Wong Kar Wai arrived at cinema like a rumor drifting through the alleys of Hong Kong, already half-true and half-invented. Before Chungking Express he had traced a feverish map of longing across the city with As Tears Go By and Days of Being Wild, films that felt less like stories than like moods that had found human faces. He was not a director who built monuments. He built weather. Neon rain. Cigarette smoke that remembered the mouths it had left. By the early nineties, the Hong Kong New Wave had matured into something restless and polyphonic, a cinema intoxicated with velocity and homesickness at once. Wong absorbed that energy and bent it inward. While others were refining genre, he was loosening it, letting the camera wander and the script breathe, turning plots into pretexts for encounters. The antecedents of Chungking Express lie as much in the exhaustion of gangster romanticism as in the director’s own creative impasse. He was stalled on Ashes of Time, a period epic swollen with dust and doubt. Instead of forcing it forward, he fled sideways, back to the city, back to the convenience stores and snack bars where hearts could break in the time it takes to buy a soda. He shot quickly, intuitively, as if stealing glances. Christopher Doyle’s camera became a nervous system, jittery and tender, capturing faces that were always about to be lost. The film inherited the nervous pulse of a place on the eve of transformation, Hong Kong still bright with its own reflections, already rehearsing disappearance. It is from this pressure between speed and melancholy that Chungking Express was born, not as an experiment but as a confession whispered at full volume.
Chungking Express opens like a chance encounter, as if you had turned a corner too quickly and walked straight into someone else’s memory. The film is less interested in announcing itself than in happening to you. From its first images, the city is not a backdrop but a pulse, an organism of escalators and rain-slicked streets, of snack bars glowing like aquariums at midnight. The camera does not merely observe Hong Kong, it keeps pace with it, stuttering and gliding, catching fragments the way a distracted mind does. Two stories brush shoulders without greeting, linked more by atmosphere than by plot, by the shared humidity of heartbreak. The first half is compressed and jittery, all forward motion and nervous jokes. The second loosens into something airier, almost domestic, as if the film itself were exhaling. What unifies these halves is not narrative but a temperament. Chungking Express believes that the most consequential events of our lives often masquerade as errands. Buying a drink. Cleaning a counter. Waiting for a call that may never arrive. The film’s world is built from such gestures, but it frames them with the gravity of rituals. Light refracts through glass until it feels like a mood. Time fractures into overlapping impressions. We are not guided through a story so much as invited to drift inside one. It is a film about being briefly available to oneself. It understands that modern solitude is crowded, that anonymity can be intimate, that the smallest objects often bear the heaviest emotional freight. Even before it tells us anything, the film teaches us how to watch it. Not for answers, but for the way a face can suddenly seem like a room we have entered without knocking.
What gives the film its peculiar ache is not merely its bifurcated structure, nor the charm of its performances, but the way it smuggles metaphysics into the everyday. Expiration dates. Timing. Love that reveals itself only in hindsight or never at all. In this world, emotions are perishable goods, stamped with invisible numbers. The idea is absurd and devastating in equal measure. We laugh at a man stockpiling pineapple cans that expire on May 1st, yet the laughter catches because we recognize the instinct. We too hoard objects to stand in for endings we cannot pronounce. The film understands that romance often unfolds in the margins of schedules and the glow of fluorescent lights. People brush past one another like radio stations, occasionally aligning long enough for a song to leak through. Love goes unrevealed not because it is rare but because it is mistimed. A door opens a second too late. A message plays to an empty room. A woman cleans a stranger’s apartment as if she were auditioning for a life that does not yet know her name. The expiration date becomes a talisman against chaos, a way of pretending that heartbreak follows the logic of groceries. Yet the film keeps insisting on the opposite. Feelings do not spoil according to calendar. They ferment. They evaporate. They haunt. In Chungking Express the ordinary props of urban life become metaphors without losing their surfaces. A bar of soap holds a confession. A towel carries the residue of a presence. A song repeats until it becomes a spell. This is cinema that trusts the viewer to feel first and interpret later, to accept that timing is the true antagonist and unrevealed love the most faithful companion.
I first met the film when I was young enough to believe that infatuation was a weather system I could predict. Asian cinema had begun to seep into my life like a new color. It did not announce itself. It simply changed the way rooms looked. I remember sitting in a darkened space, the air faintly metallic with anticipation, and finding myself mirrored in the first policeman’s quiet absurdity. His rituals felt like my own. The way he spoke to objects because they could not contradict him. The way he mistook accumulation for control. I had my own pineapples, my own arbitrary dates that I pretended were choices. I was fascinated by the speed of it all, the sprinting figures blurred into calligraphy, the sudden hush when a face filled the frame. The city of the film was not my city, yet it recognized me. I loved how heartbreak could be filmed without violins, how comedy could smuggle grief, how a man could fall for a woman in a blonde wig and never truly meet her. In those days I watched Chungking Express as if it were a promise that style itself could be a form of courage. I believed I could outpace loss by narrating it. If I named the feeling, if I found the right song to put it in, maybe it would not expire. The first policeman’s faith in small gestures felt heroic. He was a man who thought he could outwit time by bargaining with cans. I did not yet know that time does not bargain. It accepts. Years later, I can say something else with a gratitude that still startles me. I have been lucky enough in life to stop looking for a May and to be found by my Faye. To realize, without fireworks, that the room had changed while I was out. That someone had been caring for the space I would become. This does not cancel the melancholy of the film for me. It deepens it. It gives those early identifications a second echo, not of correction but of continuation.
Somewhere along the way, without ceremony, I crossed the invisible line between the film’s halves. Now, when I return to it, I recognize myself in the second policeman’s quieter surrender. He is less frantic, more porous. He lets the world rearrange his apartment. He lets a woman love him in secret because he is not ready to be seen. There is a particular loneliness to adulthood that the film captures without diagnosis. It is the loneliness of knowing that the right feeling can arrive at the wrong hour and still be right. I watch him listen to the same song until it becomes both comfort and irritant, a reminder that repetition is the price we pay for being alive in a city. I recognize the way he mistakes inertia for peace. How he thinks that keeping the door closed is a form of stability. Growing older has made me less enamored of the film’s velocity and more attentive to its pauses. The shots of empty corridors, of aquariums glowing like private planets, of a woman sitting on a bed that is not hers. These are not decorative interludes. They are the film thinking. When I was younger, I wanted to run with the camera. Now I want to sit with it. I feel the weight of the unrevealed love more acutely, not as a romantic flourish but as a daily practice. We love in advance. We love in rehearsal. We love people we have not yet met because they fit the negative space of our routines. The disturbance of the film today comes from how gently it refuses to console. It does not tell me that the missed encounter will be redeemed. It tells me only that the miss is part of the encounter. In our present world, saturated with messages that never stop arriving, how often do we mistake contact for connection. How often do we curate ourselves into invisibility. The film asks these questions not by posing them but by living them. They unsettle because they are not puzzles. They are mirrors.
[5] To watch Chungking Express now is to feel the tremor between nostalgia and diagnosis. The city it preserves has multiplied its screens and thinned its silences, yet the ache it records has not aged. If anything, it has learned new dialects. We scroll past one another with the same distracted intimacy that once belonged to midnight snack bars. We leave traces in digital apartments, likes as fingerprints, stories as towels still damp with intention. The film’s unanswered questions press more urgently against the present. What is the half-life of a feeling when it can be archived. Does repetition anesthetize or sharpen desire. Can a song still save you if an algorithm chose it. The film never offers conclusions, only conditions. It suggests that love’s most radical act may be to arrive without spectacle, to change a room while its occupant is away. There is a courage in that modesty that contemporary cinema often forgets. Wong’s film remains incisive because it does not pretend that we can manage our inner weather. It proposes instead that we learn to walk in it, to accept being drenched. The expiration dates were always metaphors, but they were also alibis. We wanted permission to let go without confessing that we were afraid. The film strips that permission away and leaves us with the harder tenderness of attention. To notice a stranger. To care for a space. To let the unanswered disturb us into a more precise listening. In the end, what endures is not the romance but the way of seeing. The film teaches the eye to be a heart. It trains us to find the extraordinary in the most provisional corners of a life. It asks us to remain open even when openness has failed us before. And then it steps aside, humming, leaving us alone with the echo of a thought we might never resolve.
“If memories could be canned, would they also have expiration dates?”
—Cop 223, Takeshi Kaneshiro.
Balductum Musings 