She goes to his apartment when he is out, cleans the place up and adds her own unique touches before connecting with him at a nearby eatery. However, when she dumps him and flies away to America, Midnight Express’s kitchen hand Faye (pop musician Faye Wong), infatuates her time with mending his broken heart. Cop 663 (Tony Leung) gets evening grub from the Midnight Express for him and his girlfriend, a stewardess.
Shortly after this brief encounter, the story shifts to two other lovesick, twenty-something souls navigating the crowded Hong Kong markets. Naturally, Cop 223 and the “Woman in blonde wig” (as Lin is credited) meet in a karaoke bar and find solace in each other’s shared loneliness. In each scene, she wears both a trench coat and sunglasses: the coat is to keep her image golden, the shades to keep her woe invisible. Between her criminal actions, she gets moments to mull about her loneliness. However, the dealers leave her stranded and she is forced to resort to kidnapping and violence to get her piece of the profit. They stuff cocaine into condoms, stick them into soles of shoes and send them jet setting. Meanwhile, not far from the busy markets that Cop 223 patrols, an assassin in a blond wig and trench coat (Brigitte Lin) facilitates a drug deal with some South Asian merchants. “Is there anything in this world that doesn’t?” If May (his girlfriend) does not return to him by the beginning of May – when he will engorge on all of the pineapple to officially mark the end of this relationship – he says his “love will expire, too.” “When did everything start having an expiration date?” he asks. Every day, #223 buys a can of pineapple that expires on May 1, his birthday. It is the last days of April and the lovesick cop is trying to find a way through it. In the first story, Cop 223 (Takeshi Kaneshiro) is in denial about a recent break-up. (The film’s North American title merges the Chungking Mansions setting of the first story with the Midnight Express fast food joint featured in both, although more prominently in the second.)
Both stories are set in busy Hong Kong marketplaces and follow the emotional heartbreak of two local cops and the two mysterious women who touch their lives. The first comprises the film’s first 40 minutes and then Wong switches to a different tale for the next hour. Even Quentin Tarantino was such a fan of Wong’s film that he signed a deal with Miramax to start his own exhibition company to release the film stateside.Ĭhungking Express follows two stories. It is undeniably cool and in love with the liberty of art itself, which is likely why Chungking Express is often compared to one of Godard’s earlier films, like Breathless or Masculin Féminin, which were more radical in style than politics. His film is an electrifying hybrid of melodrama, romance and gangster noir. Chungking Express is one of the most vibrant examples of world cinema, a kaleidoscopic adventure of love and longing that marked the arrival (at least, outside of Hong Kong) of filmmaker Wong Kar-Wai.
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