There’s no strict design to the film: one gets the sense that there could have been an infinite number of other versions of Chungking Express-with just a slight turn, the camera may have alighted on a different lonely soul and begun an entirely new story. In retrospect, then, the looseness of Chungking Express comes across as less calculated than it might have considering it was once co-opted as part of the post– Pulp Fiction boom, as Quentin Tarantino brought it to American audiences via his Rolling Thunder company. 2046 is perhaps even more exhilarating in its refusal to assume a sense of completion-it rejects time and space and resolution in equal measure.
Its vitality in 2013 is a testament to the nonaggressive inventiveness that marks all of Wong’s cinema.Ī main reason for the continued freshness of his films is that they never seem entirely settled even a perfectly polished tchotchke like In the Mood for Love was, famously, just one version of many alternates Wong could have made from the footage-a seemingly meticulous whole constructed out of spare parts.
Yet even though Chungking’s moment (the now hazy cinematic nineties, when it genuinely seemed like everyone wanted to see something that was a little out of the ordinary) has come and gone, there still is nothing quite like this vibrant portrait of one pocket of Hong Kong three years before the entire region was subsumed into China. Considered the quintessential Wong film until In the Mood for Love sidled into our lives six years later, Chungking Express would seem to be a film with its own expiration date, just like the cans of Del Monte pineapples and sardines that become its strange obscure objects of desire. “Is there anything in this world that doesn’t expire?” wonders Takeshi Kaneshiro’s lovelorn cop, known only by his number, 223, in Wong Kar-wai’s grimily splendid 1994 film Chungking Express.