Chung Hing sam lam
Tags: neo noir, cult, psychedelic, murder, romantic

Plot synopsis:
The film comprises two different stories, told one after the other, each about a romance involving a policeman. Except for a brief moment when the first story ends and the second begins, the two stories do not interconnect. However, the three main characters from the second story each momentarily appear during the first.
=== First story ===
The first story concerns Taiwan-born cop He Qiwu, also known as Cop 223. Qiwu's girlfriend May broke up with him on 1 April (April Fool's Day). His birthday is on 1 May and he chooses to wait for May for a month before moving on. Every day he buys a tin of pineapple with an expiration date of 1 May. By the end of this time, he feels that he will either be rejoined with his love or that it will have expired forever. Meanwhile, a mysterious woman in a blonde wig (played by Brigitte Lin) tries to survive in the drug underworld after a smuggling operation goes sour.
On 1 May, Qiwu, looking for romance, approaches the woman in the blonde wig at a bar (the Bottoms Up Club). However, she is exhausted and falls asleep in a hotel room, leaving him to watch old movies alone all night and order take-out food. He shines her shoes before he leaves her sleeping on the bed. She leaves in the morning and shoots the drug baron (played by Thom Baker) who had set her up. Qiwu goes jogging and receives a message from her on his pager wishing him a happy birthday. He then visits his usual snack food store where he collides with a new staff member, Faye. At this point, a new story begins.
=== Second story ===
In the second story, the unnamed Cop 663 is similarly dealing with a breakup, this time with a flight attendant. He meets Faye, the new girl at the snack bar. She secretly falls for him. The flight attendant waits for the cop around the snack bar, and finds out he is on his day off. She leaves a letter for the snack bar owner to give to the cop. Everyone in the snack bar reads the letter, which is assumed to be the flight attendant's way of telling the cop that their relationship is over. The envelope also has a spare set of keys to the cop's apartment.
Faye uses the keys to frequently break into his apartment by day to redecorate and "improve" his living situation. She finally tells him of the letter but he keeps delaying taking it or even reading it. Gradually, her ploys help him to cheer up, and he eventually realizes that Faye likes him and arranges a date at the restaurant "California" (an actual place in Lan Kwai Fong at the time). Faye, however, never shows up for the date, and the snack bar's owner, who is her cousin, goes to the restaurant to tell the cop that Faye left for California. Standing the cop up after a last-minute decision to see the world before settling down, she leaves him a boarding pass drawn on a paper napkin postdated one year later.
In the last scene, Faye, now a flight attendant, returns to Hong Kong. She finds that the cop has bought the snack bar and is converting it into a restaurant. He asks her to stay for the grand opening in a couple of days, but she says she does not know if she can. 663 then asks if she can send him a postcard if she leaves, but she says he wouldn't read it anyway. As Faye's about to leave, he gets the boarding pass she gave him a year ago, wrinkled and water-stained, and asks if anyone will accept it. She doubts it and writes him up a new one. Faye asks him where he wants to go with the boarding pass, and 663 says he'll go wherever she wants to take him. Their future remains ambiguous.

Review: The two main characters in this half of the film, a police officer played dolefully by Takeshi Kaneshiro, and a heroin smuggler played icily by Bridgitte Lin, interact for only ten percent of the story, but their meeting leaves them both with memories that will last life time.
Wong Kar-Wai uses a decidedly unique filming technique for much of the first half of the film; a blurry hand-held technique (think Blaire Witch on drugs) used during the chase scenes.
A film about love that is mired in reality (though shot through the lens of alcehmist - truly a visual experience to be savoured)though not gritty reality, just every day boring life and love, the sort of love we go through each day ourselves, the kinda incomplete love where two people touch each other briefly and spend more time dreaming of what could be rather than it actually taking place.
Masterful Hong Kong film-maker Wong Kar Wai understands that love is about the unspoken moments between people, the hidden gestures betraying loneliness.
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.
Wong Kar Wai triumphs stylistically in Chungking Express, a beautiful movie that places two fingers right on the throbbing pulse of what it means to be lovesick.
Memorable use of music additionally adds to the film's strength, along with a number of unique vignettes and quirks of character (think expired canned pineapple, a toy airplane and new additions to a fish tank, for example) that take unsuspecting audiences by surprise..
(In particular one shot of shoes filled with cocaine/heroin being put away is shot upside down which for unknown reasons I really love) The editing is quick and fast paced, rarely lingering.Through the use of shaky held hand camera during chase scenes and the busy streets we feel disorientated and just as lost as the characters on screen.
Talking about getting over the pain, since it's a Kar Wai Wong nobody will dare thinking a typical work.At the first time i watched Chong qing sen ling, what hit me was director's original style in telling his stories, how he could make me feel exactly the same mood with the characters and still no tears in the whole movie.
Nailed It. Two stories, two lovelorn cops, two objects of desire: one a big-time heroin dealer in deep trouble with her boss after the cargo disappears, the other a seriously flaky take-out waitress who inadvertently gets hold of the keys to her admirer's apartment, all shot in a breathless kaleidoscope of color and hand-held camera work to create a mesmerizing portrait of Hong Kong in the 1990s.With the constant use of "California Dreamin" and "Dreams", do you think this is a film about dreams?
Chongqing senlin, released in 1994 and directed by Kar-wai Wong, takes place in Hong Kong and is the classic love struggle/heroine smuggling film.
Chungking Express, released in 1994 and directed by Kar-wai Wong, takes place in Hong Kong and is the classic girl meets guy, girl likes guy, girl breaks into guy's apartment with stolen key and plays with his possessions film.
The other story follows a young service industry worker named Faye, played by Hong Kong's pop queen Faye, who falls in love with Cop 663 and does her best to become part of his life without ever needing to talk or be with him by using his apartment only when he's not there.
From the mind of auteur filmmaker Wong Kar-Wai, comes a film told in the urban alienating streets of Hong Kong.
When his canned food expires, so does his love for May. Although on the eve of his birthday he meets a woman (Brigitte Lin), who is suffering from her own broken heart, whom he is able to share his pain with.The second story tells of cop 663 (Tony Leung Chiu-Wai), who is suffering from romantic problems with an air hostess (Valerie Chow).
He eases his pain by going to a small time deli express, and meets one of the expresses lovely exployees named Faye (Faye Wong).A great, imaginative, and powerful film that should not be missed by anybody who is serious about movies.
Wong Kar Wai, one of the auteurs of world cinema, has made many great movies since, but to this day, Chungking Express stands out as his best, and one of the best movies, in my opinion, of all time..
Wong Kar-Wai's most acclaimed and certainly widespread film, helped by showings to film classes everywhere, Chungking Express is a meandering meditation of loneliness in urban Hong Kong.
The second watches a depressed cop's ignorance as a girl with a crush revitalises his life.The first segment is certainly a visual marvel, and Wong Kar-Wai (alongside cinematographers Christopher Doyle & Andrew Lau, the latter of Infernal Affairs fame) blazes through with a frenzy of action in a confined space.
The film offers a look at some of the things going on in the world of motion pictures in the early to mid-90's: international interest in Hong Kong cinema and Asian cinema generally; the influence of MTV-inspired film technique; a spike in the perennial popularity of romantic comedies; audience acceptance of combined stories with fragmented, braided narrative lines ("Chungking Express" was released at about the same time as "Pulp Fiction".) 6.
This combined with the sketchy and different camera movements/ angles made me very confused, but interested, in how the film's plot would play out.The two love stories that the movie portrays I think are really great.
Both of these stories are tied together by them sharing some of the same places they go to just at different moments in time.After watching this film, it can greatly change the way one views their life and reality around them.
The shot that Wong Kar-Wai captured in the second cop's apartment in which the heroine hid on the wall in plain sight and the cop looked in the bathroom missing her completely was a fair characterization of the film.
The characters are all so obsessive, neurotic and downright oddball that the film makes love seem more like a bizarre illness than something to be cherished.The narrative is awkwardly split into two distinct stories, both involving mopey guys who are mooning over girlfriends they've lost.
That's what I mean by "movie-land." Compounding my irritation, the characters sometimes decide to wax poetic about their personal philosophies, in that mock-deep movie way, saying things like "people remind me of expired cans of pineapples" or some such rubbish.
I've heard a lot of people saying the second half was better, but I thought both parts were equally effective."Chungking Express" was basically filmed while Wong Kar Wai was on hiatus from the "Ashes of Time" project.
It's obvious this film provided the director with an escape, or a freedom of expression that the audience feels from the opening credits until the end of the film.While the story may feel disjointed - the style is extremely consistent and the pacing and music in the film really balance so nicely here.I had enjoyed the two films I had seen from this director,"happy together" and "Fallen Angels", but I absolutely loved this one.There is something very real about this dreamlike world that the director has created here.
The acting and writing are sharp, but it is the overall mood/feel of this film that really makes it stand apart.Won Kar Wai throws in some parallel characters that resemble the leads, and he also jumps time within the main characters lives.
I really liked all the characters except the girl with the wig who just looked stupid and faceless with her big sunglasses on all the time.Sure some of the shaky camerawork and excessive use of the strob effect were a bit annoying, but the director's playfulness pays off as we get some really cool and original shots as well.In the end though this movie actually made me feel something and I think you should see it..
The second, however, made me fall in love with this movie completely.A cop (Leung) pining after his lost love pours out his sorrows to a fast-food vendor, attracting the attention of the young woman who has just started working there (the gorgeous Faye Wong).
Perhaps the movie was aimed at a mainly western audience, but I think Kar-Wai probably wants to emphasize that some people in Hong Kong are too much aimed at America (California in this story).
The story is very human as always in a Wong Kar-Wai movie: most of his ideas seem to deal with fear of (urban) loneliness.
This image is a reflection of what I was able to draw from the muddled combination of story lines thrown together by director and writer Wong Kar-Wai. On a second viewing of the film this blank screen was slowly filled in with slurred images of bodies in motion and a deep feeling of loss.
But what makes it so charming, and interesting ultimately in that European art-house way, is how Wong Kar Wai keeps a rhythm to his story that doesn't follow rules, but feels right in a sense like some off-beat song on an obscure album only your hip friend down the block has.
Probably film buff friends who enjoy obsessions over pineapple and girls.There's also a very good performance turned in by actress Brigitte Lin, who before this was a (enormously popular) pop star, and is slightly used as opposed to cast by Kar Wai as a figurehead, like some flashy, self-conscious symbol of a mystery in and of itself (blond wig, going about the crevices of town on some criminal mystery, the music playing in tight but sweet strings).
It's also great to see Tony Leung in an early role that allows him some space for some little notes of emotion we haven't seen in future Wong Kar Wai movies where he's the super-serious or melancholy lover.
It's a question of what makes up these characters, when romance throws caution into the wind.I've seen Chungking Express in bits and pieces over the years, and while I will eventually get down and watch it from start to finish, all the pieces together (not to draw any sort of parallel in what I described and how I view the movie) stay fresh in my mind.
I also love how Kar Wai flashes so many techniques into his story, the flashes of colors, the combinations and segues of film speeds and a kind of impressionistic style that puts up noir into a more emotional plane.
I have seen most of his work, but nothing compares to the strange and utter feeling you get whilst watching Chungking Express.This film is a two-parter: One story shows a couple-days-in-the-life of He Zhiwu aka Cop 223 (Takeshi Kaneshiro) who pathetically tries pursuing his ex-girlfriend, May, who is NOW moving on.
The cast-list only refers to him as "Cop 663" (played by Wong's alter-ego, Tony Chiu Wai Leung), who patiently is waiting for love to find him; not as assertive as our first protagonist, but still carries a great story.
Don't be fooled by the fact that this Hong Kong film about two cops was distributed in the U.S. by Quentin Tarantino; It's actually a very human story of love and loneliness in the big city.
Before Chung King Express i had never seen a Wong Kar-Wai movie, and as far as first impressions go this was a great one.
I was enjoying the first part until it abruptly stopped (it didn't "end", it just stopped in what appeared to be the middle of the story) to be replaced by an inane and totally unbelievable second part that seemed to focus around a girl rearranging and cleaning a guy's apartment (wow!) I look forward to the day when Wong Kar Wai is given a decent script to work with!.
Wong Kar-Wai's film is an aesthetic treat - it looks nice, sounds nice, I dare say it would even smell nice if it had a scent - but plainly and simply, Chungking Express lacks substance and it's 2D characters and muddled (not to mention slow) plotting with only leave you cold by the time the final credits (finally) role.
That's actually the kind of cops you can see in "Chongqing senlin."The film is unique because it presents two seemingly "different" and "unrelated" stories of broken-hearted cops and their new-found objects of affection, situated against the background of modern-day Hongkong.Thus, with regard to the element of chance and coincidence, of spontaneous and unexpected encounters, Wong Kar-Wai's film is in the same line with Krzysztof Kieslowski's "Trilogy of Colors," Milco Manchevski's "Before the Rain," Claude Lelouch's "Chance and Coincidence," Alejandro Inarritu's "Amores Perros" and Quentin Tarantino's "Pulp Fiction."The "first" story tells the story of Ho Chi-Wa (Takeshi Kaneshiro), who calls himself "police no.
663," a traffic police who was also dumped by his girlfriend, a flight stewardess.Depressed, he engages in a pouring out of sentiments to objects that remind him of his failed love affair, but ultimately, clearly "reflect" himself---soap, towel, uniform, stuffed toy.However, things might just start to fire up again for the law enforcer when a young and easy-going lady who works as a counter-girl for a food station (where he regularly buys fish and chips and black coffee) develops a crush on him and gets hold of the key to his apartment by chance.Hip, hypnotic and delightful;"Chongqing senlin" is something that shouldn't be missed.(No wonder "Pulp Fiction" megman Tarantino took it on him for the film to be released in the US.).
The biggest of them was: the director Wong Kar-wai apparently launched into filming this movie without even having completed its screenplay!
Of all the titles that the company released in the short while it was around, this one was the best and really turned me on to this great filmmaker, Wong Kar-Wai, who has made many great films.CHUNGKING EXPRESS is a fun story that is just so enjoyable to watch.
Chunking Express 11/11/2009This amazing little piece of Hong Kong cinema, directed by Wong Kar-Wai, is a great example of a modern story told in modern times.
You actually feel as if there is chemistry between the two characters.A lot of people love the movie Amelie, but I think much of that movie was borrowed from this one - especially the scene in which she goes into the cops apartment and rearranges his furniture.Unfortunately, I don't think Wong Kar Wai has matched this films quality or randomness of story line since then..
The plot is rather simple, but the real beauty of the film is Wong Kar-Wai's ability to capture the moods of Hong Kong.
As the second half of the movie picks up, it consists of the romantic relationship between food service worker Faye (the musical sensation Faye Wong) and Cop #663 (Tony Leung Chiu Wai).
Kar-wai Wong's film `Chungking Express' is sure to leave you feeling differently than most films you have seen.
This tale of the love lives of two Hong Kong lawmen - Cop 223 played by He Zhiwu, and Cop 663 played by Tony Leung Chiu Wai - may leave you utterly confused after your first viewing, but is worth a second look.
When you first see Kar-wai Wong's film, `Chungking Express,' don't expect it to be love at first sight.
While these two love stories may seem unrelated and confusing, a second view sheds new light and restores the sanity lost in the first viewing.The camera techniques used in `Chungking Express' distort time and motion, giving the viewer the notion that at certain times the characters move at a different tempo from the rest of the world.
If you're looking for a different movie from the normal Hollywood genre, you might want to consider Kar-wai Wong's film `Chungking Express'.
Not the usually, run-of-the-mill movie you're used to watching, Chungking Express is full of love, romance, drugs, murder, and, of course, expired Pineapple!
This storyline is loosely connected to the second main character of the film, Cop 663, played by Tony Leung Chiu Wai.
Wong Kar-Wai redefines Hong Kong Film Noir with Chung King Express.
I think the film works on at least two levels, the first one being the personal love stories of young people in Hong Kong, and the second is a showcase of Hong Kong, giving the viewer a wonderful tour across parts of the city.
Hong Kong director Wong Kar-Wai's Chungking Express is a breathless tour de force that will leave you feeling exhilarated.
Whatever it's influences, the look of the film is totally unlike anything else from Hong Kong before it.Of all Wong Kar-Wai's films, CHUNGKING EXPRESS is probably the most readily accessable and the most commercial.
Wong Kar-wai's romance-drama, Chungking Express (1994), is story told in in two parts, each consisting of two Hong Kong policemen who are heartbroken from their respective ex- girlfriends.
Chungking Express is a unique movie written and directed by Kar-wai Wong in 1994.
If you're interested in watching a movie which shows Hong Kong life as it is, check out Wong Kar-Wai's semi-sequel "Fallen Angels"..
Director Wong Kar Wai is a true artist of film and makes Tarantino's work look like campy self-aggrandizing shallowness).
I think it's fair to say that 'Chungking Express' is a movie more concerned with aesthetics and film technique than conventional plot or character development.
I'm usually wary of movies of this type, such as most of Jean-Luc Godard's work (Godard being an obvious inspiration to Wong Kar-Wai), but I surprised myself a little by liking 'Chungking Express'.
The film deals with two separate love stories, both featuring cops who frequent a takeaway food bar in Hong Kong.