On the night of April 30th, our "hero", # 223, buys his last tin of pineapple, returns to his grubby flat, and proceeds to eat all thirty tins while talking to his dog and his fish. He then returns to the Midnight Express in a desperate attempt to go out with any girl, but is informed by the manager that the girl there (also called May) has gone out already. # 223 goes to a bar determined "to fall in love" with the first woman who walks in. Fate has it , of course, that in walks our blond wigged heroin dealer. # 223 decides the perfect pick up line for her is , "Do you like pineapple?" Though # 223 is rebuffed and ignored by Blondie, he still manages to get her back to a hotel room, where she falls asleep while he eats four chef’s salads and watches old samurai movies on TV. Nothing happens! there is no relationship, no touch, nothing sexual, and yet as # 223 leaves the sleeping Blondie before dawn, he seems to be content with having spent a night with another person.

# 223 goes jogging in the rain to celebrate his birthday, since he believes jogging can rid the body of excess water so there will be less room for tears. As he finishes jogging, his pager rings. Calling his messenger service and giving his password of "Undying Love", # 223 receives the message that the woman in the hotel room wishes him a happy birthday. At that exact moment the digital clock turns to 6am, the time of his birth. # 223 is totally fulfilled by this message and says to himself; "Now I’ll remember her all my life. If memories could be canned would they also have expiry dates? If so, I hope they last for centuries."

As cop # 223 sits in the rain musing on his new found fantasy lover, she is returning to the bar where her heroin contact "works." (Actually this guy who has no name, spends his time grooming himself. Nobody in the film really does any serious work!). Blondie shoots drug dealer in the head and he dies in a rain soaked gutter beside an expired tin of fish.

# 223 returns to the Midnight Express for yet another coke. Someone once counted the number of cigarettes smoked and martinis drunk in the film Casablanca. Someday I will count the number of references to Coke in Chungking Express. For Wong Kar-Wai, are coke cups chalices for the brooding martyrs of the film, or is Coke just a prominent deity in the pantheon of neon gods? As # 223 sips at his coke, nameless manager tries to set him up with Faye, now that both Mays are gone. # 223 is not interested but says in his final voice-over that six hours later she (Faye) will fall in love with another man(It seems that fate and time will drift over to the second part of the film). Exit # 223 and the first story of Chungking Express, and enter cop # 663 and the second story.

After his work shift, uniformed beat cop # 663 saunters up to the Midnight Express. In this second part of Chungking Express, we do not even have the benefit of the cop giving us his name in a voice over. He is simply, cop # 663. In fact, names are so unimportant to Wong Kar-Wai, that for most of this story the fast food manager wrongly refers to # 663 as cop # 633. He is later corrected by the Indian dishwasher who uses a carrot as a microphone while he daydreams of becoming a Japanese pop star!But I digress.

# 663 moves up to the counter to order a chef’s salad (what is it with Wong Kar-Wai and chef’s salads!), the same food he has apparently been taking out every night for the past several weeks. The salad is not for him, but for his girlfriend, a nameless (of course) Cathay Pacific air hostess. Faye, who replaced a girl named May (what else!), eyes # 663, played gorgeously by Tony Leung, and immediately falls in love.

The next evening when # 663 comes back to get another take out chef’s salad, the manager of Midnight express suggests he get something different, like fish and chips. The manager dispenses advice about food, women, change and convinces # 663 to get both the salad and the fish and chips, and let air hostess/girlfriend decide. # 663 worries that change is difficult, but agrees on two successive nights to buy two different dinners and let the girlfriend decide. Indeed, decide she does. She decides not only to try the new food, but to try a new boyfriend as well. # 663 like # 223 is unceremoniously dumped by his girlfriend. We find this out on the third night when # 663 returns to the Midnight Express and orders not food, but just black coffee served in a coke cup. The manager serves up his condolences as if they were more fast food and offers unsolicited advice to the stoic # 663. As Faye watches and listens while polishing the coke machine, # 663 drifts back in memories and we are given a flashback of how he had come to meet the air hostess. "On board every flight, there’s one stewardess you long to seduce. This time last year at 25,000 feet, I actually seduced one." The flashback brings us to # 663’s apartment, where sexual foreplay is accompanied by playing with toy planes, while the air hostess mimes emergency landing procedures. These are not normal people, or are they? A voice-over of a British male giving the emergency landing procedures, while the song "What a Difference a Day Makes" playing languidly in the background, completes this sensuous scene.

We discover that we had already fleetingly seen the air hostess in part one of Chungking Express. Briefly in passing, cop # 663 and a certain stuffed toy animal also appeared in part one. This plays with our sense of time and dreams. In part one, # 663, in the split second one sees him, is not working but of course, day dreaming. Film critic Chuck Stephens puts it best as he says: "If as, at one point or another, each of Wong's films seems to suggest, falling in love is akin to falling asleep, then what a difference a daydream makes. Refusing the slumber of realism, Chungking opts instead for a sweet-tooth sleepwalk where lovers are like gorgeous zombies, alone in their thoughts, silently snacking on one another's dreams while the steam of the clotted city floats away into a limitless sky."3

A week goes by, and # 663 continues to exist on black coffee in coke cups. The manager tries to console and play therapist, while Faye shakes her head with worry that # 663, her new found fantasy lover, will have a breakdown. As luck (ie. FATE) would have it, the air hostess stops by the Midnight Express to leave a note with the manager and to return the spare keys to # 663’s apartment. The sealed breakup note is steamed open and read by everyone including the carrot singing Indian dishwasher! At last Faye gets her hands on the keys, and proceeds to secretly go into # 663’s apartment each day he is at work, and to clean and redecorate the place.

# 663 now spends his nights sitting alone in his apartment and holding conversations with inanimate objects; stuffed animals, bars of soap, dish rags. The objects are real to him and have human qualities. The dish rags cry, the apartment cries, the bar of soap is depressed and so on. By day, Faye is in the apartment cleaning and changing those same objects around, day dreaming, dressing up in the leftover air hostess uniform, and thus having vicarious sex with the unaware, unobservant and just plain dopey # 663.

The paths of these two continue to cross at the Midnight Express or in the vegetable market. We find out that Faye is only working to get enough money to fulfill her day dream, that is of flying off to California. The song California Dreamin’ by the Mamas and the Papas is played incessantly in this film. It is Faye’s battle cry. " Besides the spontaneity of Chris Doyle's camerawork... there's something tremendously refreshing about the way Wong imbues his potentially melancholy tales with a spicy, witty sense of the absurd... Throughout, he's helped no end by the cast, whose cool good looks make them the perfect inhabitants of Wong's neon city of beautiful losers, and by the inspired use of music; never has 'California Dreamin' sounded so..well, like the film, so gloriously hip."4

For Faye and # 663, it is the day dream that counts. Even when fate intervenes and the two of them are at last thrown together in # 663’s apartment, she proceeds to fall asleep, while he smokes, muses on the past, and falls asleep. The fish in his aquarium silently swim and observe. Every cop in Hong Kong has an aquarium! So like cop # 223 and Blondie in the hotel room, in # 663’s apartment there is no real relationship, little touch, no exchange, only two people occupying the same space and time but locked in their day dreams. " In Wong's world, solitary, nocturnal, anonymous men and women spend more time musing over the expiry dates on pineapple cans and exhaling endless, question-mark-shaped plumes of smoke than they do noticing what's often right in front of them. Because they never care to know -- or ask - - anybody else's name, they will never realized that the person watching them from the corner of the bar is the selfless lover they've always dreamed of, and continue being intimate only with strangers."5

# 663 almost catches Faye in his apartment one afternoon, and finally realizes why his tinned fish tastes different, why his soap is chubby, why his dish rags are now dish towels, why his stuffed animals have changed, and why his apartment is physically rearranged. He heads off to the Midnight Express to ask Faye for a real date. Faye should be overjoyed that her fantasy lover wants to date her, but she only reluctantly agrees to meet # 663 in the California Restaurant at 8pm the next evening. The afternoon of the big date, # 663 spends in his apartment boxing up and putting away memories of the airline hostess; "clearing the runway for a new flight."

# 663 arrives early at the California Restaurant, "a sort of middle ground between the golden wonderland suggested (and suggested one too many times) by the Mamas and the Papas' song "California Dreamin' " and the real state, somewhere eight time zones away."6 He muses, smokes and broods, like all the characters in this film, until finally it is not Faye who shows up, but the matchmaking manager of the Midnight Express, who sadly informs # 663 that he has been stood up. Faye has flown to the real California, but has left a note for our stoic hero. # 663 decides not to read the note, but throws it away. Some time later, a few hours, days or weeks, we are not sure, curiosity gets the better of # 663 and he retrieves the note from beside an expired tin of fish in a rain soaked gutter, and after drying it on the heat rack in a Circle K, he finds that Faye just had to go to the real California, "I urgently needed to know if the other California was warm and sunny."

Exactly one year passes. Faye returns to Hong Kong as an air hostess and makes her way to , where else, the Midnight Express. There she discovers that her cousin, the manager has sold the shop to # 663. "First he sold me fish and chips, then the whole thing!" Faye and # 663 are delighted to see each other, but again have trouble arranging a time for a date. The film ends and though the viewer has the feeling that these two characters were meant to be together, one wonders if it will ever happen.

"Anguish and alienation have rarely seemed as attractive as they do in the films of Wong Kar-Wai."7

I find the above statement to be a fitting description of Wong Kar-Wai’s work. I have seen Chungking Express at least a dozen times and always come away feeling in love with the screwed up characters and feeling, if not in love with, at least comfortable with alienation. Wong Kar-Wai has played a marvelous trick on the audience. By presenting a film that is visually so beautiful, Wong Kar-Wai has lured or lulled the audience into accepting and embracing alienation and angst.

Wong Kar-Wai’s latest film, Happy Together, for which he received the best director award this year at Cannes, similarly plays with and seduces the audience. Once again, the characters are the epitome of alienation. Two ex-patriate Hong Kong gay men, broke and living in Buenos Aires, - how much more alienated can one get? However, the intoxicating visual beauty of the film achieved through various techniques (unusual film stocks, B & W, hand held, colour saturation, video etc.), causes the viewer to wallow in the angst of the characters, and to enjoy wallowing!

I believe that Wong Kar-Wai is a post modernist romantic, creating characters who are at best, not all that happy and at worst, utter failures, but by wallowing in the angst of their lives, they achieve a certain amount of satisfaction or even pleasure. They are at home with and content with misery, loneliness and torment and have embraced them as embracing a dependable lover. "Wong makes dizzying, delightful art films about the ways people struggle with lingering remorse and crippling rejection - people who find ways to keep themselves happy while their worlds fall apart."8 It will be interesting to see the effect, if any, the Chinese takeover of Hong Kong has on Wong’s films, since the predicted doom simply did not happen.

Another reoccurring theme in Chungking Express, as in all of Wong Kar-wai’s films, is Fate. Though his films are far from being realist, Wong shares the realist’s reverence for fate. Perhaps it is because he is Chinese, but no matter, fate clutches at the heart of Wong’s films. In Chungking Express, cop # 663 accepts his being dumped by airline hostess girlfriend and being stood up later by Faye, with such nonchalant stoicism. He knows that it was fate that caused these things to happen and that he is powerless over fate. Besides, only by accepting and loving this bad fortune can he be happy, for he too is attracted to and fascinated by angst. "Wong has gravitated toward a new archetype, the wistful misfit."9

Perhaps it is because of this smothering sense of fate, that even inanimate objects in Wong’s films take on a life of their own. For the inanimate objects too must have a place in the ‘divine’ scheme of the universe. Wong’s attention to and focus on objects also highlights the sense that human beings are only slightly better off than the inanimate objects as they are all manipulated by fate. In Chungking Express, the inanimate objects do not just represent, they become what they represent. Cop # 223 must eat the thirty expired tins of pineapple in order to properly finish the relationship with May. It is not enough for him to seek out and buy these ‘symbolic’ tins, he must consume them since they no longer represent the relationship and breakup, they have become his relationship with May. In fact, the tins and his relationship with them probably exceed the depth and intensity of the relationship he had with May. As # 223 seeks out his last tin on the night of April 30th, he berates the Circle K convenience store clerk for his cavalier attitude towards expired goods. "Don’t you ever think how the can feels!"

In Wong’s newest film, Happy Together, a cheap souvenir lamp is bursting with the emotions and poignancy of that film. One need only view the lamp and one has seen the film, indeed one sees the past and the future in the lamp. The lamp is a noetic moment, almost outside of time and space. Wong Kar-Wai turns a cheap household object into delicious pure angst.

One cannot be a worshipper of Fate without paying homage to its twin, Time. Wong Kar-Wai is in love with time and timing. In Chungking Express, timing is everything. While all the characters brood on the past and ponder the future, the digital clock ticks down to the apocalyptic May 1st. Fate has it that cop # 223 receives his birthday message at the exact second of his time of birth. Cop # 663 and Faye constantly miss running into each other through the intervention of time. The climactic rendezvous at the California restaurant is an exercise in bad timing. Lives are altered for better or worse because of a few seconds, minutes or hours of time. Faye decides that she will give herself a year to try out the real California, and sure enough Fate sweeps her back to Hong Kong exactly on time!

Night and neon also figure prominently in Wong’s work. Naturally, night is the mood of alienation, loneliness and brooding. The playful glow and flashing of neon Hong Kong mocks the human beings awash in a sea of angst. The neon is ever present and it is at one and the same time, beautiful and playful, but also cold, distant and empty. The neon nightscapes ARE Wong’s characters.

"SNAKING ALONG like a series of greasy back alleys, artery-clogged with neon and irony, "Chungking Express" is a cynic's romance, a highbrow's low-budget epic, a virtuosic melange of discordant imagery and wit, and should serve to introduce a major film talent to a public that can always use one."10 Wong Kar-Wai and Chungking Express have been criticized by a minority for being pretentious, manipulative and shallow. I think these criticisms are not valid. While on the surface, Chungking Express can be viewed as a romantic comedy, there is a depth and richness to this film and to Wong’s other works, which show an artist at work. It is a refreshing reminder of what film can be. Chungking Express and the newly released Happy Together are a gentle Asian breeze blowing through the cobwebs of Western cinema.

Please note: Much of the research for this paper was taken from the internet and unfortunatly many of the internet sites do not give complete references for their articles. Any quotes in the paper which have not been noted here were taken directly from the movie Chungking Express.

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