Chungking Express (Chinese, Chóngqìng Sēnlín)

Movie: Chungking Express

Year: 1994

Director: Wong Kar Wai

Language: Chinese

Synopsis: Its never easy to describe a movie by a director as talented as Wong Kar Wai. Like for example this movie is distinctly split into two halves each bearing no correlation to the other. The story begins with a cop called Qiwu who is dumped on the 1st of April by his girlfriend. He decides that he would wait till 1st of May, his birthday for her to come back else move on. From that day he goes on to buy a can of pineapple daily with the expiration date of 1st May as she loved pineapples. Meanwhile a drug smuggling bid fails and the lady involves is on the run. Qiwu who drifts in his sorrow has a chance encounter with this lady. They have a very strange relationship and somewhere in between this the new story begins. Where Faye, who is an attendant in a Sushi joint, has a crush on Cop 663. She somehow manages to make a key to his flat and goes to his place often to tidy it up and feel like his wife. Her ploy helps cheer Cop 663. So one day he fixes a date with her. She ditches him to go on a world tour leaving him with a fake boarding pass for a date exactly one year from that date.

My own take: Imagine a situation that I tell a story from which I take away certain parts which you believe are critical. Now what you are left with is a skeleton of a story and a lot to imagine. That is the way the story is told. Its amazing how the missing parts don’t keep you feeling incomplete but make you enjoy the movie in its own way. The other part of the movie which makes it equally gripping is the way the humor is built in the story. There is a scene where we Qiwu tries to have a rebound relationship and tries really hard to get back at someone, actually anyone, and end up calling girls who used to sit next to him in KG class or someone whose name also seems faintly familiar. And added to that is the symbolism that the director uses. The boarding pass, the pineapple, the key all of it gives the movie a distinct identity. Watch it only if you have patience. The tag line warns the impatient ones when it says: "If my memory of her has an expiration date...let it be 10,000 years"