Summary
The woman in the blonde wig starts to show her first signs of defeat, sulking in a hallway while frantically smoking a long, purple cigarette. Like any classic femme fatale, the cracks in her cool demeanor suggest violence, and we get the sense that she's more like a cornered animal than a down-on-her-luck drug dealer. Indeed, she's ready to defend herself when pursued by a group of Indians out to kill her. She cooly shoots each of them in an outdoor market, barely rushing to escape potential witnesses. She only starts to run when she knows she has to, narrowly escaping into the closing doors of a train.
We see Cop 223 back at his apartment. It's a sorry sight. He's eating expired pineapple out of cans that even his dog refuses to taste. The cans multiply, and he settles into the pitiful little show, cracking open his window and leaning back in his chair, munching away. He returns to the Midnight Express and hints to the manager that he wants to take May out on a date. But she's long gone, says the manager—out on a date with someone else. Cop 223 places a call to another woman and asks her on a date, but is spurned.
He continues his wandering, spending some time in a bathroom dealing with having just eaten 30 cans of expired pineapple. Sitting at a bar, he orders shot after shot after shot. And as if in a dream, he serendipitously sees the woman in the blonde wig sitting across the bar. He hadn't seen her since slamming into her on the street. She clearly does not want his attention, but he sidles up next to her and just won't leave her alone.
We return to the Bottoms Up Bar, where the woman in the blonde wig's boss is seduced by another woman who has just taken off her blonde wig. The seduction is inverted when we return to the scene with Cop 223 and our original woman in the blonde wig. He asks if she wants to go jogging, and she says she just wants some rest. They end up in a hotel room, but nothing too torrid seems to transpire. The woman is out cold on the bed while Cop 223 eats room service.
Ever the hopeless romantic, Cop 223 cleans her shoes with his tie before leaving her to get some rest by herself. Right as he leaves, she wakes up. We next find the cop running laps around a track at the crack of dawn, living up to his earlier comment that he likes to go running when he feels like crying so that he sweats out all the water that could be tears. It's his 25th birthday, and he starts it off out of breath from running and sulking in the rain. But when he returns to his apartment, he receives a message that the woman in the blonde wig has wished him a happy birthday.
We return to the Bottoms Up Bar, where the woman in the blonde wig's boss is getting dressed after his little tryst. He dons a fresh black shirt and khakis, and wanders out to the back of the bar. He obviously has business to take care of, business that will go unfinished. When he steps out into the alley, the woman in the blonde wig shoots him. This frees her of any trouble she had that was related to the deal gone awry. We're shown a shot of a can of sardines that says "May 1, 1994"—the date of this man's expiration.
This half of the movie ends on a wistful note. Cop 223 is back in the Midnight Express for a light exchange withe manager about his little habit of depression jogging. The manager says that the cop should pursue his new employee Faye, and as Cop 223 and Faye bump into each other as he exits the fast food shop, the transition is established from the first half of the film to the second. From now on this will be Faye's story.
Analysis
This is the segment of the movie where Wong focuses on the traditional elements of genre. We watch games of cat-and-mouse play out as the woman in the blonde wig becomes hunted by a group of Indians, who she then kills before pivoting to murder the man who hired her to run the drug smuggling rung. Here, Chungking Express acts most like a conventional crime movie, bringing to mind Wong's debut As Tears Go By. It's also possible that this genre exercise is what made Chungking Express so appealing to Quentin Tarantino, who would champion the film and see that it earned international distribution through Miramax.
Indeed, this is where Wong plays around a bit with Chinese film history. Wong's decision to dress Brigitte Lin up in a blonde wig and sunglasses stands as a reference to her status as a Chinese film icon. The image is rich with connotations. On one hand, Brigitte Lin's appearance is construed here to lend the film some glamour and cinematic heft, but on the other, we see her character's double peel off the blonde wig to seduce the white crime boss, a move that feels seedy if not profane. We watch this object of mystery and desire devolve into an explicit sexual object through her double, and therefore learn that sex is not the point of all the longing in this film.
This is also the segment when Wong delivers on his motif of expiration dates. Earlier in the film, Cop 223 finds a can of pineapple whose expiration date reads "May 1," or his birthday. We see that same expiration date on a can of sardines on the ground right after the crime boss is killed. This is also the segment of the film when Cop 223's fascination with expiration dates puts him on a collision course with fate, as after eating all of that expired pineapple, he finds himself wandering the streets and, ultimately, in a bar with that mysterious woman with the blonde wig.
As this half of the film wraps up, we get the darkest material that will occur in the film. Indeed, the two halves of Chungking Express are not tonally symmetrical. Even though Cop 223's trials and tribulations are often comic, this half of the film really is the gritty crime genre exercise, rife with fateful coincidence and matters of mortality. We get a taste of the whimsy and playful chance encounters that will define the second half of the film just about as soon as Faye bumps into Cop 223 lugging a sack of potatoes.
