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This attachment to objects isn’t limited to Faye, either. She gets to know him through his stuff: commodity fetishism in perhaps its most literal form. These are some of Chungking‘s most iconic scenes, Faye bobbing her head to “Dreamin'” as she cleans up his place, plays with the toy airplane 663’s flight attendant ex gave him, and simply soaks in the margins of his life. But in classic Wong fashion, rather than be straight and ask him out on a date, Faye takes the rare chance of being handed his keys by an ex-girlfriend to sneak into his apartment while he’s working and hang out there. 663 and Faye strike up a curious courtship, much of it unrequited on her part.
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Leung and Wong’s romance, meanwhile, is more endearingly hazy - both Leung’s cop no.
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And yet, their encounter helps to teach Kaneshiro’s cop to let go and look for love elsewhere. Wong knows their interactions can’t last - like the expiring can of pineapple, Lin’s own time is running out, as the drug couriers she’s recently betrayed will soon come to kill her (her own countdown comes from a similarly-expiring can of sardines being handed off to her). Take the first story, for instance, the love-sick cop with the canned pineapple fetish - his narrative chiefly revolves around his dalliance with a mysterious drug dealer with a blonde wig ( Brigitte Lin Ching-hsia, serving Gena Rowlands on a silver platter), which never goes further than the cop intimately polishing her shoes while she sleeps one night. They’re liminal spaces, waystations from one place to another everyone feels like they’re just there on their way to the next thing, and those that stay shouldn’t be there much longer.Īlienation and decay are littered throughout Chungking Express, and the only characters we really follow feel like ships in the night, figures looking for love but unable to put away their pretenses. The film’s two distinct narratives - both of cops dealing with fractured love and the anxiety of its distance - take place, respectively, in Chungking Mansions (a crowded, working-poor area punctuated by flophouses and shady dealings) and the Midnight Express (the food stand where Wong sways to “California Dreamin'” ad nauseam while selling chef’s salads). Unlike the languid slowness of Ashes, Chungking is sprightly and fast-paced, its understanding of time as malleable as its step-printed chase sequences that begin the film. The results, of course, were revelatory, not just for Wong’s status as an auteur filmmaker but for the world of independent global cinema: Chungking Express was a huge success, at least critically, and established Wong Kar-wai as a known quantity among Western cinephiles. (A third planned story would be scrapped from Chungking and turned into future feature Fallen Angels.) The context of the film’s creation is also unique in its timing: Wong made Chungking on a two-month break from the years-long editing process of his sprawling wuxia epic Ashes of Time, out of a need to break out of that mode and try something new in the form of a two-chapter set of love stories set in the modern day. Time is absolutely on Wong’s mind in every stage of Chungking, from his understanding of chronology to the liminal states of his characters. Items become totemic, indicative of the passage of time and our connections to each other. A curious food stand worker ( Faye Wong) sneaks into the messy apartment of another cop ( Tony Leung Chiu-Wai) just to learn more about him, and clean up his belongings. A heartbroken cop ( Takeshi Kaneshiro) purchases a can of pineapples from his local convenience store for 30 days, each one with an expiration date of May 1st - both evocative of his recently-departed girlfriend (also named May) and of the month she tells him she needs to think their relationship over. In the world of Wong Kar-wai‘s Chungking Express, people, and the relationships between them, are defined by the objects they buy.
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Is there anything in this world that doesn’t?”