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copyright ©1999-2002 |
Plot synopsis In the first half of the film, a young Hong Kong cop, recently dumped, pines for his ex-girlfriend while roaming the city streets on the night before his birthday, May 1, which happens to also mark the one-month anniversary of the breakup. Do the math and you’ll realize the breakup actually occurred on April Fool’s Day, which is why the poor cop’s still half-convinced that it was all just a cruel joke. So every day since the day his girl up and left him, the cop has been collecting canned pineapple (her favorite) with an expiry date of May 1; it’s the same expiry date he’s set on his hope that the love of his life will come back to him. But it’s the last night of April and it’s becoming clear to him that she’s left for good. Drowning his sorrows at a bar, he glimpses a mysterious beauty in a curly blonde wig, and wanders over to try and find love again. In the second half of the film, we follow another Hong Kong cop, whose only concrete connection to the first is that he frequents the same fast food take-out stand. When his flight attendant girlfriend decides to end their relationship, she does so in a note that she leaves in the hands of take-out stand girl Fay, along with her copy of the cop’s housekeys. Of course both are meant to be passed along to the cop next time he comes in for a meal, but eccentric Fay has developed a bit of a crush on the cop, and decides to keep the key for her own purposes. Review Chungking Express is romantic. Not Meg-Ryan-mooning-around-in-New-York-City- romantic (which, except in the case of When Harry Met Sally, just plain isn’t, despite the fact that every year, the studios try to convince us otherwise), but moody-quirky-isn’t-love-sometimes-lonely romantic. It’s the sort of romantic that makes me feel that lovely shade of blue I sometimes describe as triste, when I’m being faux-pretentious (because there’s something about that self-indulgent, dreamy sad that strikes me as so very, quintessentially French). And it’s this mood, captured through the film’s very stylish, very kinetic camerawork and aided by the hypnotically beautiful nighttime Hong Kong cityscape, that connects the two Hong Kong cops in Chungking Express. Their two stories might seem wholly separate upon first viewing (there’s an abrupt switch in the middle of the film that comes seemingly out of the blue, and you half expect the first cop to be mentioned again later on in the film), but what you realize later is that this lack of coherence is only true if you’re looking for physical connections. Because while the two lovelorn cops of Chungking Express never connect paths in any scene in the entire movie, they actually share quite a lot. See, this isn’t the sort of movie that turns lives into simple plots, neatly intertwined and tied together to make sense at the end; the threads that connect these lives aren’t about common events but common emotions, in particular, the pains and pangs of love. Wong Kar-Wai’s quirky, artsy film might not be the best choice for anyone who demands tightly-woven plots and logical relationships in their video picks, but for the rest of us, it’s a charmingly seductive little treat. —reviewed by Y. Sun
---------------------------> lounge . nourish . host . laze . home . |
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