FILM REVIEW; Mocking MTV Style And Paying Homage to It – The New York Times

Lurching, vertiginous camera work is one hallmark of Wong Kar-wai’s “Chungking Express,” a film from Hong Kong with a tirelessly capricious sense of style. While its slender, two-tiered plot links love affairs that happen largely by accident, the film’s real interest seems to lie in raffish affectation. Mr. Wong has legitimate visual flair, but his characters spend an awful lot of time playing impish tricks. A film in which a man talks to his dishtowel has an overdeveloped sense of fun.

Mr. Wong, whose “Days of Being Wild” was shown at the New Directors/New Films series in 1991, displays aggressive energy, but his material is slight. In the first vignette, a mysterious blond-wigged moll oversees a comically intense drug-smuggling operation while a policeman mopes about the loss of his longtime girlfriend. These two strangers will eventually fall in love, we are told.

Meanwhile, the film displays the first sign of its fixation on canned goods as the policeman looks for pineapple with a certain expiration date, thinking that eating it will bring him luck in love. “I wonder if there’s anything in the world that won’t expire,” he muses.

This sentimental soul would seem to be no match for the drug dealer, who’s so tough that she simply carts off a little girl when the girl’s father behaves recalcitrantly. (After an ice-cream sundae, the little girl is returned.) When the cop and the blonde do meet, the encounter is archly effective, but it still seems less consequential than the edgy, hyperkinetic mannerisms used to tell the story.