GAME 2: CHUNGKING EXPRESS vs. SHORT CUTS
And last week's winner revealed!
Last week our readers resoundingly chose The Limey over Jackie Brown. That film will go against the winner of this week’s 1990s film playoff for a semi-final in our Narrative Rebellion bracket.
Robert Altman was on a career comeback at the time with 1992’s The Player and 1993’s Short Cuts. Both are rambling narratives that make us remember how he invented the form in the 1970s with Nashville and The Long Goodbye. Short Cuts is maybe peak Altman, with a cast of 22 and a script that links nine different Raymond Carver short stories.
In 1994 Wong Kar-Wai was exhausted after making a Hong Kong swordsman movie in the Gobi Desert. He said of that time, “I had forgotten how to see.” In the middle of postproduction on that film Wong and cinematographer Christopher Doyle set up in the small apartments and food stalls of Chungking Mansions to make a hyper-kinetic, handheld movie built around two storylines of lovelorn almost-couples.
Which film will advance? If you’ve made up your mind already, vote below! If not, read our commentary and then come back up here.
Brian J Davis: Can we sit down and watch this goddamn movie about love?! Oh, is the recorder on? I’m just kidding, I was doing a bit because Emily came to the studio in a bad mood.
Emily Schultz: I will be in a good mood as soon as the movie starts.
BJD: I know you’re a massive fan of Wong Kar-Wai, but I want to explain for the readers where this film came from. During the Hong Kong film explosion of the ’80s, you could make a crime movie, you could make a horror movie, or you could make an historical movie. And so many awesome genre movies came out of that, but Wong Kar-Wai was instead far more interested in being Godard.
ES: Did he even have a script?
BJD: The thing about Wong Kar-Wai and Robert Altman is that they both write with the camera. Altman’s famous quote is, “The script is only a suggestion.” Which means everything they make is on the precipice of disaster. Both directors have masterpieces, and unwatchable films.
ES: I do feel like there needs to be a side note about my parents. I lent them my DVD of In the Mood for Love. Criterion! Not cheap! My absolute favorite film! And when I asked for it back several months later, they were like, oh, we watched it. And I was like, yeah, so can I get it back? And they were like, oh, well, we thought you'd seen it.
BJD: So what did they do with it?
ES: They donated it! Because my parents had this weird idea that you only watch a film once.
BJD: Basically Medium Cool is a constant rebellion for you to rewatch movies!
ES: Now, in Chungking Express he’s still working within the setting of a Hong Kong police film, in a way?
BJD: And even more so in Fallen Angels right after this, which was meant to be one of the short stories in Chungking Express. And this is where Chungking Express and Short Cuts are so similar. They’re all these stories of people waiting, and missing these interactions around them. Which I think is so part of the spirit of the short story. And this is where we turn over to you, author. You have a short story collection and co-founded a certain short fiction journal called Joyland.
ES: I love the short story. But I’m going to break away from the short story topic. Because I think actually the whole idea of waiting is about love and romance. And the idea that there’s space in your life for somebody to walk into it.
BJD: Well, very much the short story is about one moment or a very short period of time. And usually the mechanics is then they make a decision about something.
ES: It’s always one particular puzzle or conundrum.
BJD: Now we have these movies that threaded short stories together. They are puzzles made of smaller puzzle pieces! In no way could you get away with this kind of narrative now.
ES: But, I mean, at the same time, this is a movie that definitely that made me want to write.
BJD: And after watching Fallen Angels again last week, I realized these movies made me want to die with a camera in my hand. I just want to capture life like it looks in Chungking Express and Fallen Angels. Existing light, wide angle, constant motion.
ES: So for both of us, this movie was completely transformative.
BJD: And that’s going to make it tough. Chungking Express is the kind of art you make after a failure. I think both of us know what it feels like to make a big, huge belly flop towards commercial. Sell our souls and feel totally empty inside and then realize we have to go and make art again.
ES: Couple of times now!
BJD: Here’s the thing about all the directors in this bracket. They’re all novelists! Wong Kar-Wai films have chapters and very writerly voiceover. And here it is! “Password is ‘Love you for 10,000 years’”
ES: I mean, the other thing I really like about Wong Kar-Wai movies is the way that he uses music. And lets characters interact with and live through music. Usually only one very meaningful song.
BJD: That’s actually how we use music in life. There’s one song that defines a certain month for you or period of your life and if you hear it you’re back there.
ES: There’s a nostalgia in both Short Cuts and this about chance encounters. You don’t have a lot of chance encounters in the app world now. Unless you run into someone you saw on an app in real life.
BJD: This is just it. I worked in restaurants and bars and watched a lot of waiting. A lot of longing. That’s not romantic, that’s just what you literally had to fucking do! You had to sit alone in a café hoping that the one would show up again or walk by the window.
ES: This movie’s just making me hungry now.
BJD: Unless Short Cuts totally changes my mind I kind of know what I’m going to pick over these two movies.
ES: So Faye Wong has the keys to his apartment because of the letter his ex left for him. Again, a great short story hook. That’s exactly what you want with a short story.
BJD: Also, a large part of you enjoys watching Tony Leung smoking.
ES: Tony Leung can do anything he wants in his undershirt.
BJD: What Wong Kar-Wai and Doyle were going after—and Doyle is really an equal collaborator on this film—was the liminal spaces and moments in cities. I hate to say it, Chungking Express is a lot like early Instagram.
ES: It was wonderful once! That’s why I was there. It was for the silence. I am going to sound nostalgic saying this, I think what this movie is about is that sometimes you just liked someone to like them. And I think that that’s sort of part of the era. I think that relationships have gotten very complicated. And we’re all supposed to interact in the healthiest way as possible.
BJD: We have to confront it. This movie’s message is: Love equals stalking plus time.
ES: There was a lot of stalking in ’90s movies.
BJD: But don’t get me wrong. It doesn’t suggest common stalking. This suggests big gestures: breaking into a cop’s apartment and turning his floor into an aquarium!
ES: A one year later epilogue. Also very short fiction!
BJD: And it ends so obliquely. It could have ended with “You’re under arrest…for stealing my heart.” But instead they decide to wait another year before meeting again!
ES: As far as bad girlfriends go, she is pretty bad.
BJD: That’s how you know it’s love! Before we switch over to Short Cuts—on fast-forward—here’s why these two films matter. If you think about the well-noted, well-worked-over feature script that adheres to the hero’s journey—the cat in the fucking tree—all that stuff is so oddly old now. I just love these movies that spit in the face of everything about screenwriting convention.
ES: But there’s a problem with the linked short story, the networked narrative, the multi-POV. It’s that you start to pick and choose.
BJD: Especially during a three-hour film like Short Cuts. Even personally, we pitched a networked narrative script last year and I could not disagree with the feedback from a producer: If I follow a character and like them, I want to keep watching them. Also, technically, you’re multiplying your chances of fucking up.
ES: For all the amazing things in Short Cuts, there’s a lot we don’t like.
BJD: Oh god, not Jazz Mom already! The worst storyline in Short Cuts and it’s Altman’s story. Not even a Carver. But before we start to pick it apart, I do love this movie. This was my first Altman movie other than M*A*S*H, censored on broadcast TV. I remember being a teenager and the youngest person in the audience for this!
ES: It was probably the first Altman movie that I saw also. Andie MacDowell? Frances McDormand? Lili Taylor?
BJD: Julianne Moore? This wins the 1990s points on cast alone. Like, the only person from the ’90s not in this movie is Steve Albini.
ES: And there are brilliant storylines in this. Tim Robbins as Officer Gene. Actually, I kind of love watching this on fast-forward.
BJD: Now here’s the magic of Altman, the world’s biggest actor lover. He’s only looking for those real grace moments and gives the cast time to find them. Frances McDormand picking her wedgie. Tom Waits throwing that plastic mini bottle of whiskey and it bounces back and hits him.
ES: But it seems like they had to follow the script for this, given the complexity.
BJD: I think they did much of the edit in the script, i.e. how long are we going to spend with each storyline. And they had a quite heavily graphed-out plot wall.
ES: Which you would have to.
BJD: Altman may be script agnostic but he cares about filmmaking. There’s a lot dexterity in the edits and jumps. But let’s get to comparisons. Because Chungking Express is shorter you don’t see the built-in limitations of short stories as source material. Here, over the course of three hours, you do. Think of the great short story writers who couldn’t write a novel to save their life.
ES: Raymond Carver, for one. Lydia Davis? But why does this not work for Shortcuts?
BJD: I think the ending. The characters are kind of running out of things to do, rather than coming to a moment of change or interesting failure. I mean, an earthquake? That’s very much a film deus ex machina. That’s Altman taking over the material to make it kind of work. No short story writer would end a story with an earthquake. They’d be laughed out of their little MFA room.
ES: People accusing them of “bathos.” Oh the shame.
BJD: So did you actually read Carver because of Short Cuts?
ES: No, I eventually read Carver because I was teaching short stories. But I was more likely to assign someone like Donald Barthelme. And my students hated me for doing things like that.
BJD: I think your students hated you flat out for being weird.
ES: They didn’t even like it when I taught Margaret Atwood! That was online. In person, my students tended to like me.
BJD: Now let’s talk Julianne Moore because I think the one thing you can say about Short Cuts unequivocally is that this is Julianne Moore’s “Holy shit who’s that?” moment.
ES: Right. This is her first role?
BJD: No. She was in Benny & Joon.
ES: No she wasn’t.
BJD: She was the waitress, Ruthie! But let’s shit on Benny & Joon for a minute. Here’s the thing that makes me cringe about the 1990s. The sheer amount of studio attempts at fake cult movies, where people were just doing the umpteenth iteration of Harold and Maude.
ES: [Imitating Dan Hedaya] “My hands are tied! My hands are tied!”
BJD: I think the Julianne Moore story is the best story in Short Cuts because these are the people that Altman was most comfortable with. A doctor and his artist wife in the Hollywood Hills. And he allows Matthew Modine and Julianne Moore to just go off, right before the dinner party. That said, my vote is still for Chungking Express.
ES: I almost want to switch my vote from Chungking Express. I mean, the baker sending death threats to the family with the child in the hospital. And Andie MacDowell confronting him. “You bastard! You monster!”
BJD: You get Short Cuts more as you get older. As you understand that…dads have affairs with sister-in-laws. A lot. Or you go to the dinner party of someone you barely even know, and they nearly got divorced seconds before you arrived.
ES: I was so young when I saw this I didn’t get the dinner invitation. They don't have any reason to try to impress these people or even entertain them.
BJD: And when you become an adult and realize: People just invite people for dinner? And then you go to their homes?
ES: And then you have to be nice to the extra people who are there who you’ll never see again.
BJD: It’s the worst thing in the world! I’ve grown with this movie and that does matter. But I still have to give it to Chungking Express. Because I feel this is Robert Altman being Robert Altman. He did the sprawling movie many times.
ES: No, I’m not going to change my vote. I’m going to go with Chungking Express because I think it has a unique style.
BJD: Okay, so we’re declaring Chungking Express the winner of our votes?
ES: I have some reluctance because I do think there is a lot of stalking in it.
BJD: The 1990s was a bad decade for love, really.