In a world that streaks by so fast, nothing could be more valuable than a concrete offer to share the same future - even if that offer is written on a napkin.F or most filmgoers, only three or four cities exist in the world at any given time. It’s also true that Wong’s delirious style is dependent on his sincerity, and a film like “Chungking Express” wouldn’t fly without scraping back the topsoil of modern life and exposing the sensitive layers we all hide just below. The preciousness of this storyline doesn’t play as well now that it’s been thoroughly weaponized by the likes of Jean-Pierre Jeunet and various lesser talents who tried to bend that kind of quirk towards their own purposes (Leung is maybe the only person alive who can sell a line like “Did I leave the tap running, or is the apartment getting more tearful?,” and even he barely squeaks it out). The most routine objects that Faye discovers in Cop 663’s apartment become imbued with a holy power, like totems that she carries to remind herself that he isn’t just a dream - or because she’s afraid to risk him becoming anything more. They find romance in the strangest of things: home invasions the sense memory of certain music the echoes that someone leaves behind that can seem more real than the person themselves. The ultra-shy connection that blossoms between Tony Leung’s beat cop and Faye Wong’s proto-Amélie manic pixie dream waitress becomes a Wong signature love story. The intimacy of the voiceover harmonizes with the indifference until everyone feels alone together. The neon-lit first part, with Kaneshiro Takeshi’s handsome pineapple obsessive crossing paths with Lin’s homicidal cocaine-runner, drops us into a romantic underworld in which starry-eyed longing and sociopathic violence brush within centimeters of each other and lose themselves in the same tune that’s playing on the jukebox. ”Chungking Express” requires both of its uneven halves to forge a complete portrait of a city in which people can be close enough to feel like home but still too far away to touch.
The second part of the movie is so iconic that people tend to sleep on the first, but their lack of overlap makes it easy to forget that neither would be so electrifying without the other. Today, when it’s steeped in nostalgia for the freedoms of a pre-handover Hong Kong (and inextricable from whatever flashbulb memories you might have about who you were when you first discovered it), “Chungking Express” still feels new. By the time the title card arrives a few seconds later in a hail of bullets, it’s clear you’re watching sui generis cinema that can only be made in a melting pot as it threatens to bubble over.
A blonde-wigged Brigitte Lin speeds through the bowels of Kowloon’s Chungking Mansions, the world streaking around her, life always in media res. Lightning in a bottle, “Chungking Express” bolts out of the darkness to the queasy sounds of Michael Galasso’s organ-grinder soundtrack. Is any other film so captivating so fast? Frustrated by the interminable post-production of “Ashes of Time” and itching to get out of the editing room, Wong Kar Wai hit the streets of Hong Kong and - in a blitz of pent-up creativity - slapped together one of the most earthshaking movies of its decade in less than two months.