Chungking Express is a film about the loneliness of not being seen. Its two cops are so lost in their own longing that the women standing directly in front of them barely register. The film finds this beautiful. That is the problem.
Faye has a key to Cop 663’s apartment. She didn’t ask for it — his ex-girlfriend left it at the snack bar in her breakup note, and Faye simply kept it. Every day while 663 is on duty, she lets herself in. She replaces his canned fish with different canned fish. She swaps out his soap. She waters his plants, redecorates his shelves, and at one point slips something into his drink because he mentioned he wasn’t sleeping. She cleans his apartment so thoroughly that it becomes, by degrees, her version of it: the life she would live in his space rather than the life he actually lives. “California Dreamin’” plays on the stereo at full volume while she works.
The film presents this as the most romantic sequence in its second story, possibly in the whole film. Christopher Doyle’s cinematography makes it golden and warm. Faye Wong’s performance makes it irresistible. The music — so loud it becomes a kind of weather — transforms the intrusion into a private concert, a girl in an empty apartment dancing inside her own future.
It does not ask whether 663 would have wanted this, if he had known.
Chungking Express, written and directed by Wong Kar-wai, was made in 1994 in approximately two months, shot almost improvisationally while Wong waited to edit his period epic Ashes of Time. The haste shows in the best possible way: the film is loose and alive and willing to follow a feeling off a cliff. It consists of two stories, both about lovesick Hong Kong cops, told in sequence with a brief overlap. Cop 223 (Takeshi Kaneshiro) has been dumped by his girlfriend May and spends a month purchasing thirty tins of pineapple all expiring on May 1st — May’s birthday, her favorite food — as if by cataloguing the properties of his love he can give it a formal ending. He never quite finds one, but he does find a brief, strange companionship with a woman in a blonde wig (Brigitte Lin) who is outrunning her own troubles through the neon streets. Cop 663 (Tony Leung) is quieter in his grief, talking to his apartment furnishings, ordering the same chef salad every day for a girlfriend who is no longer coming. Then Faye arrives.
| Director | Wong Kar-wai |
|---|---|
| Year | 1994 |
| Runtime | 102 minutes |
| Cast | Brigitte Lin, Takeshi Kaneshiro, Tony Leung Chiu-wai, Faye Wong, Valerie Chow |
| Streaming | Criterion Channel, MUBI |
The expiry date logic is the film’s first and most celebrated formal gesture, and it gives away the blind spot immediately if you look at it from the right angle. Cop 223 reduces the question of whether his relationship is over to a checkable date on a tin. He knows May’s favorite food. He knows her birthday. He knows, the film implies, all the properties of her: what she likes, what she does, when she was born. What he does not know — what the film never shows us, because it cannot show us what he does not have access to — is what May thinks. What she wanted. Why she left. May is never in the film. She is a collection of attributes around an absence, defined entirely by the things that let Cop 223 feel his grief more precisely. He is not wrong to grieve. He is, in a way the film does not name, processing the loss of a person he appears to have known primarily as an object of his own feeling.
“Both cops collect the properties of the women they’ve lost: her favorite food, her favorite song, the route she used to take. What they never collected, and what the film never notices they’re missing, is her perspective.”
663’s version of this is both more tender and more telling. He talks to his apartment’s furnishings — his soap, his stuffed animals, his towel — about the flight attendant who left. He is not talking to her. He is talking to the traces of her. And when Faye enters, he relates to her the same way: as a presence that alleviates the particular ache of absence rather than as a person whose interior life he has any interest in. He gives her his apartment key, eventually, because she has already proven she can exist inside his space without disturbing him — which is, if you think about it, the strangest possible criterion for romantic interest. What he wants is someone who can inhabit the hollow she left. Faye is ideal for this, because Faye is, for the entire second story, performing a version of herself constructed for his apartment rather than living her actual life.
Her actual life surfaces only at the end, and the film almost misses it. Faye goes to California, the place she has been dreaming about all film, dancing to her anthem in a stranger’s kitchen. She comes back a year later wearing a flight attendant uniform. She is now, structurally, what his ex-girlfriend was. The film frames this as sweet symmetry, a circle closed with warmth. It does not pause to notice that the California of “California Dreamin’” — the dream, the escape, the place where a life might be different — has resolved into a service job. Faye got there. She came back wearing the same costume. The film hands 663 a new boarding pass and calls it love and moves on before you can ask what happened to the girl in the apartment dancing alone.
The film to hold beside this one is Lost in Translation (Sofia Coppola, 2003), which is working in the same emotional register — lonely people in an Asian city, unexpected proximity, the feeling that love might be a form of being temporarily less alone — and reaches a different conclusion about what that proximity requires. Bob and Charlotte in Lost in Translation are actually attending to each other. They listen. They stay up all night in a hotel room and the film is interested in what both of them say. The final whispered exchange between them matters precisely because we believe it is addressed to a specific person rather than to the general ache of being alone in a crowded place. Chungking Express is more beautiful, and faster, and its style is so intoxicating that you feel the longing in your body rather than just understanding it intellectually. What Coppola found, by slowing down, was that intimacy requires attention rather than projection. What Wong found was that projection, when lit by Christopher Doyle and set to Faye Wong singing Dennis Wilson, is almost indistinguishable from love.
Almost. The difference is the woman in the apartment, dancing alone to music that was hers before any of this started, in a space that she is quietly making her own before she leaves for the place she actually wants to go. The film loves her for this. It just never quite asks where she was planning to arrive.
If this stayed with you, watch these next:
Lost in Translation (Sofia Coppola, 2003): a film in the same emotional territory that does something Chungking Express does not — attends to both people with equal care, and finds that intimacy requires presence rather than projection.
Perfect Days (Wim Wenders, 2023): reviewed on this blog — Hirayama’s daily routines are the closest thing in recent cinema to the cops’ rituals of grief management, but Wenders asks what the routine is protecting him from. The comparison is here.
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