Nowhere is this more apparent than in Chungking Express (1994), and in Faye Wong’s relationship with the song that traverses it as her personal anthem: The Mamas & the Papas’ 1965 classic “California Dreamin’.”As we first meet her, the movie has abandoned the romance to which it dedicates its first half (between Takeshi Kaneshiro’s heartbroken policeman and Brigitte Lin’s femme fatale), and embraced another.
“Hong Kong is a big refugee camp,” Allen Fong once told fellow New Wave director Ann Hui, and perhaps this is true of Wong’s cinema too, a universe whose loners resort to music as an escapist machine, a vehicle to dream up ties to places they’ve abandoned, and others they miss without having ever visited. For it was during the shooting that Wong first discovered the writings of Argentine author Manuel Puig, whose 1969 novel “Heartbreak Tango” he’d describe as nothing short of a revelation: a lesson in how stories can be told as jigsaw puzzles, unmoored in time and refracted through different points of view. Latin America offers the film its soundtrack-graced with tunes by Xavier Cugat and Los Indios Tabajaras-and its loose, free-wheeling architecture.
But the film is Leslie Cheung’s, here starring as Yuddy, a spoilt twenty-something cad raised by an affluent aunt (Rebecca Pan) who’s sworn to keep his mother’s identity and whereabouts secret, lest the lad should abandon her. In Days of Being Wild (1990), his sophomore, Andy Lau returns as a cop working night shifts in the streets of Hong Kong. No wonder they should feature so prominently in the one film of Wong’s most explicitly interested in unearthing a character’s childhood. Rumbas, congas, and tangos function both as a temporal markers and as Proustian madeleines.
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