CINEMATIC Review

CHUNGKING EXPRESS   ***1/2

Wong Kar-Wai

1994

IDEA:   A two-tiered tale of love in downtown Hong Kong, following two policemen and their own personalized quests for second chances.

BLURB:   Chungking Express, an uneven yet sweetly irresistible slice of fleet-footed whimsy, is another in a long line of director Wong Kar-Wai’s meditations on lost loves and reignited dreams. Here, split into two stories that share only rudimentary thematic ties, he explores the crowded congestion of the urban city and locates the broken hearts weeping in its alleyways. The first story is strange, exciting, although disappointingly underdeveloped; concerning pineapple cans and a drug smuggling woman in disguise, it is jarringly dropped less than halfway through the film for a more whispy – and loveable– romantic thread. But with expert, ephemeral flourishes of light and color, expressionistic nuances and fluid musical integration, it ends on a beat gleefully signifying the start of yet another new story in the endless vocation of life.