Filmed in a three month break from the stalled Ashes of Time production, Chungking Express is Kar-wai Wong working at his most instinctive and poetic, while also indulging in his love of quirky characterisations and unconventional plotting which alienate the casual viewer. Set in the bustle of the Tsim Sha Tsui district of Hong Kong, the film is divided into two distinct stories both centred around the titular Chungking Express fast food counter. The setting isn�t the only parallel which can be drawn, as both start with cops struggling to deal with broken hearts and follow their attempts to overcome their despair. In this way the two stories are intimately linked, but in other respects remain very different.
Cop 223 (Kaneshiro) always meets his girlfriend May outside the Chungking Express at the end of his shift, but when she doesn�t show and starts avoiding him it is obvious he has been dumped. To try and get over her, he sets about buying 30 cans of pineapple with the same use-by-date, declaring that by the time he has found enough his love for her will have died. Meanwhile, a hardened drug smuggler ( Lin) gets in trouble when the Indian couriers she has employed go missing with her merchandise. The two meet in a bar and Cop 223 decides she is the new love of his life, but we all know it�s never that easy.
Cop 663 (Leung, further consolidating his challenge for coolest man on the planet) buys Chef�s Salad every night at the Chungking Express for his air stewardess girlfriend (Chow). However, she decides to move on and the only way he can deal with it is to project his despair onto the inanimate contents of his flat. In his melancholy he fails to notice that Faye, the new kooky girl working at the counter (the wonderfully elfin Faye Wong) has a crush on him. She decides it�s time for him to come to his senses and decides on an unusual solution.
Quentin Tarantino says he cried when he watched Chungking Express for the first time, and allowed Miramax to released it with a recommendation from him to create interest in the States. But if you see this hoping for a violent Reservoir Dogs-esque caper you will be disappointed, because Tarantino is first and foremost a devotee of film, and that is exactly why this movie appealed to him so much. It�s not generic, stifled from convention or formulaic but a free flowing exercise in style and eye seduction. It�s like the famous speech from American Beauty about their being so much beauty in the world your heart might just implode � Kar-wai Wong is as close to that feeling you can get through this medium. Although his scripts are rarely set in stone and he uses improvisation for realism, there are some fantastic lines and recurrent themes evoking the loneliness you can feel in a room full of people, the absurdity of relationships but also the undefinable joy you can�t find anywhere else. I don�t think is it possible to underestimate the ability this guy has to bottle magic and pour it onto the silver screen. |
