Chungking Express

In the swarming shopping and restaurant district of Chongqing in Hong Kong one finds the street kitchen Midnight Express. This street kitchen serves as a connecting link between two stories of wrecked relationships and forlornness in the turbulent city. This is where the plain-clothes policeman He Qiwu hangs out during his breaks. At the moment he pays less attention to the ''mischief'', since he is preoccupied with trying to come to terms with the fact that his girlfriend of five years has left him. We meet a gangster chick of the hard-boiled kind. Following a failed attempt to smuggle drugs out of the crown colony with the assistance of a bunch of Pakistanis, she is now being hunted down. The evening before his 25th birthday He Qiwu sits drunk and disillusioned in a bar. He vows to fall in love with the first woman to enter the bar. In comes the gangster girl….

The second story revolves round Faye, the waitress at Midnight Express, an aimless girl in her twenties. Her biggest interest is to frequently and as loudly as possibly listen to California Dreaming by The Mamas & the Papas. She falls in love with constable no 663, who visits the kitchen in order to find food and comfort, since he too has been dropped by his girlfriend. She gets her hands on his spare keys and while he is out she rummages around the flat. She buys gold fish for his aquarium, swops the labels on his tins, hangs new shirts in his wardrobe, lies in his bed, cleans and potters around, naturally while playing California Dreaming loudly on his stereo. In other words, head over heels in love.

Chungqing Express is a film, which with its fragmentary narrative and the feeling created by the hand-held camera, is reminiscent of the French new wave in the 60's. Wong Kar-wai shot it in barely three months, during a break from the more demanding work on the kung fu melodrama Ashes of Time. He feels that with Chungqing Express he rediscovered the creative intuition necessary to complete Ashes of Time. It is an innovative and charming comedy about a romance in trouble. The irrational and random aspects of everyday life are presented with an unconventional sense of humour and it observes with tender irony the people who try to conjure up these aspects by being preoccupied with less important things, such as the `use by' date for tinned pineapple or pop-tunes from the 60's.
MARTIN SÖRNÄS

Orig. titel
CHONGQING SENLIN: Medverkande
Lin Ching-Hsia, Takeshi Kaneshiro, Tony Leung Chiu-Wai, Faye Wang: Producent
Chen Pui-wah, Jet Tone: Manus
Wong Kar-wai: Foto
Christopher Doyle, Lau Waikeung: Musik
Frankie Chan, Roel A. Garcia: Talat språk
Cantonese, Mandarine