663 hangs around a fast-food emporium mooning over a stewardess who skipped out, while the boss tries to steer him to his new waitress Faye (Faye Wang), a trim, T-shirted cutie who keeps bopping away to her own tape of the Mamas and the Papas' "California Dreamin.' " 223 keeps buying cans of pineapple with the expiration date of May 1, because he regards that date as the cutoff point for his former girlfriend's return. WITH: Brigitte Lin Ching-hsia (Drug dealer), Tony Leung Chiu-wai (Cop 663), Valerie Chow (Air hostess), Takeshi Kaneshiro (He Quiwu, Cop 223), Faye Wang (Faye).Badge No.
At Alice Tully Hall this evening at 6 as part of the 32d New York Film Festival. Garcia production designer, William Chang produced by Chan Yi-kan.
CHUNGKING EXPRESS Written (in Cantonese, with English subtitles) and directed by Wong Kar-wai directors of photography, Christopher Doyle and Lau Wai-keung edited by William Chang, Hai Kit-wai and Kwong Chi-leung music by Frankie Chan and Roel A. "Chungking Express" and "Eating Out" will be shown this evening at 6 as part of the New York Film Festival. On the same bill is "Eating Out," a deadpan, funny Norwegian short set in the most dismal greasy-spoon restaurant under the midnight sun. Like "Days of Being Wild," "Chungking Express" is clumsily subtitled, which also detracts from its effectiveness. Wong's visual energy harks back to early New Wave experimentation, it also has a substantial rock-video component, which suggests that the detritus of mass culture has a way of coming home to roost. Wherever she goes, she likes to bop along to "California Dreamin'."īeyond the Mamas and the Papas, "Chungking Express" is filled with global-village references to fast food, video, convenience stores, Bruce Willis and Demi Moore. She sneaks into his apartment, touching and rearranging things until she seems to know everything about him, even down to how he feels about his dishtowel. A pretty cook at a fast-food restaurant becomes obsessed with supplanting the stewardess in the cop's imagination. The film's second section concerns a different policeman, whose romance with a stewardess has become star-crossed, perhaps because when they met for a tryst he played with a toy airplane. "I wonder if there's anything in the world that won't expire," he muses. 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. These two strangers will eventually fall in love, we are told. 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.
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. A film in which a man talks to his dishtowel has an overdeveloped sense of fun. Wong has legitimate visual flair, but his characters spend an awful lot of time playing impish tricks. 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. 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.