'Everybody has a uniform in cities - like Brigitte's raincoat, or the policeman's uniform. 'It's only a problem for Western audiences,' Wong insists, 'because all the stars in the film are so popular in Asia.' Even so, the duplications are a necessary part of the film's thesis that in modern city life, everyone is living a borrowed identity with whatever accoutrements come to hand. It can be a confusing film, even on a second viewing characters frequently swap places with each other, or are doubled, there are two women in blonde wigs, two dressed as air hostesses, two called May (and one Faye). But she looks cool in the wig and the raincoat, so I thought of Gloria, and changed the whole thing.' But when Brigitte did the dialogue in English, she was kind of tense, so we skipped that. So she'd put on a blonde wig and hang around at night, acting like Vivien Leigh in front of the video screen. This character's one remaining wish was to play Blanche Dubois in A Streetcar Named Desire. 'Originally I wanted to write the character of a retired film star for Brigitte Lin, because I knew she was going to retire after this film. The get-up is partly Wong's tribute to Gena Rowlands's hard-boiled dame in the John Cassavetes film Gloria. In fact, there was a third story about a killer and his agent, which has now been decanted into Wong's next film, Fallen Angel.Д¬hungking Express is partly about Asian fantasies of America, with one of its characters, played by singer-turned-actress Faye Wong, obsessively listening to a CD of California Dreamin' and another popular star, Brigitte Lin, dressed as a generic femme fatale in raincoat, blonde wig and shades. 'Two hundred stories would be OK,' says Wong. The frantic rush of event makes it feel as though he has just touched by chance on two out of a million possibles, his own potential Short Cuts. The building contains a vast diversity of people from different parts of the world, so it's like a compressed Hong Kong.'Д¬hungking Mansions becomes a House of Fiction, with Wong dropping us into the centre of two stories that happen to touch on each other.

The police department considered it to be overused with electricity so it's very dangerous, it could catch fire easily. 'When we researched the building we found there were over 200 hostels there, very shabby, and over 5,000 tourists every day. 'I've been curious about this building since I was very young,' explains Shanghai-born Wong, whose father used to manage a nightclub in the basement. The action is centred around Tsimshatsui, Hong Kong's tourist area, and particularly the building Chungking Mansions - a vast, crammed complex of shops, restaurants, bars and flophouses. A melancholy sort of screwball farce put through a formalist blender, it's the story of two lovelorn cops, two women and a lot of hanging around, but everything, explains the director, begins with the place itself. Set in a snack bar and its environs, Chungking Express is urban cinema par excellence - a story of crowds, crossed paths, stolen kisses and snatched takeaway meals. Wong Kai-Wai's film Chungking Express, released this week, is Hong Kong from the inside, but with a similarly cosmopolitan perspective - the city refracted through an optic of fast food, Hollywood glamour and early new wave shooting style. That film - made by a director very much at home both in Hong Kong and the US - was at once an insider's and an outsider's view. Another place, however, that's beginning to take on distinctive contours for us is Hong Kong - largely from the huge volume of genre action movies that have become available on video here in the last few years, but also from the occasional legit production like Wayne Wang's underrated 1989 film Life Is Cheap But Toilet Paper Is Expensive, a tall tale of a Chinese-American cowboy lost in the Hong Kong labyrinth.

Viewers in the West, whether or not they travel much in the real world, know their way pretty well around virtual versions of New York, Los Angeles and perhaps Paris - but certainly not London, which hasn't figured on cinema's imaginative map for a long time. F or most filmgoers, only three or four cities exist in the world at any given time.

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