Summary
The first half of Chungking Express is devoted to the story of a cop and the criminal he arbitrarily falls in love with. We open on Cop 223 chasing a man with a brown bag on his head through the Chungking Mansions, charging through a bustling crowd in pursuit. He bumps into a woman in an obvious disguise — blonde wig, glamorous sunglasses — and in voiceover tells us that in 57 hours he would fall in love with her.
Contrast this action-packed opening shot with the rather pathetic display Cop 223 puts on in the next scene, calling his ex's house from the Midnight Express fast food joint. He talks to each of her family members in rapid succession, each time hemming and hawing, with Wong Kar-wai deftly setting up a humorous illustration of this man as a hapless jilted lover and not some fearsome authority figure.
This becomes clearer and clearer as he stands in the Midnight Express making phone calls. On his way out, the manager of that Midnight Express tells him to ask his employee May out, since she has the same name as Cop 223's ex. Cop 223 refuses, saying that he has a date for that night, but just a few shots later, we find him kicking a can around outside of his ex's apartment.
We move to the Bottoms Up Bar where a man passes the woman in the blonde wig an envelope over the counter. Dennis Brown's "Things in Life" plays on the jukebox. The woman in the blonde wig leaves and goes to a group of Indian men staying in a dormitory somewhere in the Chungking Mansions. She gives them each several hundred US dollars, and they receive it giddily. These are the men that are supposed to smuggle drugs for her, and we watch them stitch the parcels into clothing and swallow stuffed condoms.
The Indians fool around and drink beer, barely taking the assignment seriously. The woman in the blonde wig takes the Indians to the airport and they disappear behind her back as she goes to purchase flights for them at the counter. She wanders around the airport and can't find them, then decamps to the Bottoms Up Bar to have a drink and meditate on how the expiration date on a can of sardines tells her she doesn't have much time to find them.
So she begins her search, but not before we see Cop 223 meditate on an expiration date in a convenience store, mentioning that May 1 is his own birthday. The woman in the blonde wig asks around about the Indians at various stands and dark alleys in the Chungking Mansions, and eventually kidnaps a little girl, bringing her to an ice cream shop from which she calls the girls father and makes vague threats about the child's safety. But she isn't callous enough to deliver on any such threats, so she calls the father back and tells him where he can find his daughter.
We see Cop 223 chase another criminal around the Mansions, the tough image of policing contrasting again with Cop 223's overall sentimentality. He returns to the convenience store and berates the clerk about throwing away cans of pineapple just because the date says they're expired. "With you people it's always out with the old and in with the new." The clerk doesn't take kindly to the admonishing, so he hands Cop 223 a big box of expired cans of pineapple. He offers some to a seeming street person, who refuses the cans because they're expired.
Analysis
With a simple juxtaposition that opens the film, Wong Kar-wai clearly lays out so much of the fun that we're in for. We open on a foot chase that would fit in any of the Hong Kong crime films that were popular in the '90s. In fact it seems ripped straight from a John Woo or Ringo Lam blockbuster. As Cop 223 sprints after his perp, he brushes against a woman who he tells us he will soon fall in love with. A cop falling in love with a mysterious blonde woman? How classic, how masculine, how mysterious.
But the ironic juxtaposition that plays out shows us exactly how different and quirky this film is going to be. We cut to a shot of Cop 223 groveling on the phone, playing polite with his ex-girlfriend's parents who clearly do not want to let him talk to their daughter. The tough cop archetype is flipped on its head, and we quickly learn that Cop 223 is much more preoccupied with lost love than a fleeing suspect.
Of course, the very first thing you likely notice watching Chungking Express is the stunning visual style. Wong fires on all cylinders right from the get go, giving us hazy slow motion, dreamy blue lighting, and an impressionistic editing style that mimics the recall of lost memories. Film critic Jean Ma notes that Wong's films chronicle the modern city by depicting "transformation, flux, and erasure," pinpointing Cop 223's brush with the woman in the blonde wig as a "binocular effect of distance and closeness," thanks to a "flash of intimacy and an awakening of sexual interest born from the anonymous swarm from the crowd."
Indeed, much of what follows in this sequence of the film illustrates peoples' lonely journeys on one hand—as we watch Cop 223 wander amidst heartbreak and see the woman in the blonde wig race through the alleys of the Chungking Mansions—and strange intimate encounters on the other. How could you describe the kidnapping scene as anything but tender? The little girl who the woman in the blonde wig abducts seems perfectly content eating as much ice cream as she's fed, and it's clear the woman is more interested in taking care of her than harming her. When the girl's father returns and embraces her, we are afforded one of the few joyous depictions of love in the film. In this peculiar moment, early on, the city's alienation relents to show us true warmth.
