heart of the question as to how well two people can actually know one another, and whether this is, itself, an emotional connection. Though Brigitte says, ‘Knowing a person doesn’t mean having a person,’ even without having the person there can be an unrequited psuedo-connection - which becomes a part of the person’s identity.