Summary
Cop 663 finishes writing out a note to himself and then stoically ambles up to the Midnight Express. He's a strikingly different kind of officer than Cop 223. Whereas our former officer of the law wore an ill-fitting suit and a beleaguered expression, Cop 663 sports a crisp, blue patrol uniform and close to no expression at all. But when he enters the restaurant, he orders a chef salad. The girl working there, Faye, is too preoccupied doing chores to look at him while he orders. "California Dreamin'" by The Mamas and the Papas is blasting and he asks why she's playing music so loud. It helps her avoid thinking, she says. He seems to win her heart in a second by beckoning her and whispering that he likes chef's salad.
We're given a little montage of Faye dancing around with various items from the kitchen while "California Dreamin'" blares. It's not entirely clear that this is a different moment until Cop 663 walks in again, and orders a chef's salad from the manager of Midnight Express, Faye's cousin. The manager asks him why he's ordering the same thing, and he says it's for his girlfriend. The manager suggests he buy two items and bring them both to her, and the cop agrees to it. Faye hides in the kitchen but peers out at the cop during the entire interaction.
The next time Cop 663 comes back, Faye overhears her cousin talking to the cop about the girlfriend he orders food for. She's visibly distraught, and we get fantastic shots of Faye scrubbing a window, imbuing a simple chore with expressive pathos. The chores continue, but Faye has changed outfits. It's a new day, and when the manager asks Cop 663 what he plans on getting for his girlfriend, the cop admits that she left him. This piques Faye's interest. Both Faye and Cop 663 have a moment in the shop, lonely but framed in the same shot.
In voiceover, we learn that Cop 663 seduced his most recent ex, the one who just left him, on a flight. She was a stewardess and he was a passenger. We're given a sequence of them fooling around in his apartment as they play with a plastic toy plane. "What a Diff'rence a Day Makes" plays until we're back in the Midnight Express, where "California Dreamin'" takes over again. The stewardess comes in and leaves an envelope for Cop 663.
The manager, nosier than we might have expected, uses steam from a kettle to loosen the adhesive and inspect what's inside. He shakes his head at the letter and seems to be passing it around to his kitchen staff. Faye reads it herself, and then shakes a set of keys out of the envelope. She pins the envelope to a cork board. After the manager and all of the kitchen workers step out, Cop 663 soon walks in.
Now, Faye and Cop 663 have their first moment alone, with "California Dreamin'" again blaring on the stereo. Faye starts to tell the cop about the woman who came for him last night, but he makes her turn the stereo down. Not only is it their first time alone, but their first moment in quiet. Faye hands him the letter, but he refuses to take it. Time slows down as Cop 663 drinks his coffee.
As he's about to leave, he puts money on the counter and Faye reminds him to take his letter. He refuses to, but he doesn't know that he's also forsaken a set of keys to his home. Faye tacks it back to the cork board. A different officer walks in the next day and says that Officer 663 is on leave since he got hurt by a pin. Faye glances at the tack on the board holding up the letter.
Analysis
The second half of this film begins in a markedly different way than the first half. Whereas our first story, about Cop 223 and the woman with the blonde wig, is action-packed and comical from the get go, the beginning of this part of the film could best be described as a slow burn. Wong Kar-wai keeps us in the Midnight Express for almost the entirety of this segment, only showing us the outside world via a few shots of the streets from the doorway of the business, and a very short fashback sequence when Cop 663 was seducing the stewardess.
We get the sense that the same scene keeps playing over and over and over again. Cop 663 continues ordering food, Faye continues doing chores, "California Dreamin'" plays the enwholeire time. Really the only way to track the progression of time in this segment is by paying attention to Faye's dress, and the slightly different conversation points each time. This is one way Wong explores a key theme: time. He chooses to depict it as cyclic in this segment, with so many elements repeating from scene to scene to scene. It even feels like a stretch to call these different scenes, given how identical they are to each other.
Contrast this with the first half of the film when time is linear, and events move lightning fast. That part of the film feels like a hazy dream, as we jump abruptly through scenes of often-disconnected action. But here it feels more like Wong Kar-wai is tracing the way that memory works, with the tendency to use just a few details to differentiate otherwise similar encounters from one another. The editing is much more coherent this time around, and his showy techniques like choppy slow motion or filming through a dirty window are only employed to channel his characters' melancholy moments.
Thorsten Botz-Bornstein, in his book Films and Dreams, describes how Wong uses short spurts of violence to allow "real life" to penetrate the otherwise-dreamy aura of his films. But, as Botz-Bonstein keenly notes, that gangster violence isn't real at all—it's stylized fiction. In this segment of the film, though, Wong depicts a much more mundane version of real life, perhaps made all realer by the way that our days seem to just repeat themselves as we go through the drudgery of our jobs and encounters with strangers. The things that we remember, though, are those little details, like what a crush was wearing on the day we finally had a meaningful conversation with them.
