Chungking express

Director Wong Kar-Wai, working again with cinematographer Christopher Doyle brings together two loosely connected stories of unrequited love, drug smuggling, fast-food joints and melancholic cops. Revisiting his regular themes of chance vs fate and broken hearted loners, Wong Kar-Wai and Doyle (sharing his DOP duties with Lau Wai-Keung), again have created a heightened world of neon drenched cities and smokey bars, while the soundtrack repeats it’s ethereal refrain of the Mamas and the Papas California dreaming. The first story centers around the infamous Chungking mansions as a lovelorn cop, identified as No.223 (Takeshi Kaneshiro) yearns over a mysterious woman (Brigitte Lin) in dark sunglasses and a Marilyn Monroe style wig. Unbeknownst to the sombre detective, who has a peculiar nostalgic attachment to crushed canned pineapple, the woman is working on the other side of the law as a small time heroin smuggler. The second randomly linked story is set around the Midnight Express fast-food joint where cop No.663 (Tony Leung) spends most of his nights, recovering over a break up with an air hostess (Valerie Chow), unaware that the young woman who works behind the counter (Hong Kong rock star Faye Wong) is quietly infatuated with him. In Cantonese and Mandarin with English subtitles.