Love, pineapples and planes.

Chungking Express  (Wong Kar-Wai, 1994)

During the last scenes with Tony Leung and Faye Wong, when you know the film is about to end, a cheesy smile was painted on my face. I don't exactly know if the characters really hit it off but deep inside you know it feels right. This feeling of pleasant uncertainty is a great way to wrap Wong Kar-Wai's Chungking Express. What lyricism the director has achieved with subtle restraint in In the Mood for Love, this one solidifies the amalgam of both substance and style in a restlessness that doesn't need to be concealed. It's everywhere - in the kinetic mostly handheld camerawork, and among the core of the characters amidst the backdrop of a globalized pop culture. 

Set in present day Hong Kong (1994 at that time), two stories are told in such unrelated fashion but impresses in the end two different aspects of love in a modern city with the usual squalor, crime and indifference. Individually, we see the characters as isolated 'dreamers and voyagers' but the city also speaks their commonalities and how these converge in the varied forms of communication whether in a spark of conversation or in the language of love Even in the unconscious and conscious 'touch' of each other we see a disparate connection of these commonalities.

The first story is brief and oftentimes we are focused to seeing either of the individual: a cop, He Qiwu (Takeshi Kaneshiro) and the anonymous woman with a blonde hair (Brigitte Lin). He lives a listless and calculated life as shown by his seeming obsession to numbers ("we are .01 centimeter close to each other") and time - he vowed to have another girlfriend 30 days after he broke up with his previous, May, whom we get to know only in telephone conversations. The blondie lives a hurried life being involved in drug deals. Hers is also a life cloaked in uncertainty as described by her constant wearing of sunglasses day and night. Their encounter is brief and the cop's romantic prodding is not reciprocated by the tough woman. The characters may seem detached but there is a longing you can't describe.

As abruptly as the first story ends, the second one unfurls without us immediately knowing it. In the fast food junction where He eats, he lays his eyes on the new attendant (Faye Wong) who would fall in love with another cop (Tony Leung) whose relationship with a stewardess is on the rocks. The waitress is enamored by this intriguing cop but they can't seem to strike a decent conversation because she always play the radio so loud with the same song, "California Dreamin'". But she eventually gets the keys to his apartment and start cleaning and providing basic necessities such as soap and canned food. He eventually finds out but a budding romance would have to wait. She leaves for California and pursues her dream of being a stewardess. She leaves a boarding pass to the cop but the destination was blurred. 

What I love most about this film is how the director plays with pop-culture references and thematic extensions. The fast food as an offshoot of urbanization; Coke, McDonalds, even Del Monte as pervasive images globalisation; and the song California Dreamin' is complemented by the Cantonese version of The Cranberries Dreams played loudly in the soundtrack. On the other hand: the telephone as a medium of communication but sometimes blurs our ability to 'connect'; the canned pineapples on the verge of expiration which describes our hurried but often futile efforts to savor the last stages of a relationship or the obsessive beginnings marked by a desire for hefty servings; and the planes and the childlike playfulness with it both emphasizes the importance of the journey and the beauty of waiting.