‘Chungking Express’ is Poetic, Genre-Bending, and Incomplete

In his sensitive comedy-drama “Chungking Express” (1994), director Wong Kar-wai uses stunning visuals, layered dialogue, and a unique narrative structure to challenge the boundaries of time and the imagination. It is undeniable that Wong’s film is breathtaking; some may even argue that it borders on the creation of its own cinematic genre. However, despite its revolutionary vision, Wong's excessive abstraction often renders his film aimless and ungrounded.

“Chungking Express” is structured around two consecutive stories which both follow post-breakup cops’ encounters with mysterious strangers. Though thought-provoking, this unique narrative structure often does more to obscure than to illuminate. The first story focuses on a cop named He Zhiwu (Takeshi Kaneshiro) who, devastated following a break-up, seeks new love and meets a mysterious woman in a blonde wig (Brigitte Lin) at a bar. The second story, which follows a cop referred to simply by his badge number 663 (Tony Chiu-Wai Leung), details his enigmatic relationship with a restaurant worker named Faye (Faye Wong). Moments of retrospective, first-person narration provide the film with a confessional intimacy.

By focusing on two stories, both of Wong's narratives end up feeling underdeveloped. In the first story, it quickly becomes clear that the mysterious blonde woman is involved in drug trafficking, a lifestyle Wong accentuates with thrilling chase scenes drenched in hyper-saturated shades of red, cyan, and dark green. Though these moments of cinematography are stunning, they often serve more to elevate the film aesthetically than to clarify its fundamental plot. At the end of the first story, the characters remain frustratingly unknown. The transition bridging the first and second story is disjointed and abrupt, connected only by a single shared interaction at the titular snack bar named Chungking Express.

In the second half of the film, the confused abstraction of Wong’s cinematography is partially redeemed by consistent themes of solitude and human longing. The song “California Dreamin,’” for instance, serves as a musical through-line in the chaotic film. The symbolism of the song is two-fold. For one, California, a place radically different from Hong Kong, underscores the characters’ desire for escape and reinvention. Secondly, the latter half of the song’s title reflects the film’s tendency to occasionally take on a surreal quality, blurring the line between the real and the imagined until they merge into one.

The use of ordinary objects as narrative tools also acts as a cohesive motif in Wong’s film. In the first story, He buys canned pineapples following his breakup as a homage to his ex-girlfriend May, who loved the fruit. He reflects, “When did everything start having an expiration date? Swordfish expires. Meat sauce expires. Even plastic wrap expires. I’m starting to wonder: Is there anything in this world that doesn’t?” He’s obsession with expiration dates underscores his own fear of abandonment. In the second story, Cop 663’s idiosyncratic tendency to speak to inanimate objects in his house as if they were people — a towel, a stuffed animal, a shrinking bar of soap — emphasize his loneliness following the departure of his lover.

Though evocative and poetic, “Chungking Express” at times seems like an amalgam of partially executed ideas that are further developed in Wong’s future projects. The narrative duality of “Chungking Express” reflects that of “Fallen Angels” (1995), which revolves around two largely disconnected stories. The trope of romantic intimacy between strangers, exemplified by He’s infatuation with the woman in a blonde wig, is further explored in Wong’s magnum opus “In the Mood for Love” (2000).

Wong’s dreamlike film is weird and gorgeous. It is by no means, however, a fully realized idea. Nor is it the consummate film on the agony of loving and of letting go, of the blurred space between loneliness and romance. For that, skip six years into the future to Wong’s “In the Mood for Love.”

“Chungking Express” is being screened virtually as a 4k restoration by Film at Lincoln Center.