Review of Chungking Express (1994) by Mari O — 10 Jun 2009

This is a challenging time of year for me to watch movies, in the middle of the summer. The weather here in Washington is notoriously uneven, and I have a hard time with subtitles in the heat. When I was a kid, we'd watch all sorts of silly movies--I'm going to have to haul out my copy of [i]Summer School[/i] at some point, because it just doesn't feel right not to. It's been very hot the last couple of weeks, and I wasn't sure that I could get through this. However, it did seem the lightest of the Netflix movies I have right now, so I thought I'd give it a try--and, yes, I'm moving some sillier stuff higher up the list. But of course, I don't really control what I get from the library, and it turns out that very few movies that I Have to See Before I Die are comedies. Or even cheesy sci-fi or lighthearted musicals or whatever. What we have right now is subtitles. Lots of them. Turns out that the ones the library doesn't have are the ones that are, shall we say, less than cheerful.

[i]Chung Hing sam lam[/i] is actually two stories at once. Or anyway, in quick sequence. The first one is He Zhiwu (Takeshi Kaneshiro, whom we've seen before and will no doubt see again). His girlfriend, May--whom we never see--has dumped him. He gets this weird fixation with pineapple, buying thirty cans with an 1 May expiration date. She broke up with him on April Fools' Day, you see, and he's giving her a month to show him that she was just kidding. She isn't going to, of course. He also falls for the mysterious woman in the blonde wig (Ching-hsia Lin), a smuggler. On the other hand, there is Cop 633 (Tony Leung Chiu Wai, who's done a movie or two with Takeshi Kaneshiro), who never gets another name. The Air Hostess (Valerie Chow), who doesn't get another name, either, breaks up with him, and he becomes entangled with "the 2nd May" (Liang Zhen, who has no other IMDB credits), who gets all weird and stalkerish over him. At first, he only knows her through the Midnight Express, the snack bar where he gets his dinner every night. But her uncle, the manager (Chen Jinquan), works to set them up.

Cop 633 is probably the best character in the movie. Zhiwu seems like a shallow jerk who kind of deserves what he gets--one night, he sits at a pay phone and calls every girl he can think of so that he won't be alone. The woman in the blonde wig is a heroin smuggler who is blatantly using people without any other opportunity to earn money. And, again, the 2nd May is creepy. Cop 633 is not a stable guy, particularly, but you can kind of see where he's coming from. Even the Manager is kind of smug and pushy. He teases Zhiwu with the prospect of the 2nd May, then teases him again when she becomes unavailable. Cop 633 just wants to do his job, meet a nice girl, live a nice life. Things change for him over the course of the movie, but he never stops seeming like a genuinely nice guy who's just in an odd situation.

I'm glad director/screenwriter Kar Kai Wong chose not to interweave the stories. He presented them to us one at a time. First Zhiwu, then Cop 633. There are a few parallels to their stories, enough to make it make sense that they're in the same movie, but I don't want to know how the timelines compare. I don't want to know what the 2nd May is up to while the woman in the blonde wig is buying passports. I don't want to know what Cop 633 is doing while Zhiwu is calling all those girls. Enough that they are both there, that things are happening. It also doesn't really matter that I'm not sure we ever see Zhiwu actually doing police work, actually in uniform. He is defined by his May, and Cop 633 is defined by his uniform. The Air Hostess doesn't even like how he looks when he's not wearing it.

It is, when you get to the core, a very simple series of events. Some of it is improbable--no matter how much May liked pineapple, eating thirty cans of it in a night is not something a normal person would do--but it does, somewhat, explore the nature of obsession. It also explores the contrast of someone obsessed with a person who isn't anywhere near that interested. It's not exactly a work of High Art, but we don't always need that. There's a certain value to be had from just watching people go about their lives, especially when those lives aren't much like our own. It's what essentially any film is about--some lives are just more exciting than others.