Summary
After Cop 663 refuses the envelope, Faye starts daydreaming about using the keys to get into his apartment. Her cousin, the manager of the Midnight Express, berates her for always daydreaming, and she starts walking around like a zombie. We next see Cop 663 go to his apartment for his lunch break, sulking in his loneliness. He's convinced that his ex may be hiding somewhere in his apartment and starts shouting into a cabinet for her to come out. Yet when he turns and walks away, Faye creeps out of the cabinet. Thus begins a game of cat and mouse where he walks around the apartment as Faye slips away. Was this the daydream?
We next see Cop 663 eating lunch at an outdoor market, and somehow Faye finds him there. She is wearing the same outfit we saw her wear when her cousin was yelling at her for sleepwalking. She has a stilted conversation with him and then starts to drag a basket full of vegetables away. She leaves the vegetables with the man who sold them to her, saying she has to go pay the electricity bill. Instead, she goes to Cop 663's apartment.
At the apartment, she tells her cousin over the phone that she's at the market paying the electricity bill. She's watering the plants in the shower, and the cousin hears the water. She tells him it's raining at the market. She puts on "California Dreamin'" and starts playing around Cop 663's apartment. The first real signs of life Faye has shown in the entire movie come during this scene, as she revels in being alone, having fun in a risky scenario. Through her, we notice that Cop 663 seems to own a lot of stuffed animals. She does his dishes, among other things, and leaves.
Faye finds Cop 663 eating lunch at the outdoor market again and gives him a handful of lychees. We then see her back in his apartment, eating lychees while lounging around. She's on the phone with her cousin again, telling him that she's paying the electricity bill. He's distressed that she hasn't paid it yet, but she manages to talk her way out of paying it again.
Again, we return to the outdoor market where Cop 663 is eating his lunch, and Faye now has two big shopping bags. She tells him that a friend of hers is redecorating his apartment. Once again, Faye goes into his apartment, and this time is much more disruptive. A Cantonese version of "Dreams" by The Cranberries plays on the soundtrack. Faye puts new goldfish in his fish tank, sets his table, puts away his flip flops, puts sedatives in his vodka. We watch Cop 663, in a sequence that apparently takes place later, take a pull from the vodka and promptly pass out at his table while solving a jigsaw puzzle.
Again, Faye returns to the apartment to put more fish in the tank. She plays dress-up in the flight attendant costume that Cop 663's ex left in the apartment. We watch her rearrange the labels on cans of sardines. She continues returning to the apartment, straightening up and playing around. After scavenging his bed, Faye finds a long, black hair and inspects it. She hears a message come over the machine that the stewardess ex has landed in Hong Kong and wants to see him. Before leaving, she hits rewind on the answer machine so that the message will get recorded over.
Fay goes back to the market and inspects the hair of the woman who's bussing Cop 663's table. It upsets the woman, and Faye says to the Cop that the woman is kind of a flirt. He says he guesses so. Faye seems to think he's into the woman bussing the table, but she seems not to care.
Analysis
Since this is Faye's section of the film, it is a particularly good opportunity to talk about the use of pop music in Chungking Express. On a trivia note, the version of "Dreams" by The Zombies that plays in this part of the film is sung by Faye Wong, the actress actually playing Faye. This adds a unique psychological and metatextual aspect to the scene, as the dreamlike way that Faye plays around Cop 663's apartment is backed by the real actress's own song. The real life actress and the life of her character are all blended together, as the various versions of Faye Wong's person mingle.
Gary Bettinson expertly details the use of music in Chungking Express and therefore in Wong's whole oeuvre in his book The Sensuous Cinema of Wong Kar-Wai. Bettinson outlines how Wong tends to weave his narratives around his music choices, realizing cinema as a not just a visual art, but an audio-visual one. As he tells it, the popular read of Wong in the '90s was that he was bringing the formal innovations of MTV into his movies, using music video techniques and visual language to bolster his stories. This line of reasoning has traditionally been used to tease out the post-modern aspects of Wong's films.
Bettinson isn't exactly on board with the claim that Wong employs a music video aesthetic, but does feel that there is a power to the pop-cultural aspect of the songs Wong chooses, particularly in their ability to bridge cultures, creating a less distinctly Chinese film, and one that's participatates in a global culture.
As Bettinson later explains, characters in Wong's films tend to choose their musical cues, but Chungking Express is one where the pop songs chosen serve a less than typical purpose. The repetition of "California Dreamin'" makes the narrative feel like it's continually slipping backwards, and through that song playing over and over and over again, we can trace the development of the characters. To take Bettinson's point one step further, this is a particularly useful device in a film where the plot is so barebones, and where the story is really only moved forward by the characters continuing to sulk, daydream, and drift.
One of the more important ideas that Bettinson elucidates is the fact that music is used as leitmotif in Chungking Express. It's a stretched metaphor, since a leitmotif is a little idea that appears repeatedly throughout a piece of music, but it is an apt one. Every time a song repeats in this film, that little idea is recontextualized by the scene and the characters' development. In that way, it lends some coherence to a film that could well be disorienting given the way it's edited.
