Of course, the very first thing you likely notice watching Chungking Express is the stunning visual style. The tough cop archetype is flipped on its head, and we quickly learn that Cop 223 is much more preoccupied with lost love than a fleeing suspect.
We cut to a shot of Cop 223 groveling on the phone, playing polite with his ex-girlfriend's parents who clearly do not want to let him talk to their daughter. A cop falling in love with a mysterious blonde woman? How classic, how masculine, how mysterious.īut the ironic juxtaposition that plays out shows us exactly how different and quirky this film is going to be. As Cop 223 sprints after his perp, he brushes against a woman who he tells us he will soon fall in love with. In fact it seems ripped straight from a John Woo or Ringo Lam blockbuster. We open on a foot chase that would fit in any of the Hong Kong crime films that were popular in the '90s. With a simple juxtaposition that opens the film, Wong Kar-wai clearly lays out so much of the fun that we're in for. He offers some to a seeming street person, who refuses the cans because they're expired. "With you people it's always out with the old and in with the new." The clerk doesn't take kindly to the admonishing, so he hands Cop 223 a big box of expired cans of pineapple. He returns to the convenience store and berates the clerk about throwing away cans of pineapple just because the date says they're expired. We see Cop 223 chase another criminal around the Mansions, the tough image of policing contrasting again with Cop 223's overall sentimentality. But she isn't callous enough to deliver on any such threats, so she calls the father back and tells him where he can find his daughter. The woman in the blonde wig asks around about the Indians at various stands and dark alleys in the Chungking Mansions, and eventually kidnaps a little girl, bringing her to an ice cream shop from which she calls the girls father and makes vague threats about the child's safety. So she begins her search, but not before we see Cop 223 meditate on an expiration date in a convenience store, mentioning that May 1 is his own birthday. She wanders around the airport and can't find them, then decamps to the Bottoms Up Bar to have a drink and meditate on how the expiration date on a can of sardines tells her she doesn't have much time to find them. The woman in the blonde wig takes the Indians to the airport and they disappear behind her back as she goes to purchase flights for them at the counter. The Indians fool around and drink beer, barely taking the assignment seriously. These are the men that are supposed to smuggle drugs for her, and we watch them stitch the parcels into clothing and swallow stuffed condoms. She gives them each several hundred US dollars, and they receive it giddily. The woman in the blonde wig leaves and goes to a group of Indian men staying in a dormitory somewhere in the Chungking Mansions. Dennis Brown's "Things in Life" plays on the jukebox. We move to the Bottoms Up Bar where a man passes the woman in the blonde wig an envelope over the counter. Cop 223 refuses, saying that he has a date for that night, but just a few shots later, we find him kicking a can around outside of his ex's apartment. On his way out, the manager of that Midnight Express tells him to ask his employee May out, since she has the same name as Cop 223's ex. This becomes clearer and clearer as he stands in the Midnight Express making phone calls. He talks to each of her family members in rapid succession, each time hemming and hawing, with Wong Kar-wai deftly setting up a humorous illustration of this man as a hapless jilted lover and not some fearsome authority figure. He bumps into a woman in an obvious disguise - blonde wig, glamorous sunglasses - and in voiceover tells us that in 57 hours he would fall in love with her.Ĭontrast this action-packed opening shot with the rather pathetic display Cop 223 puts on in the next scene, calling his ex's house from the Midnight Express fast food joint. We open on Cop 223 chasing a man with a brown bag on his head through the Chungking Mansions, charging through a bustling crowd in pursuit.
The first half of Chungking Express is devoted to the story of a cop and the criminal he arbitrarily falls in love with.