Review of Chungking Express (1994) by David F — 04 Feb 2014

The film depicts two stories, each involving a romance with a policeman, set in the concrete jungle of Hong Kong circa 1994. While the nameless policemen are different as are the women they encounter, both are dealing with recent break-ups.

In the first story, He Qiwu (Kaneshiro) or Cop 223 is getting over his girlfriend May breaking up with him on April 1 (nice). His birthday is on May 1st and for some reason he chooses to wait until then before moving on while consuming an unbelievable amount of canned pineapple all with expiration dates of May 1, 1994.

By then, he will either rejoined with his love or they would be done forever. Meanwhile, a woman in a blonde wig (Lin), trying to make it in the drug underworld experiences a smuggling operation gone sour.

On his b-day, a lonely Cop 223 meets the uninterested and exhausted blonde wig gal at a bar. They get a room where she falls asleep, leaving him to eat many chef's salad (a plot device that will carry over) and watch movies alone.

He leaves her in the morning and we later see her shoot the drug dealer (Thom Baker) who had set her up. Cop 223 goes jogging and receives a message from her on his pager wishing him a happy birthday.

He then visits his usual snack food store where he collides with a new staff member, Faye. From here, a new story begins. Cop 663 (Leung) has broken up with a flight attendant (Chow) and meets Faye, the new girl at the snack bar (Wong).

She secretly falls for him and often breaks into his apartment during the day to clean and redecorate and "improve" his home. Gradually, her antics encourage the morose cop, he eventually sees that Faye likes him and arranges a date at a restaurant.

However, Faye stands him up after a last-minute decision to see the world before settling down; she leaves him a fake boarding pass dated a year from then. In the last scene, Faye arrives back in Hong Kong, now a flight attendant; she finds that Cop 663 has bought the snack bar and is converting it into a restaurant.

I didn't ruin anything for anyone going over the plot like that cuz in a Wong Kar Wai film, knowing the plot ahead of time does not diminish the pleasure that will undoubtedly come from losing yourself in the expected visual delights.

In fact, in can only help understand and appreciate the film all the more. In this particular film as in most of his romantic films, love can blossom in the most unexpected places at the most surprising times.

WKW shows us that you must have a very careful eye to capture love as it happens. As oblique as it is sweetly naive, the film lingers like a personal memory long after its final frames have faded and certainly warrants repeated viewings.