Shared Space

Wong (Kar Wai) achieves this through a renewed emphasis on the potential of shared space within the city, suggesting that while "proximity without reciprocity" is often the affective result of urban space, a re-thinking of shared space as a form of proximity that allows the gradual blossoming of reciprocity can offer new forms of urban relations (Abbas, 1997a: 54. See Appendix One). The film also presents a re-reading of desire that accompanies and lends itself best to the potential of shared space in an urban context of physical closeness but emotional distance. By imagining the lack in the Other, from which desire springs, as physical, tangible absence and substituting shared space for this absence, the film provides a means of coping with lack through the fetishisation of space.

Affectivity and Urban Space in Chungking Express

By Wendy Wang, University of Hong Kong, Pokfulam, Hong Kong