[FIELDWORK] CHUNGKING EXPRESS (1994), MID LEVELS ESCALATOR

CHUNKING EXPRESS, DIR. WONG KA WAI (1994)           

Central-Mid-levels Escalator, Central, Mid-Levels District, Hong Kong

Jet Tone Productions released Chungking Express in September 1994.¹ The film tells a 2 part story, both about a Hong Kong policeman coping with a break up in their own ways. The plot advances as the characters run and navigate their way through different locations of Hong Kong, each with its own urban landscape and identity unique to Hong Kong, accentuating the sense of loneliness and urban isolation in the hyperdensity of Hong Kong. This report will analyse one such key reoccurring film space – the Central-Mid-Levels Escalator in two aspects, to firstly compare how the space presented in the film differs from the spacial experience in reality and secondly why it is presented as such in Chungking Express. 

Analysing the escalator on a larger scale, this space serves as the spine of Hong Kong. Connecting Central to the Mid-Levels, the Central-Mid-Levels Escalator is the longest outdoor covered escalator in the world. Accessible by the public at any time, the escalator offers a convenient form of transportation to the working population and tourists, with travelling up and down the entire escalator system now taking less than 10 minutes. Since the completion of its construction, the escalator has radically transformed the neighbourhood it passes through; skyscrapers and commercial buildings replaced older residential housings, gentrification has taken place, turning the shops near the escalators into westernised bars, restaurants and real estate agency shops, increasing the human activities, population and thus urban density of the area in the process. The streets around the escalator have become a gathering hub, the most famous of them all being SoHo, while the escalator serves as a means of getting there. For  Christopher Doyle, cinematographer of Chungking Express, the escalator portrays the image of Hong Kong as a city where east meets west, old meets new, and the ever-changing nature of Hong Kong, a never resting city constantly in motion.

Zooming into a human scale, the escalator in the film is shown in two ways: directly where the character travels through the escalator, or indirectly, where it is shown behind the window of cop 663’s house. When filming the elevator directly, panning shots are often used to show the linear movement of the focal characters, such as cop 663, the air stewardess and Faye, when the cop waves his ex-girlfriend goodbye from his house and when Faye sees him on the escalator similarly in separate scenes. From the house, the mechanical noises of the escalator can be clearly heard, showing the adjacency of the escalator in relation to the apartment. When filmed indirectly, such as when the cop enjoys coffee in Midnight Express, the escalator is not directly shown in the shot, but the movement of the pedestrians shows the dynamic and linear movement on the street. Step printing² is used as the cop lifts the cup very slowly, in contrast with how swiftly pedestrians travel across the screen. The time passes at different paces when in the shop or on the escalator.

Left: Interaction between public and private: air stewardess peeping through the gap between the partition and the handrail.  Scenes from Jet Tone Production’s Chungking Express. Right: Windows of buildings adjacent to the Mid-Levels Escalator. Photo taken on-site.

Experiencing the escalator in real life, it is obvious that Wong Ka Wai highlighted certain aspects of the film and omitted some of them. Starting with the similarities, pedestrians travel up and down the escalator, rarely stopping and constantly in motion, much like what was shown in the film. The escalator feels much closer to the buildings on the side than from Cop 663’s house. This is where the similarities stop. Barricades are installed above the handrails, replacing the frosted acrylic partition in the movie. Mirror glasses are installed on the buildings, with most windows shut, making it very difficult to look into one’s living room, or looking at the escalator from the apartments, ensuring privacy for those living by the bridge. Analysing the sounds of the street, the film chooses to highlight the mechanical sounds of the escalator, where it can be heard faintly in the background even from Cop 663’s apartment, while in reality, chatterings of pedestrians, footsteps, as well as traffic echo through the corridors of the bridge, muting turning of the elevator gears.

In the film, there are several contradictions and polarities between the private spaces and the public escalator: the private spaces are almost frozen in time, symbolic of cop 663’s inability or unwillingness to move forward after his break up, whilst the escalator always has pedestrians in motion, a lot more dynamic when compared to the snack bar and the cop’s living room. However, both spaces feel lifeless and lonely, Hong Kong’s hyperdensity by in a sense. 

In my opinion, the escalator and its surroundings are presented in the film in a particular way to show a sense of urban isolation and the underlying theme of love at a distance. The cop’s living space is rarely occupied by more than one person, with the cop talking to himself in most scenes making the quiet living room even more hollow, lonely. On the other hand, though the escalator is filled with pedestrians and noises, the pedestrians, similar to real life, seem to lack any vigour and energy, motionlessly carried by the escalator belt, while the noises are unwanted street pollution such as the mechanical noises of the escalator, the distant screeching of vehicles’ tires. Chungking express accentuates the sense of urban isolation and loneliness in the hyperdensity of Hong Kong, through filming the bustling yet lonely escalator of Hong Kong, where people use but not occupy, a non-place³ that does not hold any significant emotional value.

Equally noteworthy is how close the escalator is to the adjacent buildings, but just barely out of reach. This distance embodies the idea of love at a distance in Chungking Express: when Cop 663 finally acknowledges Faye’s love and is ready to reciprocate it, Faye decides to leave Hong Kong and become an air stewardess, once again leaving Cop 663 alone. Similar to the distance between the escalator and the apartment, you can wave goodbye to your lover, or shout out to garner the attention of your object of obsession, but you cannot be too close to the one you love. Just as the movie says, “the closest we ever got, we were only 0.01cm apart, I knew nothing about her. Six hours later, she fell in love with another man.”

Through the portrayal of the ordinary and mundane daily lives of the actors and the spaces they occupy, Chungking Express shows Hong Kong as a city constantly in motion. People all have to go about their daily lives, no matter if you’re a drug dealer, a heartbroken policeman, or a staff at a snack bar, life still has to go on. Like in the film, everything will eventually come to an end: canned food will expire, and so will love. In the grand scheme of things, perhaps what matters is for us to enjoy it while it lasts, and try to move on and find new things to cherish. 

Notes: 

1. Produced by the Jet Tone Production, the film was directed and written by famous Hong Kong film director Wong Ka Wai and Starred famous actors and singers Brigitte Lin, Takeshi Kaneshiro, Leung Chiu Wai, and Faye Wong. It was released later in the US under the same title by Quentin Tarantino’s Rolling Thunder Pictures in 1996.                                                                                      
2. Step Printing refers to the duplication of a time frame. The footage in certain scenes of Chungking Express is filmed at a lower frame rate, then duplicated and projected at the usual 24 frames per second, essentially stretching out scenes and creating a sense of slow-motion.
3. Coined by the French anthropologist Marc Augé, “non-place” refers to liminal spaces where human beings there remain anonymous and do not hold significant values to be regarded as “places”. Augé referred to motorways, hotel rooms and airports etc.