Chungking Express
(1994)
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Chungking Express
(1994)
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| Complete credited cast: | |||
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Brigitte Lin | ... |
Woman in blonde wig
(as Ching-hsia Lin)
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| Tony Leung Chiu Wai | ... |
Cop 663
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Faye Wong | ... | |
| Takeshi Kaneshiro | ... | ||
| Valerie Chow | ... |
Air Hostess
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Chen Jinquan | ... | |
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Lee-na Kwan | ... |
Richard
(as Guan Lina)
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Zhiming Huang | ... |
Man
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Liang Zhen | ... |
The 2nd May
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Songshen Zuo | ... |
Man
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Wong Kar-Wai's movie about two love-struck cops is filmed in impressionistic splashes of motion and color. The first half deals with Cop 223, who has broken up with his girlfriend of five years. He purchases a tin of pineapples with an expiration date of May 1 each day for a month. By the end of that time, he feels that he will either be rejoined with his love or that it too will have expired forever. The second half shows Cop 663 dealing with his breakup with his flight attendant girlfriend. He talks to his apartment furnishings until he meets a new girl at a local lunch counter. Written by Tad Dibbern <DIBBERN_D@a1.mscf.upenn.edu>
Masterful Hong Kong film-maker Wong Kar Wai understands that love is about the unspoken moments between people, the hidden gestures betraying loneliness. Chungking Express is a unique expression of such notions of love. The film doesn't pretend that love is all-embracing and constant, in the way so many predictable films would suggest. Love, for the protagonists of this film, comes and goes between subtle glances - always elusive. Indeed if a level of contentment can be reached at all for these characters - it is a fleeting moment, a memory of a song, the way that somebody smells. There are so many essential moments in this film - when Dinah Washington's 'What a difference a day makes' plays over two lovers cavorting, the moments when characters talk to inanimate objects to overcome their loss of love, the brief glances between the second policeman and the waitress across the counter of the fast-food restaurant. It has been dismissed as an exercise in style over substance by many, mainly due to the hypnotic way in which the film is shot and the lack of a real story as such. I don't feel the need to defend it from these accusations because the beauty of the film is there on the screen and nothing I have said or could say could really do it justice. It breaks my heart every time.