Chungking Express

1994 love story

Rating: 17/20

Plot: A pair of cops in Hong Kong try to get over break-ups and find new love.

As I put together a list of favorite 1994 films, this is one I knew I had to catch up with. I'm really glad that I saw the other Kar-Wai Wong movie (Days of Being Wild) before this because it helped me adjust to his impressionistic style, the lurid colors, the unique type of characters he creates, and the fragmented storytelling. I wonder if I would have liked that one even more if I had seen it after I saw Chungking Express actually.

This is a pair of love stories that are only marginally connected. They might be connected thematically or they might not, they are connected by space, and they're barely connected by time and circumstance. One could accuse Wong of starting one story with one particular style and brand of criminal violence, getting completely bored with it, and deciding to start a new story instead. I like how this movie that is about missed connections, with two references to characters being within a tenth of a centimeter of each other, has stories that also just barely miss being connected.

I really liked the characters here. The love-struck cops, one who at least thinks he's ripped from the pages of a neo-noir world and has pineapple obsessions and the other who has conversations with bars of soap, have an almost cartoonish heartbreak, but they work almost as straight men to the more animated women who wander into their lives. The first is a femme fatale, sunglassed and trenchcoated, who would likely be arrested just for stepping out of her house because there's no way a woman who looks like that is not up to no good. Brigitte Lin's character, who is called "Woman in Blonde Wig," doesn't need dimensions. She's mystery and intrigue incarnate, and it's easy to read the guy's mind after he's decided to hit on the next girl who walks into the bar he's drinking at and sees her walk in. The other guy's just as mopey, and his love interest, played with a teenage pop star effervescence by a teenage pop star named Faye Wong, perfectly contrasts with that. She's a bouncy nymph, joyfully dancing to "California Dreaming" as she goes about her business in enough scenes to test one's patience for The Mamas and the Papas. She's introduced in abbreviated snippets of that song, and right away, as the cop remains mopey and oblivious, the viewer knows that she's going enter and probably leave his life as effortlessly as a dream. Never has stalking been so cute.

More than the characters and the dueling love stories, it's the visuals that make Wong's movie stand out. An opening scene introduces the principles as they move in this Koyaanisqatsi-esque world surrounded by these blurs of people. Colors melt together, the camera is always zipping around, and montages showing drug smuggling and pineapple expiration dates are lively and ultra-cool. The visual storytelling's so good that I'm not sure I even needed any dialogue at all. However, the dialogue in this is really good, too, with its philosophical language about expiration dates and raincoat/sunglasses combinations.

I had a tough time finding this movie, by the way. I couldn't find it online at all legally or illegally, at least for free. I never checked the local Family Video, and none of the libraries I use had a copy. I ended up finding it at a Christian high school of all places and made arrangements with that librarian to borrow it. Nobody cares about any of this, but that's ok because nobody has read this far anyway.

Spoiler: This will make my Best of 1994 list when I eventually put that together.