Latest / MUBI Podcast / CHUNGKING EXPRESS — Wong Kar Wai puts "Dreams" on the menu (rewind)

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CHUNGKING EXPRESS — Wong Kar Wai puts "Dreams" on the menu (rewind) · MUBI Podcast

• 0:03
  Hi everybody, we've got new episodes coming in June all about great needle drops in movies.
• 0:09
  While we give them a final spin clean, please enjoy this classic episode from our season a couple years back where we dove into the same topic.
• 0:16
  And heads up, it does include spoilers.
• 0:22
  I want to take you back to 1989 and the cramped little bedroom of a teenager named Noel Hogan.
• 0:29
  One of the many bored kids in Limerick City.
• 0:31
  Which is kind of so West of Ireland.
• 0:35
  It was a pretty dull place in the eighties, kind of very gray, old kind of industrial town that had seen better days.
• 0:45
  There wasn't a lot of, kind of, employment here.
• 0:48
  That's Noel.
• 0:48
  And like a lot of local kids back then, he had figured he might as well start a band, called The Cranberry Saw Us.
• 0:56
  As in S-A-W, U-S Not sauce. Terrible name.
• 1:01
  We were really young, so I'm gonna use that as my defense here.
• 1:04
  That name was the brainchild of their lead singer who almost immediately quit.
• 1:08
  Leaving Noel, as lead guitarist, to write the band's songs, just rudimentary instrumentals.
• 1:13
  And one evening up in his room after a night on the town, he was inspired to break out his guitar.
• 1:19
  Yeah, I had...
• 1:21
  I'd seen a guy play in a bar, I'd seen a guy play acoustic.
• 1:26
  He was playing a song, I don't know what the song was, it was something he'd written.
• 1:30
  But there was one part of the song where he was playing an E and he let go of the A string and it was just open...
• 1:43
  And it just turned that E into something else.
• 1:49
  And I'd never seen that before.
• 1:51
  I still remember that.
• 1:52
  It was kind of the nucleus of what I was thinking.
• 1:56
  That's great.
• 1:56
  That sounds so cool.
• 1:59
  And I took that basic part from the middle of some guy's song that I'd seen him just move his finger off one string and built the whole song like around that, then.
• 2:12
  Not long after the Cranberries Saw Us, got a new lead singer, a girl who lived in the country outside of town named Dolores O'Riordan.
• 2:20
  She added lyrics, making it a song about the joy of first love.
• 2:24
  And they cut a demo.
• 2:26
  Oh, my life is changing everydayIn every possible way It's a song they ended up calling Dreams.
• 2:41
  And oh, my dreamsIt's never quite as it seems We were so young.
• 2:49
  I can't kind of tell you, like I was, I suppose, 17 or something when I came up with that idea.
• 2:56
  And I mean, if you saw my bedroom at the time, I mean, it'd just fit a bed in there, and me.
• 3:00
  You do this thing lying on your bed one day, and then you flash forward to five years and it's been played for, you know, the president's wife.
• 3:13
  Yeah, in 1992 Dreams became the first monster hit for the now, way better named, The Cranberries.
• 3:19
  And two years after that, with help from one of the world's greatest filmmakers, it was reportedly the favorite of a president's wife.
• 3:27
  The president of China.
• 3:39
  Technically, he's called the General Secretary of China.
• 3:42
  But anyway, I'm Rico Gagliano, and welcome back to the MUBI Podcast.
• 3:46
  MUBI's the streaming service that champions great cinema.
• 3:48
  On this show, we tell you the stories behind great cinema.
• 3:52
  This is season three. We're calling it Needle on the Record.
• 3:55
  As we're diving into a few of movie history's iconic needle drops.
• 3:58
  When filmmakers take preexisting tunes, drop them in their films and end up with something legendary.
• 4:04
  And while I know you know the songDreams from ads and movie trailers and just like hearing it playing at the grocery store, you probably have no idea how legendary it became in corners of Asia, thanks in part toChungking Express, the movie that launched the international career of Hong Kong auteur Wong Kar Wai and helped make Dreams and the band who wrote it icons of the era.
• 4:25
  The Cranberries became huge in Hong Kong.
• 4:27
  When Dolores O'Riordan died, there was a tribute show on the radio.
• 4:31
  That is Hong Kong born indie pop star Emma-Lee Moss, AKA Emmy the Great, and she is one of many folks I talked to about this film, this song, and the pop diva turned movie star who covered it, Faye Wong.
• 4:43
  I spent years at karaoke trying to imitate the way she sings, and I still can't.
• 4:51
  You know, I haven't succeeded.
• 4:52
  For me, it's a story about a moment of hope and optimism that's hard to imagine today.
• 4:56
  So stop doomscrolling and listen up as we drop the needle onChungking Express.
• 5:11
  Wong Kar Wai was born in Shanghai, China in 1958.
• 5:15
  But when he was five, his family moved to the British colony of Hong Kong, part of town called Kowloon.
• 5:20
  He was an only kid.
• 5:20
  Didn't speak Cantonese.
• 5:22
  Kind of isolated.
• 5:24
  So it's easy to imagine him taking solace in one thing about his new home.
• 5:28
  He grew up on a street where there were lots of music stores.
• 5:32
  And as you walk down the street, partly because a lot of sailors went there from various places, it was a big port, so there was music from all over the world that was playing there.
• 5:40
  That's film critic John Powers.
• 5:42
  He wrote the bookWKW: The Cinema of Wong Kar Wai along with his co-writer Wong Kar Wai.
• 5:48
  So he grew up listening to things like Xavier Cugat and Johnny Mathis and then Chinese songs, both Cantonese and Mandarin.
• 5:56
  So he grew up surrounded by a soundtrack of music, playing almost all the time when he'd be out walking.
• 6:01
  I've always said that maybe shaped his sense of life a little bit, because almost all of his movies are musicals in a way.
• 6:08
  Really? How would-- They're not literally musicals, but they're carried by music.
• 6:15
  You know, in his first film,As Tears Go By, there is in the middle this incredibly long scene where they play all of Take My Breath Away, Which was in Top Gun.
• 6:31
  But this is the Hong Kong version by Sandy Lam.
• 6:35
  Yeah it's not so much a scene as a whole chapter, over seven minutes of screen time.
• 6:40
  The gangster hero and the woman he loves connect in part and follow each other all around, yes, Kowloon.
• 6:49
  The song fading in and out on the soundtrack like a breeze blowing through the scenes.
• 6:59
  Right off the bat in Wong Kar Wai's debut movie as in his life, pop songs felt like they're just in the air.
• 7:10
  And actually, for a guy that into music cinema crazy Hong Kong at the end of the eighties was kind of the perfect place and time to start directing movies.
• 7:18
  'Cause the line between the film world and the pop music world, in fact, basically boundaries of any kind were totally blurred.
• 7:25
  It was a zoo.
• 7:25
  I mean, it was like a wild west thing.
• 7:28
  It really was all about churning out movies fast for an audience that couldn't get enough of them.
• 7:33
  There's almost no regulation.
• 7:35
  People were just doing stuff and there wasn't a deep bench of great actors.
• 7:40
  So often people were just taking pop stars and models and putting them in movies to see if it worked.
• 7:46
  And Wong Kar Wai had always had a particularly good eye for that because he could see the special thing.
• 7:50
  And in 1990, when he was casting his two part, second film, film called Days of Being Wild, he saw that special thing in a singer named Faye Wong.
• 8:02
  Who is Faye Wong? Don't know.
• 8:05
  She's whatever you want her to be, I guess.
• 8:10
  That again, is Emma-Lee Moss.
• 8:10
  When she's not making music she's writing a book about Hong Kong pop, AKA Cantopop.
• 8:17
  And she says early in Faye Wong's career, people wanted her to be anything but herself.
• 8:22
  She had come to Hong Kong when she was 18 from Beijing to join her dad, and she was taking singing lessons and she got a record deal.
• 8:30
  And because she was from the mainland, they tried to force her to have this Hong Kong personality.
• 8:36
  Because they were worried that Hong Kong audiences wouldn't accept someone who was from the mainland.
• 8:41
  Because remember, back then, Hong Kong was still part of the British Empire.
• 8:45
  Locals saw mainland Chinese people as kind of backwards.
• 8:48
  Stuck in the communist past.
• 8:50
  So Wong's handlers gave her an Anglicized name.
• 8:53
  Shirley Wong.
• 8:54
  And she didn't enjoy it.
• 8:56
  She felt forced into like a fake version of herself, I guess.
• 9:00
  And audiences seemed to sense it.
• 9:02
  She put out three albums full of the kind of easy listening ballads that were big at the time, and each sold fewer copies than the last.
• 9:08
  But none of that apparently bothered Wong Kar Wai, because when he auditioned her, he saw an edge that her handlers had been trying to sand away.
• 9:16
  He was very much taken with Faye Wong, who's an interesting figure because she was a mainlander, and she had a particular aura that he thought was interesting.
• 9:25
  She seemed cooler than the people in Hong Kong.
• 9:27
  Because there's something kind of other-worldly about her.
• 9:30
  - Yeah.
• 9:30
  - And in fact, she seemed cooler- and then--- Cooler than even the Hong Kongese who think of themselves as the coolest.
• 9:36
  Yeah, you'd look at her and think, oh, that's the cool person.
• 9:39
  He could see it and, you know, that's part of his gift is to find people and realize, oh, I can make them cool.
• 9:46
  He was going to cast Faye Wong in part two of Days of Being Wild.
• 9:52
  Except there never was a part two.
• 9:54
  In fact, after part one came out in 1990, you'd have been forgiven for thinking there'd never be another Wong Kar Wai movie ever again.
• 10:02
  When Wong Kar Wai madeDays of Being Wild, I think everyone thought it's going to be a gangster movie because his previous movie had bee As Tears Go By, it had been billed as a gangster movie and it had every big star in Hong Kong.
• 10:12
  You think you're going to see The Godfather with every big star in Hong Kong and you get there and you get this weird art movie about this self-destructive rich kid and how he treats women badly and nothing violent happens.
• 10:25
  And then it ends with the weirdest ending maybe of any movie you can think of.
• 10:30
  Where suddenly somebody is preparing to do something and he's not been in the movie to that point. And it just ends.
• 10:36
  At the time when the film came out, it was a box office flop.
• 10:40
  That's Vivian Chow.
• 10:41
  Back then, she was barely a teenager, but she grew up to write about Hong Kong arts and culture for theSouth China Morning Post,The New York Times and these days for Artnet and Variety.
• 10:50
  I remember my uncle went to see it because of this ensemble cast, and afterwards we had a family dinner and he was like so angry.
• 10:59
  He was like,"I don't know what this film was about.
• 11:01
  "This is like totally nonsense.
• 11:03
  "It's rubbish, has no story!" Blah, blah, blah.
• 11:06
  It's like, you fooled me.
• 11:07
  I thought I was in for an action film.
• 11:09
  Yeah, exactly.
• 11:10
  I think he was so angry that he almost wanted to slash the chairs in the cinema.
• 11:15
  So for Wong Kar Wai, this is not the zenith of his popularity.
• 11:17
  Well, that's the thing.
• 11:18
  So among the general public, people just thought that, oh, this is, he's like, being too pretentious.
• 11:26
  But I think from critics, they raved.
• 11:28
  And so it was a film that got everyone talked about.
• 11:34
  Especially because something that was on the whole city's mind as the eighties rolled into the nineties, was the fact that in less than a decade, 1997, Hong Kong wasn't going to be British.
• 11:42
  It'd be handed over to China.
• 11:47
  In the meantime, shouldn't Hong Kong filmmakers be striving for something more than violent gangster flicks?
• 11:52
  That was definitely discussed.
• 11:54
  What kind of stories ought to be told and how Hong Kong cinema can reflect the culture or the conditions of the city.
• 12:02
  What's next for Hong Kong cinema?
• 12:05
  Turns out what was next would be Chungking Express.
• 12:15
  But before Wong Kar Wai could figure that out, Faye Wong, with her fake persona she hated and now no Days of Being Wild, Part Two, to act in, was figuring out what was next for her.
• 12:25
  She disappeared for some time and she went to study in New York.
• 12:31
  Or, you know, she tried to.
• 12:32
  She got there too late to enroll in music school.
• 12:34
  Instead, as she recalled in an interview years later, she just roamed the Big Apple for a few months, and saw "So many strange, confident looking people.
• 12:46
  "They didn't care what other people thought of them." And then when she came back, she became a different person.
• 12:53
  You told me one misty dayYou'll never go awayThe look in your eyes I'm so afraid Like in every way.
• 13:05
  Her first album, post hiatus, added more smoky R&B to her repertoire.
• 13:10
  It included this tune Tears on the Wind, her first in English, and the CD cover proudly announced her new old name.
• 13:17
  She gave a self the name Faye Wong, which was her Mandarin name, Wong Faye.
• 13:23
  And then she just, I think she did like two or three albums a year or something for a really long time.
• 13:28
  Each a little different, tweaking her sound and her image.
• 13:31
  In 1993, she dropped the LP100,000 Whys, doing covers of songs from Western alt rockers like Tori Amos and throwing in some killer, alt pop originals like this one called Flow Not Fly.
• 13:49
  The Hong Kong kids fell in love with her.
• 13:51
  Oh, she was the huge, like, rising star because it was so cool to be a fan of Faye Wong.
• 13:58
  She was like the Nirvana of that moment.
• 14:01
  Oh, interesting.
• 14:02
  When you mention Nirvana, because, yeah, I remember the way she dressed at the time and she was wearing all these grungy style clothes and...
• 14:13
  there was no internet at the time, so I had no idea about, you know, Nirvana or, you know, the grunge music scene.
• 14:20
  And the people were commenting like,"How come Faye Wong dresses like this?" They're not like glamorous outfits that people would be expecting a Cantopop star to be wearing.
• 14:30
  And she never danced.
• 14:30
  She never pandered.
• 14:33
  You know, she would do shows where she didn't dance.
• 14:37
  She would just sing.
• 14:38
  In fact, Wong once told an interviewer that she designed stage costumes with long sleeves that hid her hands so she wouldn't feel self-conscious about how little she moved them.
• 14:47
  You know, a lot of people, obviously, they try to entertain and that's great.
• 14:51
  But Faye Wong just...
• 14:51
  you had to come to her I guess.
• 14:55
  She just did her thing.
• 14:55
  She just couldn't be put in a box.
• 14:59
  In other words, Hong Kongers finally saw what Wong Kar Wai had seen years before.
• 15:04
  A mainlander who out cooled them all, something totally modern.
• 15:15
  Which made her, and her music, the perfect fit for the director's next movie.
• 15:19
  A wry snapshot of modern Hong Kong, 1994.
• 15:23
  Now just three years before its handover to mainland China.
• 15:27
  Chungking Express is basically a two part movie.
• 15:30
  And so you actually have two stories that only have the most tenuous links, but which show the different sides of Hong Kong.
• 15:36
  The first story is set at night in gritty Kowloon.
• 15:39
  The second longer one happens in daylight in an area called Hong Kong Island.
• 15:43
  I think he wanted to do Hong Kong day and night for a couple of reasons.
• 15:46
  The first reason is, he told me that the Island of Hong Kong was suddenly live and happening with young people and it felt a bit like Soho.
• 15:56
  So he wanted to do something about that.
• 15:58
  But but I think also, like many people in Hong Kong, they could feel that at some point they were going to be given away.
• 16:05
  So he's trying to capture a particular moment of Hong Kong.
• 16:08
  Where everything's vibrant, but they know it could all change.
• 16:10
  Yeah, that it would change.
• 16:10
  So you want to capture that, too.
• 16:13
  And he did.
• 16:15
  In a movie that, like most Wong Kar Wai films, is about a million things, but kicks off with the story of a guy who, like his city, is obsessed with time running out.
• 16:26
  He's a Kowloon cop who's been dumped by his girlfriend on April Fool's Day.
• 16:30
  Lovelorn, he decides to wait exactly a month for her to take him back.
• 16:35
  He marks the days by buying cans of her favorite food, pineapple.
• 16:38
  One can a night, making sure each one has the same expiration date as his relationship might, May 1st.
• 16:49
  But on the last night, grocery clerk says he's already taken the old pineapple cans off the shelves.
• 16:57
  "Get a fresh one!" He tells the cop.
• 17:03
  "People like you are hung up on freshness." The cop yells in desperation.
• 17:08
  But then, a minute later, in a voiceover, he resignedly sighs.
• 17:19
  "Even plastic wrap expires.
• 17:21
  "Is there anything in the world that doesn't?" A lot of people would reference that to the anxiety of the upcoming handover in 1997.
• 17:31
  In just three years.
• 17:33
  What is going to happen to Hong Kong?
• 17:35
  And a lot of people were leaving at the time because of the uncertainty of the future of the city.
• 17:41
  So there was this expiry date.
• 17:44
  This staring expiry date, it's 1997, an expiry date.
• 17:47
  People didn't know at the time.
• 17:49
  So that's the dark nighttime side at Chungking Express.
• 17:52
  But then a third of the way through the movie, Wong Kar Wai shifts to daylight and story number two.
• 17:58
  Featuring a food server in hip Hong Kong Island, played by Faye Wong, named Faye, who's like real life Faye in ways every music lover in the audience would probably recognize.
• 18:10
  All the leaves are brown(All the leaves are brown)And the sky is gray In the movie Faye dreams of leaving Hong Kong for the West.
• 18:19
  She's constantly blasting The Mamas and the Papas' California Dreaming.
• 18:23
  Like Faye Wong, movie-Faye does leave for the West.
• 18:26
  And like Faye Wong, movie-Faye also comes back. Changed.
• 18:31
  Got so...
• 18:34
  Now she's an airline attendant.
• 18:34
  and she's come to pay a visit to a guy she was obsessed with but never quite dated.
• 18:40
  Played by Tony Leung.
• 18:43
  "Where do you want to go?" She asks him.
• 18:47
  "Wherever you want to take me" says Tony.
• 18:50
  Will they stay in Hong Kong, will they go?
• 18:53
  Instead of telling us Wong Kar Wai smash cuts to the end credits, accompanied by Faye Wong's cover of a different song about dreaming.
• 19:05
  Her version of the Cranberries tune is called Dream Lover.
• 19:08
  It's as joyful as the original with Cantonese lyrics that add a hint of trepidation.
• 19:13
  They're about waiting to fall into a long kiss with an enticing stranger.
• 19:28
  It could be movie-Faye singing to Tony Leung.
• 19:31
  Or maybe a city singing to the country it's about to get involved with.
• 19:35
  Kind of freaked out, but hoping that just like mainlander Faye Wong, it'll turn out to be really cool.
• 19:41
  There's no right or wrong, you know.
• 19:43
  No yes-or-no answers to how things would develop.
• 19:47
  But I think it tried to give the film a more positive, upbeat ending.
• 19:53
  And a more positive outlook to the question of the handover.
• 20:06
  Or, that's one interpretation.
• 20:06
  Anyway, I should sayDream Lover came out a month before the movie debuted.
• 20:11
  The tune was already a smash, but now it was about to get bigger.
• 20:16
  Chungking Express goes global.
• 20:29
  Alright, everybody.
• 20:30
  MUBI is the global film company that champions great cinema, bringing it to you wherever you are, in as many ways as we possibly can.
• 20:37
  We stream movies, we produce them, we distribute them in cinemas.
• 20:38
  Movies from any country made by legendary auteurs or brilliant first timers.
• 20:44
  There's always something new for you to discover.
• 20:46
  And hey, since you are listening to a classic episode of this show right now, I do want to reiterate that coming up in June, we are going to have all new episodes of MUBI Podcast to discover.
• 20:57
  It's our 12th season, which we are calling Needle on the Record, Side Two.
• 21:01
  We're going to be diving into many more iconic needle drops, including the bhangra bangers in the sleeper hitBend It Like Beckham and the '80s UK club hits that basically speak for the characters in the 2023 heartbreakerAll of Us Strangers, with guests including the directors of those movies, Gurinder Chadha and Andrew Haigh, plus movie star Jack O'Connell and many more.
• 21:23
  Follow MUBI Podcast wherever you listen so you don't miss it.
• 21:26
  Also, if you're a Wong Kar Wai fan and, how couldn't you be after listening to this episode, we are streaming his new epic TV series Blossoms Shanghai in a bunch of countries including France, Germany and many more.
• 21:40
  It is about the rise of a businessman in 1990's Shanghai, when China and its economy were opening up.
• 21:46
  It is in three parts, with ten episodes each.
• 21:49
  So your binge appointments are set for the next while.
• 21:51
  Subscribe to MUBI at mubi.com to start watching.
• 21:55
  We've got info on all of this, including which countries are streaming Blossoms Shanghai in the show notes of this episode.
• 20:19
  Coming up in a minute.
• 20:19
  Stay with us.
• 22:02
  Speaking of which, let's get back to the episode.
• 22:08
  So it's Summer 1994 and Wong Kar Wai's first film sinceDays of Being Wild is finally about to hit theaters.
• 22:15
  Chungking Express, which actually might have caught some of his fans by surprise.
• 22:23
  'Cause he'd been working for years on something totally different.
• 22:29
  See, back in 1990, after Days of Being Wild tanked, no producer in town would bankroll a Wong Kar Wai movie.
• 22:35
  So he set up his own company named Jet Tone after the roar of planes flying in and out of the airport nearby, and he started making a martial arts epic called Ashes of Time.
• 22:46
  And he kept working on it.
• 22:46
  And kept working on it.
• 22:50
  Ok, his style of making a movie, the most striking thing about it is often he wouldn't write the script till the morning.
• 22:55
  - Before the shoot?
• 22:55
  - Before the shoot.
• 22:57
  And he's painstakingly, he's doing and he's writing it in the morning, and some mornings he can't think of what to do.
• 23:02
  And his production designer friend, editor William Chang is as perfectionistic as he is, so that sometimes in building the sets, they will be months behind because it's not perfect for William.
• 23:15
  So you're making this martial arts movie off in China, and it's really hard.
• 23:20
  You have this perfectionism where every shot has to be perfect, every detail in every frame has to be perfect.
• 23:25
  And as he was editingAshes of Time after this huge, long, complicated shoot, he needed to do something quick.
• 23:32
  As in make another movie quick.
• 23:34
  It had taken years just to shoot Ashes of Time.
• 23:37
  Now, Wong realized he'd need profits from two films to keep Jet Tone afloat And to be profitable the second one would have to come together fast and cheap.
• 23:46
  Voila: Chungking Express.
• 23:52
  Voila: They decided to shoot at a place called Chungking Mansions.
• 23:54
  Voila: It's this big building of many, many levels that at one time was a fancy place.
• 23:59
  Voila: By the time he shot the movie, it was a place filled with immigrants swirling, doing business illegally, avoiding the cops.
• 24:05
  Voila: And they simply one night plunged into that and began shooting with no permits.
• 24:10
  Voila: Nobody knew they were coming.
• 24:12
  Voila: And they did that for several days just racing through doing that.
• 24:15
  Voila: That was for the nighttime Kowloon story and for the daytime story.
• 24:18
  Voila: There's famously on Hong Kong Island, an escalator that actually rises up outside through the city.
• 24:25
  Voila: It's very cool.
• 24:25
  Voila: You can look into apartments, people look at you, and it's very, very close.
• 24:29
  Voila: And as it happens, one of the people who lived right near that escalator was his cinematographer, Chris Doyle.
• 24:36
  Voila: So they would just go in and use his apartment as the place where the cop, played by Tony Leung, lives.
• 24:41
  Voila: Speaking of Doyle, he kept the camera mostly handheld so they could shoot fast.
• 24:45
  Voila: Ending up with a woozy documentary look.
• 24:47
  Voila: And post-production was also a blur.
• 24:50
  Voila: That was the first time I remember in my life not sleeping for three or four days.
• 24:56
  Voila: That's Roel A. Garcia, along with Frankie Chan he created the film's amazing score pretty much overnight.
• 25:02
  Voila: We only had two weeks before the premiere, or even less.
• 25:07
  Voila: 2 to 3 weeks from the moment that you started until the moment the movie premiered.
• 25:11
  Voila: Until the movie premiered.
• 25:13
  Voila: You know, it was all rushed, and I've been sitting for three or four days smoking, you know, in the studio, we smoke a lot during that time.
• 25:22
  Voila: And, you know, it's just so unhealthy, really.
• 25:24
  Voila: Luckily, I was still young then.
• 25:26
  Voila: Wong Kar Wai later said the whole process was like making a student film.
• 25:30
  Voila: So when Chungking Express debuted in July, beating the big budget Ashes of Time into theaters by months, probably few in Hong Kong had high expectations.
• 25:40
  Voila: They were wrong.
• 25:42
  Voila: When it came out, it became a sensation because it captured something.
• 25:46
  Voila: You know, I think this was probably maybe the first really youthful movie that Hong Kong had produced that felt cool in a youthful way rather than just young people being dumb.
• 25:56
  Voila: In fact, for some young Hong Kongers like Vivian Chow, it was life changing.
• 26:00
  Voila: Chungking Express is a film that I've seen 400 times at least, and how important it is.
• 26:08
  Voila: I think it gave me, the little me at that time, where I wanted to live when I grew up.
• 26:13
  Voila: Because the film was set in the central escalator and I thought, wow, it would be so cool to live along the central escalator when I grow up.
• 26:22
  Voila: And eventually I did.
• 26:24
  Voila: I lived there for a decade.
• 26:26
  Voila: And then the movie started finding that level of fan worldwide.
• 26:30
  Voila: It's a big sensation in Hong Kong.
• 26:30
  Voila: Then it plays...
• 26:32
  Voila: Japan loves it, and Japan being, you know, one of those great places, if people love it, then somehow that expands out.
• 26:39
  Voila: Illegal copies got into China, so that was cool.
• 26:42
  Voila: But then it began playing at all the festivals.
• 26:44
  Voila: I remember seeing it playing when it played, I think for the first time maybe in North America at the Toronto Film Festival.
• 26:52
  Voila: And the audience going berserk, just loving it so much 'cause it just it was like suddenly the French New Wave had been discovered, but more fun.
• 27:02
  Voila: I mean, Chungking Express isn't a demanding film, but it had all the stuff people loved in French New Wave stuff.
• 27:07
  Voila: It had beautiful people.
• 27:08
  Voila: It had liveliness, it had film style tricks.
• 27:12
  Voila: It had energy and life and wit and all of that.
• 27:16
  Voila: And if you watched film school student films, the number of people who were copying Wong Kar Wai in that period was flabbergasting.
• 27:23
  Voila: I mean, people all over the world were doing it.
• 27:26
  Voila: Because it also looked like something you could do.
• 27:28
  Voila: Oh, yeah, because it's so like, it seems so seat of the pants.
• 27:30
  Voila: Yeah, exactly.
• 27:31
  Voila: It looks like you just grabbed it.
• 27:33
  Voila: And the other thing international audiences took from the film was Faye Wong.
• 27:37
  Voila: In that great sequence, when she's at the snack bar and she's dancing toCalifornia Dreaming. The first time it ever played in North America at the Toronto Film Festival.
• 27:45
  Voila: After she finished dancing, the crowd applauded.
• 27:49
  Voila: 'Cause it was such a magical sequence, and people came out thinking,"Who is that woman?" That's the other thing about Faye Wong.
• 27:55
  Voila: I mean, hardened film critics came out thinking, "Who was that?" For sure,Chunking Express was a great introduction of her to a much bigger international stage.
• 28:08
  Voila: She became quite popular in Japan, thanks to the film.
• 28:11
  Voila: And so she did quite a few concerts in Japan, and she did the theme song ofFinal Fantasy, the video game.
• 28:20
  Voila: What?
• 28:21
  Voila: So she was like that big.
• 28:22
  Voila: I never sang my songsOn the stageOn my own Yep, this Faye Wong tune, Eyes on Me, graced the Japanese made videogame Final Fantasy VIII, sold half a million records in Japan and cracked the Billboard Hot 100 in the US.
• 28:43
  Voila: Even before that, she'd become the first Hong Kong music star ever featured on the cover ofTime magazine's Asia Edition.
• 28:49
  Voila: By the end of the century, the Guinness Book named her the best selling female Cantopop singer ever.
• 28:54
  Voila: You'd always be there in the corner And as for Dreams, after Faye Wong's cover blew up in Hong Kong in 1994, Noel Hogan and his band had some inkling it was out there.
• 29:06
  Voila: We noticed it happened and then kind of forgot about it a little bit because we were so busy touring.
• 29:12
  Voila: But then bit by bit you'd kind of hear oh yeah, Dreams has taken off in this country and that country but it really, really didn't hit till we went to Hong Kong and then later to China that we saw the full impact of it and how big it was.
• 29:28
  Voila: The Hong Kong gig would have been the Cranberries World Tour, May 1996.
• 29:33
  Voila: And...
• 29:34
  Voila: We were absolutely shocked.
• 29:40
  Voila: This isn't actual sound from the show that night, but it's an accurate recreation.
• 29:44
  Voila: Turns out Faye Wong had popularized both Dreams and the band who'd written it.
• 29:48
  Voila: They performed in Hong Kong at the Coliseum, and I went to see that show.
• 29:52
  Voila: The Coliseum holds more than 10,000 people, the biggest Hong Kong concert venue at the time.
• 29:59
  Voila: And how big a deal was that?
• 30:00
  Voila: A lot of other foreign bands, western bands, when they came to Hong Kong, they performed at smaller venues.
• 30:06
  Voila: Even for some bands that were very popular at the time, like Suede, Oasis.
• 30:12
  Voila: And then there was a huge-- There was a crazy show that had Foo Fighters, Beastie Boys and Sonic Youth in one night.
• 30:20
  Voila: Amazing! But they didn't play at the Coliseum?
• 30:22
  Voila: No, they were at the Queen Elizabeth Stadium.
• 30:25
  Voila: And that had only, what, 3000 people?
• 30:28
  Voila: In fact, the Coliseum was usually reserved for Cantopop superstars.
• 30:32
  Voila: Which now the Cranberries kind of were.
• 30:34
  Voila: It was big.
• 30:36
  Voila: Way bigger than we thought it was going to be.
• 30:38
  Voila: We were shocked that people knew who we were.
• 30:40
  Voila: And then Dreams is always the last song of the set.
• 30:43
  Voila: It always has been for some reason.
• 30:46
  Voila: It was from a very early stage to the last show we ever did.
• 30:50
  Voila: And yeah, the place just erupted.
• 30:54
  Voila: I was sitting on the fourth row or something.
• 30:56
  Voila: It was quite mindblowing to see the band performing in front of me like that up close.
• 31:04
  Voila: And I really liked Dolores, so it was such a joy to be able to see her perform in person.
• 31:10
  Voila: 15 years later, when The Cranberries finally toured mainland China, they got a similar greeting and heard some pretty tasty rumors.
• 31:17
  Voila: Like that one about the First Lady of China being a stan of Dreams.
• 31:21
  Voila: I don't know what version, but apparently this was made known and everywhere she went, if she went to any kind of functions, they'd always play Dreams as she came in.
• 31:31
  Voila: And I think even at one point, I don't know how true this is, the Olympic team for China used it for a while as well as they would enter and things like this.
• 31:41
  Voila: I have to say, as a journalist, I found no evidence to corroborate either claim.
• 31:45
  Voila: But the fact that you can take them seriously at all maybe says something.
• 31:59
  Voila: I want to end this story by playing your cover of a cover.
• 32:02
  Voila: Emma-Lee Moss, AKA Emmy the Great, doing Dream Lover.
• 32:15
  Voila: This is her playing it at WNYC's Greene Space in New York City back in 2016.
• 32:20
  Voila: I was sitting on stage right next to her.
• 32:22
  Voila: It was a live taping of my old radio show.
• 32:25
  Voila: We'd asked her to do a few covers, and this is one she picked.
• 32:28
  Voila: Turns out it's been part of her set for years.
• 32:31
  Voila: It's just such a...
• 32:31
  Voila: First of all, it's a crowd pleaser because people are like,"Oh, I know that song." And then, you know, it takes them a while to figure out what it is.
• 32:40
  Voila: Unless you're in Hong Kong, in which case they know exactly what you're doing.
• 32:43
  Voila: But then she says the song started helping her sort of find her tribe.
• 32:47
  Voila: People she could connect with over shared culture and heroes.
• 32:51
  Voila: They turned out to be all over the place.
• 32:53
  Voila: Everywhere you go, there's someone who loves Faye Wong, I played in China and I couldn't communicate with anyone because my Mandarin was so terrible.
• 33:02
  Voila: But the moment we started talking about Faye Wong, we're talking in Faye Wong song titles.
• 33:07
  Voila: That's how we were communicating.
• 33:11
  Voila: An Irish kid writes a song in his room.
• 33:14
  Voila: A mainlander sings it to Hong Kong.
• 33:17
  Voila: Then a movie sends her music everywhere.
• 33:21
  Voila: The world's got more fractured since Chungking Express but look...
• 33:27
  Voila: we speak the same language.
• 33:39
  Voila: And that's our flashback episode of the MUBI Podcast for this week.
• 33:42
  Voila: Follow us to make sure you get a front row seat to more deep dives into music and movies.
• 33:47
  Voila: Next time we are back with new episodes, starting with the story of a movie fueled by Indian dance music and UK pop, and made by a woman who's a product of both.
• 33:57
  Voila: And one of my earliest memories is standing on a chair with a broom handle in my hand and singingShe loves you, yeah, yeah, yeah Director Gurinder Chadha takes me through the tale of her sleeper hitBend It Like Beckham, also featuring superstar DJ producer Bally Sagoo.
• 34:17
  Voila: Follow us so you don't miss it.
• 34:18
  Voila: While you're at it, leave us a five star review wherever you listen, won't you.
• 34:21
  Voila: tell everyone we're not your standard movie chat show And you can find me on Threads and Instagram My handle is ricogagliano That is G-A-G-L-I-A-N-O.
• 34:32
  Voila: Happy to respond to questions, comments or to wax nostalgic about '90s music, I could do it all day long.
• 34:38
  Voila: And now let's roll credits.
• 34:40
  Voila: This episode was written, hosted and edited by me, Rico Gagliano.
• 34:43
  Voila: Ciara McEniff is our producer along with assistant producer, Kat Kowalczyk.
• 34:47
  Voila: Jackson Musker is our booking producer.
• 34:49
  Voila: Mastering by Stephen Colon.
• 34:50
  Voila: Martin Austwick composed our original music.
• 34:53
  Voila: Thanks this week to Eva Krysiak Kevin Lee, Oliver Wang and Michael Ziming Ouyang.
• 34:58
  Voila: This show is executive produced by me, along with Efe Çakarel, Daniel Kasman and Michael Tacca.
• 35:04
  Voila: And finally, to stream the best in cinema, subscribe to MUBI at mubi.com Thanks for listening.
• 35:11
  Voila: Now, go watch and listen to some movies.