Many of today's younger filmgoers, fed only by the narrow selections at video stores, are not as curious or knowledgeable and may simply be puzzled by 'Chungking ExpressвЂќ instead of challenged. When Godard was hot, in the 1960s and early 1970s, there was an audience for this style, but in those days, there were still film societies and repertory theaters to build and nourish such audiences. Wong is more of an art director, playing with the medium itself, taking fractured elements of criss-crossing stories and running them through the blender of pop culture. There's a lot of interesting Hong Kong films right now, but it centers more on commercially oriented figures like John Woo and Jackie Chan. Tarantino loved this movie so much, indeed, that he signed a deal with Miramax to start his own releasing company, and his first two pick-up deals are 'Chungking ExpressвЂќ and another Wong Kar-Wai film. There is the possibility that they have all been driven to desperation, if not the edge of madness, by the artificial lives they lead, in which all authentic experience seems at one remove. What happens to the character is not really the point the movie is about their journeys, not their destinations. He scarcely notices her, but she gets the keys to his apartment, and moves in when he isn't there - cleaning, redecorating, even changing the labels on his canned food.Д«oth of these stories, about disconnections, loneliness and being alone in the vast city, are photographed in the style of a music video, crossed with a little Godard (signs, slogans, pop music) and some Cassavetes (improvised dialogue and situations). The first cop hangs out at a fast-food bar, where he notices an attractive waitress ( Faye Wang), but she has eyes only for another cop who frequents the same restaurant (Tony Chiu-Wai Leung). We expect their relationship to develop in conventional crime movie ways, but instead, the film switches stories, introducing a new couple. A new woman walks into his life: the woman in the wig (Brigitte Chin-Hsia Lin), who is involved in drug deals. He gives himself 30 days to find another girl, and uses the expiration dates on cans of pineapple as a way of doing a countdown. As the film opens, we meet a policeman named He Qiwu ( Takeshi Kaneshiro), who wanders the nighttime city, lonely and depressed, pining after a girl who has left him. If you're trying to follow the plot, you may feel frustrated. If you are attentive to the style, if you think about what Wong is doing, 'Chungking ExpressвЂќ works. His visuals rhythmically switch between ordinary film, video and pixilated images, often in slow motion, as if the very lives of his characters threaten to disintegrate into the raw materials of media. He sets the stories in the Hong Kong world of fast-food restaurants, shopping malls, nightclubs, concrete plazas and pop culture (one of his heroines wears a blond wig and dark glasses, and the other seems addicted to 'California DreaminвЂќ' by the Mamas and the Papas).

He is concerned more with the materials of a story than with the story itself, and he demonstrates that by telling two stories, somewhat similar, that have no obvious connection.

Chungking express movie poster