copyright 2025, Jump Cut: A Review of Contemporary Media,
Jump Cut, No. 63, summer 2025

Hong Kong in transition and “aesthetic anxiety” in the
millennium films of Wong Kar-Wai

By Eriko Ong  and David Christopher

In three of his end-of-millenium films—Chungking Express (1994), Fallen Angels (1995), and In the Mood for Love (2000—celebrated Hong Kong auteur Wong Kar-wai depicts anxieties pertaining to Hong Kong’s transient identity during the massive political upheaval that was to occur in 1997 when Hong Kong was delivered from over one hundred and fifty years of British colonial regulation to officially become an administrative region of China. Although Wong has directed a total of ten films at the time of writing, we focus on these three films in particular due to their comparative popularity and their significant release dates that frame the 1997 hand-over.[1] [open endnotes in new window] While scholars have theorized the films’ aesthetics, the provenance of their unique treatment of the handover has remained vague or absent. With the benefit of hindsight informed by more recent political developments, such as Donald Trump’s hostility to China,[1b] we wish here to specifically articulate the unique aesthetic innovations that Wong employs and develops in terms of the socio-political and ideological milieu that engendered them.

Wong makes a social commentary on Hong Kong’s historical situation and its social consequences through a highly innovative use of the elements of filmmaking, ranging from the films’ narratives to their cinematic techniques and visual symbolism. Indeed, Wong’s films betray an anxiety surrounding the 1997 handover buried in their elusive aesthetics, an anxiety that Wong explores on a sensual level rather than through an explicitly political script. In this regard, we build on Gary Bettinson’s notion of the “sensual aesthetics” as they occur in Wong’s films and the political meanings they engender through the affordances of Wong’s innovative filmmaking techniques.[2] From this point of departure we develop the notion of a sensual aesthetic anxiety that Wong generates to stage and thematize the social concerns that emerged as a result of the impending or recently realized 1997 political hand-over of Hong and the ostensible 50-year period of capitalist liminality that was promised to follow it.[3]

According to Ackbar Abbas, an authority on Wong’s films,

“In the films made up to 1997, we might think of disappearance as an allusion to the Hong Kong handover. What was once there—a benign colonialism under which the city had thrived—would soon be no more.”[4]

Indeed, Hong Kong’s identity can be understood as temporary and impermanent[5] or “transient” in the context of the 1997 handover around which Wong’s most celebrated films emerged. While Hong Kong was expected to maintain relative autonomy for fifty years, this privilege was likely to cease once it returns to Chinese sovereignty in 2047.[6] After the handover in 1997, China established Article Five as part of the written law:

“The socialist system and policies shall not be practised in the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region, and the previous capitalist system and way of life shall remain unchanged for 50 years.”[7]

Of course, this law has more to do with ideological optics than with de facto economic manifestations. Under the conditions of global capitalism, even mainland China has been operating as a largely capitalist market system while maintaining rhetorical claims to socialism in order to continue to justify its authoritarian government. The framework states that despite being a part of China, Hong Kong will continue to have its own separate legal and economic system from what might be understood as an administrative center in mainland China until 2047.

However, this 50-year period of liminality appears to be largely nominal. Hong Kong maintains historical connections with the West while remaining embedded in its context in the East. It also sustains inevitably shifting boundaries in its transnational context. (In this context, we take “transnational” particularly to signal “the simultaneous socio-cultural, economic, and political processes of local and cross-border participation, sociality, membership, connection, and identification”[8]). Even if it is only a nominal phenomenon, however, it would certainly have been expected to create complications for the people of Hong Kong in fostering their own national identity. Such a transition promised increased tensions surrounding the capitalist and industrial contradictions that had already been a part of their society in the context of that socio-economic reality being absorbed into the authoritarian proto-capitalist political trajectory of the Chinese mainland.

In such contexts, Cheung, Marchetti, and Tan convincingly argue that

“historically critical times often inspire and motivate artists and cultural practitioners to reflect upon their own history and to grapple or come to terms with their current situations and future predicaments.”[9]

As concerns among the people of Hong Kong were increasing due to the city’s changing landscape and imminent political handover, independent filmmakers from the second new wave, such as Stanley Kwan, Mabel Cheung, and Wong Kar-wai, were inspired to communicate this collective anxiety in their films. Although Kwan and Cheung innovate in important ways, Wong stands apart from these other filmmakers for his elusive poetic style. This style has fascinated and evaded scholars for decades, evidenced in the volumes of scholarship dedicated to the task of articulating Wong’s aesthetic styles. For example, David Bordwell vaguely refers to these aesthetics as “liquid atmospherics.”[10] Abbas argues that

“each film is elusive and surprising, not so much because it is different from other Wong Kar-wai films but because it is the same—a feature that Wong has in common with the great Japanese director Yasujiro Ozu. The aesthetic principles of such work are not change and development, but repetition and memory.”[11]

Citing Ackbar Abbas’ Hong Kong: Culture and the Politics of Disappearance (1997), Helen Hok-Sze Leung claims that “[w]hat is persistently repeated and remembered”[12] in Kar-wai’s contemporaneous cinema is “an experience of the negative.”[13] Leung further refers to this aesthetic experience as comprising a sense “of something elusive that is just out of grasp.”[14] This phenomenon results in what Abbas refers to as the oddly sensuous “erotics of disappointment.”[15] Similarly, Jean-Marc Lalanne argues that Wong “films the huge flow of contemporary images from the inside [and] hones them to an almost dizzying point of seductiveness.”[16] Lalanne proceeds to argue that

“at the same time [Wong] is not afraid to talk about the damage they do. Individuals are alone, orphaned, unfit for love, unable to exert the slightest influence on reality (always somewhere else out of reach).”[17]

However, Lalanne does not specify the source or subject of the damage done to individuals beyond this short list of alienated characteristics he assigns to them.

Brunette explains that “[i]n interviews, Wong has vaguely linked the political issue with a more general urban alienation that has come to seem normal.”[18] Shortly before the handover, Wong explained that, for example, “Days of Being Wild centers on various feelings about staying in or leaving Hong Kong. That’s less of an issue now that we’re so close to 1997. Chungking Express is more about the way people feel now.”[19] Contra Wong’s vague dismissal, however, his long-time cinematographer, Christopher Doyle (to whom much credit for Wong’s styles can be attributed) agrees that some of the aesthetics of Wong’s films are imbued with an anxiety that might have to do with a desire to halt the march of time towards the handover:

“I’ve always associated our ‘blurred action’ sequences with the adrenaline rush triggered by fear or violence. ... The idea is to suspend time, to emphasize and prolong the ‘relevance’ of whatever is going on.”[20]

Abbas further states that even though “we find no direct reference in any of these films to the political situation at all ... politics seems to be conspicuously absent in Wong’s films. What we do find, on the other hand, is something else, a more indirect relation.”[21] Abbas concedes,

“Something of these confusions [concerning Hong Kong’s uncertain political future leading up to the handover], a part of what [he calls] the experience of the negative, has seeped into Wong's films.”[22]

Indeed, Eric Greene (1998) convincingly argues,

“Even if artists do not consciously attempt to make ‘political statements,’ artists exist in a world of political and social relations. … We can reasonably expect therefore that, consciously or not, political realities, events, and themes will register in an artist’s work. In fact we should be shocked if a country’s political conflicts and social biases do not find their way into its cultural productions.”[23]

For all of his discussion of aesthetics in Wong’s film, Peter Brunette (2005) makes only one reference to anxiety in his entire book, although it is tellingly attached to the 1997 handover:

“In 1984, mainland Chinese and British authorities agreed to the handover of Hong Kong to the People’s Republic in 1997. Hence, the ticking clock, in Wong’s films ... became a natural metaphor for all the fear and anxiety attached to this change.”[24]

Discussing Chungking Express in particular, Brunette foregrounds “the political aspect of the film, which is, for once, undeniable. Since Chungking Express is actually set in present-day Hong Kong, there is a clear political subtext to whatever happens in it.”[25] While Abbas acknowledges the handover as a determining factor to the “negativity” and “melancholy” in Wong’s films, most of his analysis becomes descriptive of the films’ aesthetics, missing the opportunity to parse specific formal and aesthetic elements for their thematizing of the social anxiety pertaining to the handover.[26] Abbas concludes that,

“as noted, there is very little reference in Wong’s cinema to the political situation. Moreover, his films after 1997 continue with the same set of concerns. It will be necessary therefore to think about disappearance in another way: not as vanishing without a trace, and not as absence, but rather as problematic presence, as dis-appearance.”[27]

Abbas then proceeds with his descriptions of the aesthetic conventions in Wong’s films with little further connection to the 1997 handover.

In this contribution, we tether the aesthetics in these films to a particular historical moment and a specific socio-political anxiety in an effort to anchor an understanding of this highly sensuous aesthetic. Wong’s films embody the “sensuous aesthetics” described by Gary Bettinson in “Partial Views: Visual Style and Aesthetic of Disturbance.” He argues that these particular aesthetics cause viewers to “become absorbed in the film at a purely aesthetic level.”[28] Wong puts these sensuous aesthetics to use in the service of an almost universal concern with the social subject of Hong Kong, either in the films’ immediate settings or by symbolic absentia. For example, narratively he carries the viewer along on the journeys of his characters who often aimlessly wander around the city, an experience that prompts the viewer to discover the struggles they face within this era of transience.[29] While many of the urban and social anxieties that are presented in Wong’s films date well back into the pre-handover period, actual social anxiety levels increased as the Hong Kong populace was “faced with the uncomfortable possibility of an alien identity about to be imposed on it from China.” As Abbas so succinctly encapsulates the scenario, Hong Kong residents were “experiencing a kind of last-minute collective search for a more definite identity.”[30] In this liminality, Wong brings attention to the cultural anxieties shared among native Hong Kong subjects in regard to Hong Kong’s changing political landscapes.

Three themes emerge that pertain to each film’s evolving historical moment. Cumulatively these themes are developed by a sensuous aesthetic anxiety specifically concerned with the 1997 take-over and the following period of liminality. The first surrounds an anxiety pertaining to a perceived disappearance of the city’s sociocultural space into atomized imagined havens of fantasy, the second embodies a concomitant alienating search for shared identity and memory, and the third evolves into a nostalgic anxiety arising from the perceived loss of Hong Kong’s pre-handover past. Collectively, these three films, understood from the perspective of the sensual aesthetic anxiety that Wong’s films engender, share themes, narratives, formal elements, cinematic styles and techniques, and ideological and political implications that reflect and mutually constitute the cultural anxieties in Hong Kong.

Failings of commodity capitalism and emergence of
temporal disappearance anxiety in
Chungking Express (1994) and Fallen Angels (1995)

In her dissertation on how the 1997 handover informed a swathe of Hong Kong films in the decade leading up to it, Wai Yee Ruby Cheung argues,

“The distinct visual style in [Chungking Express] reflects Wong’s self-exilic mentality as a Shanghainese inhabiting the Cantonese speaking Hong Kong, and Wong’s status of Hong Konger contemplating his uneasiness and helplessness when facing the imminent Handover.”[31]

However, Cheung does not offer a detailed analysis of the aesthetics in the film that would support the assertion. A sensual aesthetic of anxiety is prominent in Chungking Express, Wong’s 1994 film for which the original title, Chun Hing Sam Lam, actually translates to Chungking Jungle, a reference to the dilapidated Chungking mansions in which the first part of the narrative occurs conflated with the metaphor of urban jungle for its crowded and labyrinthine cityscape. Both Chungking Express and Fallen Angels depict the frantic lives of subjects living in contemporary Hong Kong who frenetically move from place to place in the exigencies of their daily lives. Laura Rascaroli and Ewa Mazierska describe the Hong Kong in these films as a “metropolis which encapsulates the rush, efficiency, and obsession with money characteristic of contemporary capitalism.”[32] They find this frenetic experience a characteristic of a “throw-away society” “where everything is constantly in the process of change.”[33] Rascaroli and Mazierska refer to Hong Kong’s ever-changing socioeconomic space as one in which the films’ protagonists find it difficult to form connections with those around them. In this environment, alienation and invisible identities mark native Hong Kong subjects in the age of transience.

Wong embeds this sense of rushed and alienated anxiety directly into the framing and cinematography in Chungking Express. Both compositional aspects play a significant role in the film’s meaning-making, obscuring clarity at times, inviting and displacing viewer identification at others. Visually there is a destabilization of identificatory suture, repeatedly moving in and out of first-person perspectives.

In the opening scene, Wong’s use of step-printing also creates a blurred visual. Step-printing is accomplished by filming at 16 frames per second, printing at 32 frames per second, and displaying at 8 frames per second. The resultant image, especially when filming the fast motions of a character, create a heightened sense of motion and crowding, highlighting the contradiction of simultaneous overcrowding and loneliness—a side effect of atomizing and alienating urban overpopulation. This style in the opening scene highlights the dream-like and fast-paced experiences of residing in the city.

Only once the tempo is slowed to allow the insertion of commodities into the narrative do the characters begin to realize and resolve their loneliness. More specifically, the film offers a witty critique of efforts to mediate social relations through commodities. In Tsung-Yi Huang’s two articles on Chungking Express, she focuses on the motif of urban flaneurism in particularly neo-Marxist terms. She describes the main characters as flaneurs of compulsion and details how the characters negotiate social relations and create meaning within the labyrinthine streets and passageways of late twentieth-century Hong Kong. She considers these characters as “alienated walkers” mired in their own urban delusions.[34] Indeed, “global capital flows continuously promise local people the dream of ... their global city as a space of convenience and chance for everyone.”[35] This alienated urban flaneurism operates as a vehicle to critique commodity fetishism and reification (under global capitalism) as it occurs in Chungking Express. Huang’s Marxist language suggests notions of the commodity fetishism seen in a number of instances in the films. Finally, Huang observes the entire city as a commodity with a detrimental mediating influence. She states that the characters “cannot see the dubious nature of the inflated global city: a convenient door that invites them to fantasize all kinds of possibilities camouflages an invisible wall that hampers their desires and dreams.”[36]

In the first of the two extended vignettes that comprise the script, Cop 223 (Takeshi Kaneshiro) replaces his ex-girlfriend with canned pineapple. He buries his sexual and social frustration in food, but specifically food as a commodity. He counts the cans of pineapple, the number of chef’s salads, etc. that he eats. Extending the same motif, a blonde-wigged femme-fatale makes her living from the drug trade. In the second longer vignette, Cop 663 (Tony Leung) manages the long absences from his girlfriend that his career as a Cop demands of him by buying her food. She leaves him, and the counter-girl, Faye (Faye Wong), becomes enamoured of him. In order to negotiate her attraction to him, Faye buys things for his apartment including a giant stuffed Garfield toy, goldfish, soap, hand towels, and, of course, different food. (Her purchase of the Garfield is the Easter egg scene embedded in the first part of the narrative.) The silly variety of purchases highlights the significance of commodities as a way in which otherwise disparate subjectivities are brought into social intersection. This social activity of consumption is in perpetual motion in the city, collected amongst the anonymous behaviors of everyone occupying its spaces, loosely and abstractly connected through mutual ties to the market. In the film Cop 663 talks to the objects in his apartment as an empty panacea for his loneliness.

People are similarly treated as commodities by both the viewing audience and the diegetic characters. Huang describes the femme-fatale in the narrative as “an enigmatic beautiful sexual object whose walking in the city attracts the male gaze.”[37] And throughout the film, social choices are repeatedly coded as food options. When Cop 663 offers his girlfriend a variety in her menu, it prompts her to leave him. In this regard, she treats him as a commodity, as readily exchangeable as the items on the menu at The Midnight Express. His commodification becomes the source of his loneliness. Huang also introduces a thematic motif of blindness into her commodity critique. In the first narrative, from behind her obscuring sunglasses, the femme fatale cannot see the abject Indian refugees residing in the Chungking Mansions as anything but money-motivated objects ripe for exploitation. She is just as unable to see 223’s discussion of pineapples as an attempt to create a social bond in the only language he knows, commodity. Similarly, in his commodity-mediated relationships, 223 chooses to be blind to the fact that his infatuation is, in fact, a violent criminal.

In the second narrative, 663 is also blind to the fact that Faye has been infiltrating his apartment and even replacing his commodities. Faye, in turn, is blind to the fact that her obsession with The Mamas and the Papas’ song California Dreamin’ indicates her desire to travel, not to generate romance. She negotiates this fantasy by getting lost in her own commodity-based imagination within 663’s private space, significantly preoccupied with his toy plane. The narrative aperture of both plotlines emphasizes the consequence of such commodity-mediated social relations—there can be no satisfying resolution and the characters’ “yearning for intimacy appears to be doomed.”[38] In both narratives, commodity fetishism and reification fail to produce satisfying social relations and do not align with any traditional convention of narrative closure.

However, it would be reductive to suggest that the film operates merely as a critique of urban commodity culture. Chungking Express might be read as subversive in how it confuses hermetically sealed categories such as profit and survival, and progressive in how it critiques the way capitalist motivations are unconcerned with morality (the femme-fatale drug smuggler is not a significantly less sympathetic protagonist than any of the others). Nevertheless, its critique of capitalist social relations should not be read as a proactive validation of the imminent introduction of so-called socialist political dynamics as a result of the handover to Chinese rule. It is merely the backdrop of the already established failings that are known which will be rendered even more anxiety-ridden by the imminent unknown of the post-handover socio-economic environment.

While scholars have brought attention to Wong’s use of mise-en-scene and character portrayal, one important aspect that has been oft-overlooked is the director’s use of specific visual techniques to create anxiety-ridden thematics of space and time. Bettinson argues that Wong’s use of visual techniques is worth exploring as these stylistics not only narrate Hong Kong’s culture of disappearance but also respond to the collective desire to conserve a culture threatened with disappearance.[39] According to Bettinson, Wong’s visual technique is “generally self-conscious and noticeable…(and) generally motivated by story concerns, compositionally rooted in narrative, character, and theme.”[40] Bettinson further argues that every element of Wong’s film plays a role in creating a social comment on Hong Kong’s larger political situation. Bettinson echoes Huang’s analyses that suggest that Wong’s characters and themes are a representation of Hong Kong’s people and their experience within this ever-changing space.[41]

Aesthetically, the use of overlapping editing and serial repetition keeps the audience in the moment and acts as a resistance towards the future in the way it delays cinematic time.[42] Wong communicates his resistance to time through particular visual editing techniques, including “shot duration, editing, camera movement, slow-and fast-motion techniques and stepprinting.”[43] Shohini Chaudhuri adds that Wong’s distinct use of smudge motion captures “an evanescent perceptual and sensory present: both here and already vanished.”[44] In doing so, this technique produces the visual effect of a slowly fading moment,[45] an aesthetic reflection of Hong Kong’s fading cultural space. Bettinson describes how these examples of Wong’s visual techniques disturb “the viewer’s perception and comprehension” as he commits “to making the image ‘difficult’ yet intelligible.”[46] For example, the use of step-printing in Chungking Express manipulates cinematic time and the use of wide angles in Fallen Angels manipulates cinematic space.[47] Such a manipulation of cinematic time and space disturbs the viewer’s perceptual and cognitive facilities.[48] The visuals transfer the native Hong Kong subject’s anxiety about the disappearing cityscape onto the active viewer experience.

In what reads like a nod to Bettinson’s notion  of sensual aesthetics and Wong’s elusive style, Ackbar Abbas affirms that “disappearance refers not just to a rapidly changing space, but more importantly to a space changing in ways that challenge description and representation.”[49] However, Abbas dissolves the local experience into a larger global phenomenon and argues that it is more appropriate “to think about disappearance as the mutations in space and our perception of space brought about by ‘globalization,’ of which the 1997 handover can be seen as merely one event in a much larger reorganization of global space and power.”[50] Even with his dismissal of the specificity of the handover on a local level, it is remarkable the way that he describes Chungking Express in a way that might be understood as an aesthetic of anxiety:

“Chungking Express (1994) is constructed almost entirely with images of disappearance. Take the opening shots of the city. Instead of giving us an establishing long shot with Chinese junks in the harbor against a backdrop of modern ‘Western’ architecture or focusing on recognizable landmarks like the Tsimshatsui clock tower and so on (clichés that effectively erase the city), Wong gives us a medium shot of roof-tops and TV antennas. This is a space that is anchored in the local and particular, at the same time as it is a space that could be almost anywhere in Asia: a nondescript space. The ‘local’ has become dislocated, so that the real we are all too familiar with is now overlaid with the uncanny. Unlike stereotypical images that frame Hong Kong as an east–west city, to take a standard example, the nondescript image subjects the city to a radical deframing that allows it to float free.”[51]

This contradiction in the free-floating and deframed experience of the city on a local level is exactly the aesthetic of anxiety that points specifically to a city bracing itself for such political destabilization as the 1997 handover.

On the script level, disappearance and time running out are aesthetically and thematically connected. The femme-fatale drug smuggler, for example, while she may be blind “to the changes taking place in a global city,”[52[] is just as vigilant towards what appears to be the biggest threat of her life: time (or a lack thereof). She is cautiously anxious of the deadline imposed on her missions, similar to Wong Chi-Ming (Leon Lai) in Fallen Angels. Both of their professions require them to complete tasks to exacting schedules which must perpetually remind them of the life-threatening uncertainty of every moment of their daily intrigues. Similarly, Cop 223 in Chungking Express appears to be living under a constant reminder of time. Having broken up with his former girlfriend on April 1st, he buys one can of pineapple a day for one month, but only cans with an expiry date of May 1st. Again, he embeds the expiry of his social relationship into the expiry of the commodity and decides that if his partner does not return to him by that deadline, then their romance will expire. Buttressing the same motif, in another scene, the drug smuggler gets handed a food can with the same expiry date. In this conflation, Cop 223 laments that “somehow everything comes with an expiry date.”

Wong conveys that almost every process that takes place in Hong Kong comes to an end in order to announce that Hong Kong subjects are essentially living in a space where time has become both a luxury and a limited resource that is running out. Hong Kong’s time runs out in 1997 with the initial handover, and then again in 2047 with the merging of the economic and social political legalities, a lingering and anxiety-ridden double-disappearance over time.

While the use of step-printing creates the effect of slow-motion and thus appears to be Wong’s desire to suspend time, it also helps to communicate the anxiety of a disappearing sociocultural space made unfamiliar to the Hong Kong subject. In the context of Hong Kong’s “imagined community,”[53] what forms the characters’ sense of communal belonging is not the physical space that surrounds them but rather the shared experiences of urban alienation. In turn, this alienation sends them into atomized psychological realms of escape, an experience they share separately. In the second storyline, when Cop 663’s relationship ends, the keys to his Hong Kong flat that his departing ex-girlfriend wants to return wind up in the hands of young daydreamer Faye, a food-server in a street-café. After many apparently self-foiled attempts to return the keys to Cop 663, she uses them to infiltrate his flat. Every time she sneaks in, she cleans, rearranges, and replaces his items. Despite these changes to his physical space, Cop 663 appears to be nonchalant about it. Wong portrays how Cop 663’s recognition of space is not merely based on what is physically around him but, instead, it is constructed by his mental projections. His own emotions and feelings define and build his physical space, regardless of their material anomalies. He proceeds to anthropomorphize these objects into substitutes for genuine human social connection. For example, when he notices that his diminishing bar of soap has been replaced with a new one, he expresses, “you’ve gained weight so fast.” Similarly, when he comes home to find his home flooded, he asks,

“Is the apartment getting more tearful? I always thought it would cope okay. Didn’t expect it to cry so much.”

Faye similarly creates her own fantasy space of escape by repeatedly playing a specific song that she associates with the state of California, her dream travel destination. Whenever she is working at the food outlet or cleaning Cop 663’s flat, she plays the song to lift her mood and distract her from boredom. Eventually Cop 663 sets up a date with Faye at a social club called California. Although he meant to meet her at the club, she does not turn up that night and when he asks one of her coworkers where she had been, he tells her that she went to another California, the one in the United States. While Faye’s version of California is one that is sunny and Cop 663’s version of California is quiet and lonely, the film highlights that the space that one creates for themself may not be one that is familiar to everyone, making one’s perception of it subjectively contingent. Similarly, although Faye and Cop 663 are embedded in the same geographical spaces of Hong Kong (until she flies away), these spaces are not defined for them by their physical surroundings but by their own mentally manufactured or fabricated desires and anxieties, and hence the same space becomes something which they cannot identify or observe for each other.

As allegory, through these episodes of willful oblivion to the materiality of the characters’ physical environments, Wong highlights the real concern among contemporary subjects of Hong Kong—the impact of the erasure of the national boundaries of Hong Kong and mainland China on the sociocultural space of Hong Kong. At its extreme, this erasure will inevitably dissolve even the alienated familiarity of their experiences into mere memory. In this context, Gina Marchetti explains that “there is also a sense that Hong Kong has been abandoned and, worse, that, like the jilted lover, it has no power or say in this decision.”[54] Indeed, these examples bear testimony to the ways in which Wong foregrounds that the already striated capitalist social geography of Hong Kong is still the only space that Hong Kong’s imagined community had known, and thus implies that the implementation of mainland China’s sociocultural space is an alienating threat to identity and a sense of belonging.

An extended formal analysis of Fallen Angels is redundant here since it deploys most of the same themes and cinematic techniques utilized in Chungking Express and for the same meaning-making purposes. (Indeed, Fallen Angels was originally conceived by Wong as the third vignette in Chungking Express, but it made the final cut of the cumulative narrative too long.) However, some salient additional observations buttress the analysis. As with Chungking Express, in addition to its manipulation and thematization of cinematic time, Wong also manipulates the concept of space through the experimentation of different camera angles, positions, and framing, observed by the even more drastic warping of dramatic space in many scenes of Fallen Angels.[55] On one level, Bettinson argues that this effect portrays the protagonists’ intimate yet distant relationship on a specifically narrative level. Huang adds that the protagonist is, in fact, a representation of the every-man Hong Kong subject. Together these perspectives inform an argument that the excessive screen on screen within the movie is a visual illustration of the alienated Hong Kong subject in this lived space where they also feel claustrophobic and invisible.

Summarily, in another two-tiered narrative cross-over, Charlie’s (Charlie Yeung) and Prisoner 233’s (Takeshi Kaneshiro) narrative comes to an end when 233 realizes that she still has feelings for an unknown Johnny, and she overlooks 233’s amorous efforts in favor of a continued search for the absent enigma. After some time, Charlie and 233 meet once again, but she does not recognize him. Feeling heartbroken, he suddenly feels a new interest towards a woman with whom he had “too many chances to rub elbows in the past…till our clothes tore, but there were still no sparks,” a woman who happens to be the female agent (Michelle Reis) introduced at the beginning of the film. In this development Wong proffers another narrative metaphor of the contingent and ever-alienated nature of social connection in Hong Kong.

While the two protagonists, the female agent and 233, have gone through their own disparate narratives, Wong posits loneliness as the shared outcome of living in contemporary Hong Kong’s phase of liminality. Prisoner 233 and the female agent’s loose relationship stages what Bettinson describes as the intimate yet distant relationship that Wong presents in his films because although they are distant strangers, they are able to bond over their mutual alienation.[56] It does not seem, however, that they connect on any significant interpersonal level, and the film ends with the empty romantic imagery of him taking her as a passenger on his motorbike for a ride through the concrete city back to her home. She understands that he too will become just another stopover in her life when she blithely comments, “the road wasn’t that long and I knew I’d be getting off soon.” Herein lies the cinematic essence of the idea of what it means to be living in the age of transience where nothing lasts and nothing matters.

However, even in spite of this daunting age of transience, Rascaroli and Mazierska discuss how the protagonists of Fallen Angels do find ways to mark their existence through the use of tools (in contradistinction to commodities). The tools to which they refer vary from the characters’ personal belongings to video cameras.[57] For instance, the female agent and the assassin, Ming (Leon Lai), maintain their intimate yet distant relationship through items left behind by Ming. This is the only way she can learn about him since their jobs preclude them from physically or directly working with each other, another echo of the failings of objects to satisfactorily mediate social relations. Through these material traces of his presence in the same spaces, the female agent is led to a bar, his carefully protected space of loneliness and isolation. Reflective of her unknown name throughout the film, her desire to go to the bar to feel close to him suggests her curiosity to know what life is like for another person whose material remainders, the tools of his deadly trade, at least mark his actual existence in the world. This disconnected method of connection marks a temporally dislocated interpersonal experience in which objects become artefacts of historical record. However, as she steps into the bar, she is overwhelmed by this dislocated commune, and succumbs to the same familiar loneliness and isolation that was Ming’s in the same space. Here Wong illustrates the various, mutually invisible identities in a harrowing phase of liminality.

Similarly, Prisoner 233, when he shifts his attention from Charlie towards his relationship with his father, begins to record their daily lives together. When his father passes away, he notices in the videographically mediated images a dynamic between them which he had not realized previously, a connection that was especially difficult for them to foster since Prisoner 233 does not communicate verbally. These videotapes are the only thing 233 salvages when he leaves the tiny flat they were sharing. Wong romantically emphasizes the importance of retaining memories for the anxious Hong Kong subject against suffocating spaces that will inevitably be left behind as they resolve into the remembered spaces of nostalgia. Since the tapes help 233 remember a relationship he had with his father, Wong illustrates how these tools can duly help Hong Kong subjects retain a deteriorating collective memory that can help them to preserve a diminishing cultural identity.

In the end, using the tools of filmmaking allegorized in his narrative as a vehicle for preserving both memory and anxiety, Wong reproduces many of the visual mechanisms and narrative ellipses employed in Chungking Express. Again, these generate an aesthetic anxiety surrounding the alienating experience of the film’s characters, an experience that is familiar to the Hong Kong subject in the phase of liminality. Thorsten Botz-Bornstein argues,

“The existence of Hong Kong does not evoke the identitarian images of chronotopes but, as much literature on Hong Kong has established, it seems to be floating in an in-between of the local-global, the colonial-postcolonial, and the present-disappearing.[58]

Similarly, Jean Ma characterizes Hong Kong as “a place in a process of constant transformation, flux, and erasure, where capitalist modernity’s reigning value of speed and an uncertain political future converge to produce a foundational indeterminacy.”[59] However, neither of these insights explicitly link these aesthetics of anxiety to the 1997 handover of which they are a clear marker. Even Brunette reiterates how Curtis “Tsui plausibly claims that the film’s mostly humorous expiration-date motif, for example, refers to the expiration of Hong Kong as a British colony.”[60] In a space where everything appears to be transient, loneliness and isolation become overwhelming, and identity becomes just another disposable abstraction. Identity is rendered invisible in a new political phase where the sociocultural space is being dissolved by a perceived outsider identity. In both films, time robs each of the characters of the only connections they had managed to salvage, and of the meagre identities they had created in the disappearing space of Hong Kong.

Time becomes a symbol of loss for the characters, just as it has become for Hong Kong’s social framework as the two dates, 1997 and 2047, signified what was expected to be a shift of national boundary and the end to Hong Kong’s autonomy.[61] For the Hong Kong subject, it suggests an end to their own culture and identity. Despite these existential threats, the protagonists are still desperate to leave traces behind to remind them of their existence. On a more hopeful level, Wong demonstrates that retaining memories with such tools can help establish a visual reference for a common past that has been shared among Hong Kong subjects. This vehicle, both cinematic and diegetic, can help remind the anxious subject of their cultural and social background and to preserve Hong Kong’s embattled imagined community.

The nostalgic fantasy trapped in the present
in In the Mood for Love (2000)

Following the 1997 handover of Hong Kong from British colonial rule to the powers of mainland China, the populace of the city moved headlong into a phase of liminality that was expected to accrue over time towards the expiration in 2047 of the “two systems, one country” rhetoric. In consideration of In the Mood for Love’s year of release, three years after the 1997 handover, the historical specificity of this film (set in 1962 British Hong Kong) evolves from the rising anxieties of displacement and invisibility in Chungking Express and Fallen Angels towards a nostalgia invoked as a desire for Hong Kong’s pre-handover past.[62] The theme of nostalgia appears to be a major component of In the Mood for Love, which functions as “a bridge between the present and the memory or imaginary experience of the past (1960s Hong Kong).”[63] However, as with Chungking Express, the nostalgia in In the Mood for Love is one that longs for static time by confining the characters to claustrophobic and isolated spaces that are temporally and physically disconnected from the larger city.

“In decoupling offscreen space and desire, Wong introduces a temporal matrix that can imagine only the present. In the Mood for Love is unique among Wong's works in that it takes place in a present continuous, without past or future other than those intimated in the dialogs.”[64]

With reference to Wong’s auspiciously titled follow-up sequel to In the Mood for Love, 2046 (2004), Abbas points out the abiding nature of the theme of wishful thinking towards the fossilization of time in Wong’s post-handover films.

“Memory as the foldedness of times and places is suggested by the many meanings of the title itself. 2046 is firstly a place where ‘nothing changes’, and people go there in search of lost memories. It is also perhaps the only [explicit] reference in Wong's works to the 1997 handover, after which year the administration of Hong Kong is supposed to remain ‘unchanged for 50 years.’”[65]

As with Chungking Express, aesthetically, the use of overlapping editing and serial repetition mires the audience in the seemingly endless cinematic moment and acts as a resistance towards the future in the way that it delays time.

In an observation that more explicitly returns to the notion of an aesthetic of anxiety, Vivian Lee further points out how the use of mise-en-scene in In the Mood for Love helps form a nostalgic imagination and collective memory of 1960s Hong Kong. Lee specifically focuses on the use of symbolically-charged props such as “the cheongsam (qipao), hairdos, street lamps, handbags” that are characterized as iconic period objects.[66] Shohini Chaudhuri also highlights how aesthetics, especially visual and sound elements, help to form a nostalgic imagination. These aesthetic elements directly appeal to viewers’ senses and emotions which allows them to take in “the vitality of landscapes and capture the ‘spirit’ of a given place.”[67] However, Lee argues that the tension that is presented in the film in regard to the theme of nostalgia raises a tantalizing “mood” for a Hong Kong of the past since the past which Wong is trying to depict “refers less to an actual past than an illusive/elusive ‘pastness’ that history does not offer.”[68] For Lee, the construction of a nostalgic imagination in In the Mood for Love derives from the aestheticized and romanticized images of Hong Kong that Wong weaves together. By doing this, Wong provides a visual reference for an imagined common past in which the native subjects of Hong Kong can mutually engage.

Wong raises the theme of nostalgia via the aesthetic function of the film’s mise-en-scene, specifically with his use of colors and music. Wong is “undoubtedly one of cinema’s great colorists,”[69] in this case employing color towards the construction of a romanticised past of 1960s Hong Kong. Chaudhuri introduces the term “coloured audition” to suggest that his use of colors is not merely for the aesthetics of the film, but with the accompaniment of music, helps to evoke a mood or emotion.[70] For instance, Wong often uses bright, saturated colors such as red and blue with melancholic music in romantic scenes led by the lead characters, Su (Maggie Cheung) and Chow (Tony Leung), to evoke a mood of intimacy. Wong creates two contrasting atmospheres between their rooms and the confined flat shared by multiple families; the plain yellowish wallpapers accompanied by dim lighting in the shared flat creates a dull and alienating atmosphere, but the use of a primary color palette and floral wallpapers in their private rooms creates a warmer and more welcoming atmosphere. The mood of intimacy evoked from the depiction of their romance helps to immerse the audience into the atmosphere of the nostalgic imagination.

Costume design is another aesthetic element that Wong foregrounds. The cheongsam is an iconic piece of clothing that Su wears throughout the entire film. It is a recognizable period item that is symbolic of 1960s Hong Kong and its fashion origins serve a purpose to the understanding of the film’s contemporaneous political implications. The cheongsam is a tight-fitting dress inspired by traditional long and loose-fitting robes, which men wore during the Qing dynasty and then altered and popularized as a fashion piece in 1920s Shanghai. Although the cheongsam originates from China, and is thus symbolic of Chinese identity, it is also associated with westernization as it was partly inspired by western fashion during a time when western education and culture were being widely introduced into the country.[71] The cheongsam also symbolizes modernity and female liberation since a significant number of women were entering the workforce and education sectors during that particular period of social reform.[72]

While the cheongsam “quickly lost its prominence in China after the Communist Party assumed power in 1949,” it remained popular in Hong Kong, especially during the 1950s and 1960s when Shanghainese tailors who were escaping from the civil war brought it along with them.[73] In cinematic representations, the cheongsam became “an emblem of modern Chinese womanhood and complex cultural understanding,” and further fed Hong Kong’s cultural hybridity.[74] This iconic fashion piece in In the Mood for Love is not only representative of Hong Kong’s pre-handover past but it is also symbolic of the city’s ambiguous identity that encompasses both British and Chinese culture. This “ambiguous identity” comprises part of a cosmopolitanism and différance that Hong Kong culture did not realize it could foster and localize until as late as the 1970s.[75]

In one sequence, the film depicts Su walking towards Chow’s room “2046” in her iconic cheongsam. The number on the door is an ostentatious reference to the last year before the final 2047 handover. The year 2047 is presented allegorically as a threat to the complete evacuation of Hong Kong’s cultural identity. However, the allegory arrives as a threat that has yet to even have had the chance to fully emerge, as Su hesitates and does not enter the room. After a brief conversation with Chow, she turns back to leave. As the door shuts behind her, the camera focuses on a close-up of the room number. As Su walks down the corridor, the camera slowly rolls away from her. The subtle increase in distance between the location of perspective and her smoothly departing figure implies an identity that remains out of reach and allegorically conveys Hong Kong’s restricted freedom to foster its own identity (in that the cheongsam also once symbolized liberation). To further indicate Wong’s repeated resistance to the future and a desire to hold onto the past, he manipulates the representation of time in space. The languid camera movement halts and Su unexpectedly pauses in the middle of the corridor. The scene appears like a still frame, an image of a cultural symbol frozen in time. Together, the contrasting symbolism of the cheongsam and the forbidding “2046” create an anxious nostalgia as a longing for the past, especially for the native Hong Kong subject faced with a reality that threatens the loss of their culture, a culture which they might have hoped had the potential to emerge more steadfastly before the first handover in 1997.

Pam Cook argues that

“it is as though history is being viewed through the filter of nostalgic memory—and, indeed, Wong makes liberal use of screens, mirrors, windows and extremely tight framing to imply a perspective colored by distance and obstructed vision.”[76]

This technique is emphatic in the next scene which depicts Su and Chow working on his writings in a room; the protagonists are not directly captured by the camera lens but are instead framed by the mirror in front of them. Even when the camera captures them directly, they remain partly obstructed by the blinds that interrupt the camera’s gaze as the protagonists are filmed from outside the room. While this is only the case for some scenes, the sudden change of clarity tends to render the viewer conscious of their position as a third-person spectator. This technique of oblique viewing reminds the viewer that they are in fact viewing a mere memory of Hong Kong with which they cannot fully engage, either physically or emotionally. This memory of Hong Kong is, in fact, fading, as do the troubled marital relationships in the narrative, and becoming distant within Hong Kong’s changing cityscape.

To add to this mysterious sensuality, Wong offers only fragmented insights into the story rather than the whole picture, as with the ever-hidden visages of the absent spouses who only occur as disembodied voices, or the relentless close-up shots of the protagonists that limit the viewer’s knowledge and understanding of the physical environment that surrounds them. More broadly, the entire narrative is presented in abrupt scenes that are dizzying in their rapid staccato, a cinematic reproduction of the way ailing memory often works to recall a life as it is cut up into fleeting moments. Indeed, the closing images of the film present an image of the world through a blurry mirror—a last metaphor of the blurred nostalgia that memorializes a past that never existed as the ideal it is imagined to have been. In this way, Wong evokes the native Hong Kong subject’s nostalgic response comprised of a blurred memory of an imagined community, an era of Hong Kong that they recognize and cherish but cannot vividly recall.

From the viewer’s perspective, aware of their position as a mere spectator, Wong follows the writing scene with one in which the protagonists stage their own switching of identity, a narrative mirror image which, in effect, guides the native Hong Kong subject to similarly reflect on their own identities. The film depicts a scenario rehearsed by Su and Chow, with Su “playing” the role of herself and Chow playing the role of Su’s husband in their effort to imagine how the situation might unfold if Su were to confront her husband about his affair. Nancy Blake argues that these recurring reenactment stagings insinuate that their relationship is “nothing more than the obsession they have with understanding the relationship between their spouses.”[77] Indeed, Su and Chow repeatedly deviate from their own identities and attempt to situate themselves in their absent spouses’ headspaces, trying to empathize with the thoughts and feelings of the very characters that have betrayed them.[78] This practice raises questions about Su and Chow’s own relationship–whether their feelings for each other are genuine or just a footprint of their spouses’ duplicity embedded from their repeated reenactments and performances.

While Blake argues that their commune is “not a romantic relationship, but the attempt to identify with a romantic relationship,”[79] their interaction also echoes the relationship of the native Hong Kong subject with the cityscape in the phase of liminality. Su and Chow are so attached to their past that they cannot move on from it, particularly from their spouses. The contemporaneous Hong Kong subject parallels the protagonists in that they are, likewise, attached to the memory of pre-handover Hong Kong, married in a sense, to the nostalgia of a past that is leaving them. What appears to cause Su and Chow’s attachment is a new feeling of shared alienation–they are each living a life on their own with which they are unfamiliar. As marital alienation sets in, the cinematographic pacing incorporates interludes of slow-motion in which each of the now mutually alienated lovers walk alone or past each other in narrow corridors. The moments captured in the mise-en-scene become increasingly claustrophobic, staged in suffocatingly narrow passageways and characterized by uncomfortably intimate profile close-ups. This representation of a suffocating nostalgia is a reflection of the Hong Kong subject’s anxiety. Summarily, they have only known one relatively historically stable version of Hong Kong, or at least an elusive nostalgia for it, and become increasingly enclosed within its blurred image of the past.

The ambiguous intimate romance that develops between the lead protagonists in In the Mood for Love can also be read as an allegory for the Hong Kong populace’s aspiration to maintain a distinct identity within the one country narrative. As Abbas argues,

“The relation that develops between [Su] Lizhen and Chow is based on the impossible premise that they do not want to be like their adulterous spouses. The result is that what brings them together (“we do not want to be like them”) is also what keeps them apart.”[80]

At the same time, the protagonists’ willing failure to develop their own relationship also reflects the Hong Kong subject’s failed attempt to mentally exist in a progressive fashion in the age of post-handover transience. The epilogue depiction of Su and Chow coming back to the flat after they had long gone their separate ways and, of course, missing each other, is representative of their futile desire to continue from where they had left off. Their failure to meet becomes another missed chance and another memory to long for, and their romance dissolves into another lost narrative that even the protagonists themselves are unable to revisit. From the perspective of the Hong Kong subject who is immersed in the aesthetic impact of the film, the narrative engenders a resonant emotional response of nostalgia towards an era of an imagined Hong Kong history that they experience as dearly lost.

Conclusion

A review of Wong’s three films surrounding the 1997 handover draws out the three dominant themes of nostalgia, alienation, and disappearance. A comparative review of In the Mood for Love, Fallen Angels, and Chungking Express demonstrates how the three themes spread across each film, variously appearing more or less emphatic depending on the historical moments of the films, preceding or following the 1997 handover. In a dialogic fashion, for instance, Fallen Angels proactively refines the understanding of nostalgia in In the Mood for Love which visually illustrates the alienated protagonist in a diminishing sociocultural space. Through the depiction of their struggles in this phase of liminality, nostalgia in In the Mood for Love does not just arise as a tantalizing “mood” but also as a longing for pre-handover Hong Kong. Likewise, an exploration of invisible identities in Fallen Angels establishes a retroactive reading of the theme of disappearance in Chungking Express because in an era when the city’s sociocultural space appears to be already diminishing, Hong Kong subjects can expect a new soon-to-come era replete with cultural loss and despair.

In Wong’s films, this emotional tenor is significantly expressed in the particular aesthetic of anxiety that each film engenders, manifest in such film elements as narrative and form, cinematic styles and techniques, and the socio-political implications embedded in each. For instance, In the Mood for Love relies heavily on visual elements such as colors, props, costume design, etc. to form an aesthetic vision of Hong Kong’s pre-handover past, which seems intended to heighten the viewer’s nostalgic response. In contrast, Fallen Angels and Chungking Express do not depend as much on visual appeal as In the Mood for Love due to the difference in their central themes and motifs preceding the 1997 handover. However, just as Gary Bettinson argues that Wong’s “authorial strategy contributes to an overall aesthetic of perceptual and cognitive disturbance,”[81] this effect can certainly be observed in Chungking Express with the use of step-printing and other jarring visual effects that are unconventional to social realism. The blurring of cinematic space, an image made difficult to comprehend for the viewer, aesthetically illustrates an anxiety of a disappearing sociocultural space.

Wong represents and reproduces the experiences surrounding identity and socio-political transition in the unique use of visual and narrative affordances that engender an aesthetic of anxiety. What is notable here is the way that Wong vaguely embeds the pervasive anxiety in Hong Kong into the aesthetics of the films rather than overtly narrativizing it as he does with the simple allegory of the title of the film 2046. Wong develops an aesthetic cinematic language to articulate these anxieties in a more nuanced fashion than vulgar articulation might have done. In doing so, Wong shares the anxiety both with the local domestic Hong Kong audience and with a wider international audience that might be more receptive to an aesthetic language of cinematic affect on an interpersonal level than to the historical actuality of the handover. Wong literally pictures the effects of an ever-changing sociocultural space that leaves the Hong Kong subject with no permanent sense of belonging. In this jarring historical cusp in which he recognizes an already diminishing cultural autonomy, Wong presents a cinematic aesthetic of how diminishing time and space are experienced by the Hong Kong subject living in the transitional era.

In hindsight it is clear that these films were significantly informed by and infused with the anxiety that emerged in Hong Kong from the 1997 handover and can be understood as cinematic vehicles of catharsis and wishful thinking in response to it. Indeed, through an exploration of the themes central to In the Mood for Love, Fallen Angels, and Chungking Express respectively—nostalgia, alienation, and disappearance — an aesthetic reading of the anxieties pertaining to each of Hong Kong’s historical phases surrounding the 1997 handover presents itself as an important way to understand the cultural work the films accomplish. What is most important is that the films can now be properly located as historical documents that record the social-cultural sentiments of the Hong Kong populace as they grapple with their identity within the broader narrative of national unity promoted by the Chinese government.

Notes

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