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Wong Kar-Wai’s films are atmospheric masterpieces suspended in beautiful but fleeting moments in time. Watching any of his films is like falling into a dream state of heightened emotion: vivid colors, nostalgic, heart-aching soundtracks, neon-drenched cityscapes, and night escapades with lonely strangers. That is to say, Wong Kar-Wai is a director who emphatically understands emotion. His films are interested in conveying emotion and expressing the passing of time and memory’s impact on how we feel. In particular, Wong Kar-Wai’s films explore the depths of loneliness, solitude, and alienation in urban modernity. The effect is melancholic and beguiling, a painful yet relevant reflection of our society’s inability to connect and our predispositions for nostalgia as time continues, often without us.
The most striking of his many films dealing with such themes is Chungking Express. First released in 1994, Wong Kar-Wai’s film follows the daily lives of four love-lorn residents of Hong Kong and their failed attempts to connect despite being in a city so full of opportunities. The film itself is divided into two separate storylines. The first follows an off-duty police officer named He Qiwu (Takeshi Kaneshiro), recently dumped by his girlfriend. He encounters an anonymous drug smuggler (Brigitte Lin) on the night before his 25th birthday. The second follows another heartbroken Hong Kong cop, only known as Cop 663 (Tony Leung), and his interactions with a food-stand worker named Faye (Faye Wong), who secretly falls for him.
These two tales weave together in a dreamlike fashion. Each character enters one another’s lives like ghosts, each alone yet intrinsically linked by their proximity in a vast and crowded city. Their interactions are fleeting, full of miscommunications and longing, yet Wong Kar-Wai imbues these short connections with such intimacy and passion that these characters’ loneliness and need for one another is palpable, emphatic, charged. Ultimately, Chungking Express is about lonely people longing for connection and finding it in passing moments, unable to hold on to what they find. And despite the inherent melancholy in the futility of these connections, Chungking Express remains somehow hopeful, understanding the romance in the ephemeral.
Part One: Touch And Proximity In A Lonely City
The film begins with this preoccupation with touch and the passing of time. Minutes into the film, He Qiwu nearly runs into a mysterious woman (who we soon find out is a drug smuggler working the streets) while chasing after someone else through the crowded streets of Hong Kong. The moment they almost collide, the film freeze-frames, and He says, “This was the closest we ever got. Just 0.01 centimeters between us. But 57 hours later, I fell in love with this woman.” It is this observation that drives the entirety of Chungking Express: the acknowledgment of proximity and touch, the contradiction of being physically close yet starved of connection, and the tangible space that time occupies — and how lonely it can be.
He Qiwu makes for an interesting character in this sense. He spends most of his time talking on the payphone just outside the Midnight Express food stand. We listen in as He calls his ex-girlfriend May, and when she doesn’t answer, he calls her family and friends. Ultimately rejected, he goes through a list of potential women from his past who might join him on the night of his 25th birthday. What’s more, we hear him speak Cantonese, Mandarin, Japanese, and English. Yet despite the ability to communicate in so many languages, having the potential to connect in so many ways, He Qiwu remains at a distance from everyone he seeks out. The one person throughout the film that maintains any form of connection with He is the nosy, gossiping owner of the food stand who, having observed He Qiwu’s heartbreak, tries to play matchmaker to no avail. He, too, ultimately fails to get through to He Qiwu and fails to penetrate the barrier between two separate individuals.
The most poignant visual example of this lacking closeness is a repeated shot. While in the dive bar, Wong closely films the nostalgic, neon jukebox as it blasts through the darkened space. Three CDs rotate side-by-side within the jukebox, each maneuvered in such a dance that they never actually touch, although they move in sync, so close to one another. In this sense, He Qiwu’s interactions with the shopkeeper and the woman in the blond wig mimic this image: though they may speak to one another, see each other, and perceive the other in some way, what remains is a gap in time and space between them. This gap is in understanding, vulnerability, and intimacy: the conditions of loneliness and alienation.
How To Be Alone, Together
This lack of emotional intimacy means that each moment of actual physical touch is ravenous, consumptive, greedy. Even the briefest, lightest touch is filmed with such striking, claustrophobic intimacy and passion that these lonely characters’ hunger is painful. The scenes of the bartender and waitress kissing one another behind semi-closed doors is evocative of the height of this desire for touch — for closeness in an environment that warrants such loneliness and feelings of emptiness. The contrast of sensual intimacy in a semi-public, crowded space denotes the constant tension between loneliness and connection with which the characters in the film struggle.
These nameless characters, seen only in passing through the Chungking Express narrative, heighten the pervasive sense of alienation and loneliness experienced by He Qiwu. He comes to this dive bar with clear intentions of finding someone to share his birthday celebration. It’s a communal, social space but is also rough and lacks inhibitions — the perfect place for a brief, fleeting connection. In wanting desperately to form an emotional bond with another, He Qiwu turns toward a space designed for superficial relationships, much like the physical connection between the bartender and waitress. Yet, for He Qiwu and the anonymous woman, something peculiar happens in the span of the night they share.
The two share a hotel room for the night, but nothing physical occurs. Having had too much to drink, the woman passes out in exhaustion while He Qiwu eats salad, watches television, and bides his time alone while keeping the sleeping woman company. Perhaps the most physically and emotionally intimate the two get is when He takes off her heels so that her feet don’t swell overnight. But there’s an emotional weight to these scenes — a certain romanticized melancholy upon watching two lonely characters inhabit a room together wherein the only thing they genuinely share is the space itself, remaining separated in their loneliness. It isn’t a hopeless feeling; instead, these moments are comforting, romantic — like a dream. In isolation, the two characters find solace together for one night, simply existing within proximity for a fixed amount of time, likely never to meet again. This acknowledgment of the ephemeral quality of time, its constant flux, and life’s transiency becomes a means for understanding the human condition. It becomes a way to connect when the inability to connect is ubiquitous.
He Qiwu’s obsession with eating canned pineapple with the expiration date of May 1st best exemplifies all of these preoccupations with time, touch, and loneliness. The date holds significance for a few reasons: May is his ex’s name, but it’s also his birthday. In He Qiwu’s mind, the pineapple’s expiration date coincides with the expiration date on his relationship with May — it is the timeframe he has to mourn or reunite with her. Once these pineapples expire, he has to move on. But as often happens, a heartbroken and lonely person will find a way to hold on to what they desire, no matter how convoluted. He starts eating canned pineapple with this expiration date every day in April. When April 30th comes around, and stores start throwing out the soon expired fruit, He Qiwu is upset and even argues with the associate, who gives him a box of cans marked May 1st. Alone in his apartment, He proceeds to eat all of these cans. This shows the tension between time and the human inability to let go, to allow the flow of time to roll on. He Qiwu’s preoccupation with this expiration date represents that he understands on some level that time will pass, that relationships come and go, but still, he resists it, futilely trying to stop its passage by eating expired fruit.
Part Two: Passing Time And Falling In Love
The first story occurs almost exclusively at night, leading to its dreamlike atmosphere of isolation and loneliness. The dark seems to widen the gaps between individuals, obscure touch, and envelop emotion. But the second story in Chungking Express occurs primarily in daylight; instead, the lonely distances between the characters are illuminated, highlighted in lingering stares, music filling gaps in conversation, and playful daydreams.
The characters of focus in this story are Cop 663 and Faye. Cop 663 is an insomniac, lost in the haze of heartache after being dumped by his flight attendant girlfriend. He frequents the Midnight Express snack stand and meets the new hire, Faye, who takes an immediate yet unrequited interest in him. Unlike the first sequence, this narrative approaches the two characters’ loneliness and longing lightheartedly. The interactions between Faye and Cop 663 are playful and charming. Faye shyly flirts with Leung’s character by omission. She refuses to turn down “California Dreamin'” to have a clear conversation, bumps into him on the street and asks for help carrying produce, and ultimately breaks into his apartment while he’s away to tidy and restore his life post-breakup. She dances and smiles and screams in the depths of her infatuation with him. Watching Faye struggle through the rollercoaster of emotions a crush brings is heartwarming. Yet, a devastating alienation and loneliness keep her from connecting with Cop 663.
This melancholy feeling is scattered throughout the story, caught between the feel-good nature of Part Two. It is most recognizable in the moment’s Wong Kar-Wai lingers on the characters’ expressions; often, Faye gazes at Cop 663 without his notice. Her stare is that of longing, apprehension, and daydream — wanting what one cannot have. These moments are framed expertly, visually distinguishing the barrier between the two love-lorn individuals. Faye gazes at the cop from behind her manager at the food stand while washing windows, and through the curtains of an apartment building. Cop 663 does the same, always looking at her when she isn’t looking at him.
The longing, lingering stare implies that the two characters are never in time with one another. While Faye is infatuated with Cop 663, he is too preoccupied with the past. Focused on memories of his ex-girlfriend and the loneliness of being without her, he cannot see the woman pursuing him in the present moment. So much so that Faye gets away with remodeling his entire apartment, even bringing him new, live fish for his aquarium before he even notices. It takes the cop catching Faye in his apartment for him to realize her interest in him romantically. This idea of people not being in time with each other is an extension of the first story’s preoccupation with time’s passing and the notion of touch.
California Dreaming In Hong Kong
In a city like Hong Kong, people brush shoulders with one another every day, but what does it take for those same people to have an intimate connection? Chungking Express answers this question with futility — there is little chance for this connection. Like Cop 663, people are often trapped within their own notion of time, caught in memories, wanting what isn’t, not seeing what is. In this sense, connection requires being on the same psychological time, which is why once Cop 663 notices Faye’s interest in him, she is already off to California. On California time, if you will.
Like previous visual motifs utilized by Wong in the first narrative, the second story relies heavily on the repetition of The Mamas & the Papas song “California Dreamin'” to amplify this sense of loneliness and preoccupation with the passage of time. The song’s lyrics are reflective and full of longing, telling the story of someone who wants a change of scenery from the dreary winter they find themselves in. This is a song drenched in melancholy — from the symbolism of grey skies and brown leaves to the haunting call-and-response vocals that make the song sound almost like an incantation when repeated throughout the film. When confronted by Cop 663 about playing the music so loudly at the food stand, Faye responds by telling him she doesn’t like thinking, that the song drowns out her thoughts. With that in mind, the song can be understood as a stand-in for Faye’s frame of mind and her longing for a place outside of a lonely Hong Kong — the cold winter’s day which, for a place like California, is sunny, warm, and even intimate.
These narrative techniques culminate in a beautiful story of longing between Faye and Cop 663. Though never on the same time, the two share each other’s orbits in a beguiling dance of romantic melancholy, much like the jukebox CDs of the first story. These interactions are compelling, intimately charged, and suggest a chance to connect by utilizing this supposed gap. Faye’s antics charm Cop 663, and he eventually asks her out to dinner, though she travels to California instead of meeting him. Despite her absence, her presence remains within the cop’s heart, and he ends up buying the food stand. By the end of the film, Faye returns to Hong Kong as a flight attendant to find Cop 663 playing “California Dreamin'” loudly on the radio. This denotes the cyclical nature of time and perhaps a way beyond the futility of time’s passing. Here, Wong suggests that, though time passes and it is difficult for individuals to connect because of time, there is a chance for return.
Finding Comfort In Fleeting Connections
In these final moments, Cop 663 pulls out the tattered, wrinkled plane ticket Faye had given them all those months ago and asks her to write him a new one. She asks where he’d like to go, and he responds with a smile, “wherever you want to take me.” With that, Chungking Express ends. It’s a cheeky conclusion to an emotional and heartfelt film that leaves one with no real sense of resolve. It is a romance wherein no one gets together.
No one finds their soulmate; no one quells their loneliness. But that seems to be the point. Wong Kar-Wai begs that we look upon the passage of time the same way we view a romance, asks that we find intimacy in our loneliness, and cherish those fleeting moments when we do find connection among others. Loneliness and melancholy take on a romantic, poetic nature and are crucial in experiencing fulfillment in life.