You know those movies in which everyone in town seems to connect with everyone else? The kind which depict a city as a fabric, with everyone's stories woven together? CHUNGKING EXPRESS (1994) is not one of those movies. CHUNGKING EXPRESS is a movie about disconnectedness, about the isolation we can feel in the unlikeliest of places.
The movie doesn't have a unified narrative, and it isn't all tied together with freak meteorological events. Think of it, instead, as variations on a theme of loneliness. In the first variation, RETURNER's Takeshi Kaneshiro plays Number 223, a not-particularly-effective Hong Kong police officer. He's working through a difficult breakup, and the woman ( Brigitte Lin) he needs may be the worst possible woman for him. In the second, Tony Leung plays Number 633, another officer in similar circumstances. He meets Faye Wong, and I suspect that she's trouble in her own way.
The details of their stories aren't particularly important. What is important is the ways in which they try to order their lives, and how, even though they're sometimes only .01 centimeters apart, they may never connect. I suspect that, somewhere in China, there lives the girl who broke Wong Kar Wai's heart. We need to thank her, because his variations on a theme of loneliness are a beautiful thing, finding connections deeper than those any freak storm can create.
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