Time’s gone by, sometimes you look for the closest evidence that you’ve grown up indeed. Most of the time, after a couple of vindications, followed by a couple of false dawns, you wonder if those are mere illusions accidentally happening at the same time.
Chungking Express aka 重庆森林 is a 1994 film. I was 9 years old during 1994. Couldn’t have watched this movie then. I probably watched this during one of the movie’s rerun on tv somewhere between the mid to late nineties. I was very young then, and I thought this film is boring. Just a couple of whirl-ish camera angles. Besides, I never really understood what’s going on exactly. So my memory of this movie is pretty vague. Almost dreamlike – I think it really took place, but i can never be too sure.
Fast-forward 15 years on, I’m 24 years old this year, the age of Takeshi Kaneshiro’s character in the movie (with no intention to attempt to draw any possible comparison. I swear I’ll never try. Just unbeautifully imperfect coincidence that’s all.) I think I’ve probably watched parts of this movie during one of those reruns on local tv over the past 15 years, but again, I’m not too sure.
Just on this fine evening, I suddenly thought of Mijung, who had gone missing, and I decided to watch this movie properly once more in its whole entirety. 1 hour 37 minutes, I enjoyed it. Like how I enjoyed 2046 though a lot of people still hates me for dragging them to the theatre for that movie. That’s the surest sign of growing up. That the kinetic motion on your clock is no illusion. It feels like over the years, all you’re doing is accumulating experiences, your imaginations and your thoughts. When you reach a certain amount of quota, you gain access to different understandings. You began to understand things that you never used to understand.
Like the retirement speech I heard this morning, if life is divided into 3 stages, I’m probably at the brink of the 1st stage, sauntering awkwardly into the 2nd. Gaining the number of candles on my birthday cake seems exciting. Surely more heartbreaks ahead along the way, but all of these are slowly easing me into the better understanding of the next great movie.
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internship…about 30 working days left. I’m not a great fan of countdowns. I didn’t even really do it for my ORD. But this time, I truly felt that I’ve overstayed my welcome.
