Chungking Express movie review (1996) | Roger Ebert

He is concerned more with the materials of a story than with the story itself, and he demonstrates that by telling two stories, somewhat similar, that have no obvious connection. He sets the stories in the Hong Kong world of fast-food restaurants, shopping malls, nightclubs, concrete plazas and pop culture (one of his heroines wears a blond wig and dark glasses, and the other seems addicted to “California Dreamin”’ by the Mamas and the Papas). His visuals rhythmically switch between ordinary film, video and pixilated images, often in slow motion, as if the very lives of his characters threaten to disintegrate into the raw materials of media.

If you are attentive to the style, if you think about what Wong is doing, “Chungking Express” works. If you’re trying to follow the plot, you may feel frustrated. As the film opens, we meet a policeman named He Qiwu (Takeshi Kaneshiro), who wanders the nighttime city, lonely and depressed, pining after a girl who has left him. He gives himself 30 days to find another girl, and uses the expiration dates on cans of pineapple as a way of doing a countdown. A new woman walks into his life: the woman in the wig (Brigitte Chin-Hsia Lin), who is involved in drug deals.

We expect their relationship to develop in conventional crime movie ways, but instead, the film switches stories, introducing a new couple. The first cop hangs out at a fast-food bar, where he notices an attractive waitress (Faye Wang), but she has eyes only for another cop who frequents the same restaurant (Tony Chiu-Wai Leung). He scarcely notices her, but she gets the keys to his apartment, and moves in when he isn’t there — cleaning, redecorating, even changing the labels on his canned food.