Chungking Express

This is probably my favourite film from Kar-Wai Wong. It tells the stories of two Hong Kong Police officers. The former, the dashing Takeshi Kaneshiro, who is struggling to come to terms with his recently ended relationship of five years. By way of a means to closure, he purchases a tin of pineapple each day with the expiry date of May 1st (then he will be 25 years old). Either they will have reconciled by then, or he must look for a new love - and perhaps an enigmatic, somewhat shady, lady in a raincoat and wearing a blonde wig might offer a solution? The second features the slightly older regular with this director, Tony Leung, who has also split from his long-term partner only to find a new girl working at the stall he gets his meal from in the evening. She is equally enigmatic - and has a penchant for "California Dreamin'" played very loudly too. Both stories are throughly enjoyable to watch, the humour is plentiful and subtle - and we are never quite sure how anything is going to pan out, or even if the two stories are going to end up over-lapping - right until the end. The hand held photography helps the personalities develop well, offering us intimacy and also an opportunity to become more immersed in the two gently developing character studies that are imbued with the colours and culture of this bustling urban landscape.

Filmed into the post production of two years of filming the Wuxia epic "Ashes of Time", with low resources, this movie is another example that we don't need millions of USD to make a masterpiece. Wong Kar-Wai have a personal style of using melancholic characters distorted stories, using elaborate soundtracks in the background. This movie show two drama and crime stories about two lovesick policeman and their search over his relationship with a woman, always in a 0,01cm encounter of distance between them. The first story stars Takeshi Kaneshiro as a cop obsessed by his breakup with a woman named May (replaced emotionally with letters and old pineapple cans), and his encounter with a mysterious drug smuggler. The second stars Tony Leung as a police officer roused from his gloom over the loss of his flight attendant girlfriend by the attentions of a quirky snack bar worker called Express - referred in the title (Faye Wong). Both stories circles around Chungking Mansions, a 60's complex of buildings supposed to be residential, but that is made up of many independent low-budget hotels, shops and other services, filled with stores and stalls in the building cater to wholesalers shipping goods to Africa and South Asia, and amid the gigantic Central–Mid-Levels escalator with a length of 800m and one of the two highlights locations of the movie. Both sequences have a unique visual approach sometimes intimate, sometimes frenetic with a beautiful use of color among the chaos that reminds me of the works of the photographer Saul Leiter. On the unique soundtrack using ocidental musics we have the use for the first story is Dennis Brown's "Things in Life" and "Baroque", composed by Michael Galasso, can be heard twice during the first part of the movie. On the second "California Dreamin'" by The Mamas & the Papas plays in the key scenes in the second story, which also features Faye Wong's Cantonese cover version of "Dreams" by The Cranberries. In the plans of making there was a third movie but since it was too long it was released as a separate movie, Fallen Angels in 1995. Another must watch classic with a unique style that differentiates it from other Hong Kong productions - I gave it a 8,7 out of 10,0 / A rate.

A total surprise, in the negative sense. The story was very random with little logic in it. Weird characters that also made little sense, and the conversations were poor and uninteresting. It was more like a Japanese anime story because of its randomness, but then not even interesting to watch. One soundtrack kept being played over and got me to the point that further watching was giving me a headache. I tried to finish it, but had to turn it off at 3/4 progress, for the sake of my mental health.