A side project made between two much bigger films
Wong Kar-wai shot Chungking Express during a two-month gap in editing his wuxia epic Ashes of Time, and by his own account wanted to make something light after that film’s weight. The result is two unconnected breakup stories set among Hong Kong police officers, sharing a production and a food stall but little else. Cop 223 buys a tin of pineapples every day for a month, giving his vanished girlfriend a deadline to come back before he calls the relationship expired. Cop 663, still stinging from losing a flight attendant, is quietly adopted by a snack-bar worker who starts letting herself into his flat while he is out. Jet Tone made it fast and cheap under producer Jeffrey Lau, and it took back barely $600,200 at the box office, a scale that fits its improvised, side-project origins rather than any grand design.
An unfinished script shot handheld and cut in two halves
The script was not finished when shooting started; Wong wrote the second story in a single day over a New Year break. That pace shows in the method rather than the seams: cinematographers Christopher Doyle and Andrew Lau shoot handheld through the Chungking Mansions crowds, then apply step-printing, duplicating frames so background traffic streaks and blurs while the actor in frame stays sharp and still. Editors William Chang and Kwong Chi-Leung cut the two halves like separate short films joined by a jump rather than a bridge. Wong narrates both cops in voiceover monologue, each man talking through his own small private rules for grief, which does more to set the tone than either plot does on its own. Cop 663’s apartment, incidentally, was cinematographer Christopher Doyle’s own flat at the time, borrowed for the production rather than built for it.
Faye Wong and Tony Leung carry the stronger half
The second story is the one that holds up scene by scene. Faye Wong plays the snack-bar worker with a physical restlessness, bouncing and swaying through the shop to whatever is on the stereo, that makes her repeated, illicit tidying of Cop 663’s flat feel like curiosity rather than stalking. Tony Leung underplays every beat of his half, talking to a bar of soap and a soaked dishcloth as though they were the girlfriend who left, which is funnier and sadder than a scripted confession would have been. The step-printed chase through Chungking Mansions in the first story gives Brigitte Lin’s blonde-wigged smuggler a sense of moving through a Hong Kong that has already sped up and left her behind. At 102 minutes the film never outstays a single idea, and the Hong Kong Film Award for Best Film it took home reads, in hindsight, as an early recognition of how well the whole thing was going to age.
The pineapple-tin story runs out of road early
The first story is the weaker half, and it is telling that Wong originally planned a third strand, about a lovesick hitman, and cut it loose entirely rather than force it in here; that plot became the separate film Fallen Angels. Brigitte Lin’s smuggler, drugged and exhausted through her one long scene with Cop 223, is given almost nothing to do except sleep while he watches television beside her, and her subplot resolves off-screen with a shooting the audience never sees coming or fully understands. The pineapple-tin conceit is a good hook for an opening ten minutes but has nowhere further to go once the month is up. Set against Cop 663 and Faye’s slow, specific courtship, Cop 223’s half can feel like a short film that got the running time it needed by virtue of coming first, not because its own ideas justified the length.
A crowded building as a portrait of near-misses
Wong chose Chungking Mansions because he grew up nearby and saw it as Hong Kong compressed into one crowded building, a place where locals, traders, and new arrivals from South Asia and elsewhere pass through the same corridors without much overlapping. That density is the film’s real subject: two people can share a stairwell, a food counter, or a bed and still miss each other by days or months, which is why an expired can of pineapple or a boarding pass drawn on a napkin can stand in for a whole relationship. The original Chinese title translates as Chungking Forest, echoing the Chinese title of a Haruki Murakami novel Wong admired, and the same interest in small private rituals used to survive loneliness runs through both stories. Made three years before the 1997 handover, the film’s constant motion and its characters’ inability to hold onto anyone for long reads, from this distance, as a mood as much as a plot.
Who the mood will hold, and who it will lose
This suits anyone drawn to mood and texture over plot mechanics, and specifically anyone curious what Wong Kar-wai and Christopher Doyle were doing together before In the Mood for Love made that partnership famous. It rewards patience with tone rather than incident: nothing is at stake for most of the running time beyond whether two strangers will notice each other in time. Viewers who want a conventional love story with a clear beginning, middle, and resolved ending should look elsewhere, since the first story ends in a phone message and the second in a blank plane ticket with no destination filled in. It is also a poor fit for anyone who finds voiceover narration intrusive, since both halves lean on it heavily to carry emotional information the images alone do not spell out. Fans of tightly plotted crime cinema, expecting the drug-smuggling strand to pay off as a genre plot, will find that half thin and unsatisfying.
A short film that has outlasted its own budget
Yes, and easily, given the running time is barely over an hour and a half and the film has kept earning its reputation for three decades, placing 88th in the 2022 Sight and Sound critics’ poll and staying in print through The Criterion Collection since 2008. It was made in two months on money that barely mattered to its makers, took back a modest $600,200, and still outlasted films with a hundred times its budget, which is its own quiet argument for watching it. The second story alone, Faye Wong turning a stranger’s flat into an act of courtship one small object at a time, is worth the evening even if the first story never fully lands. Go in accepting that this is two moods stitched together rather than one plot resolved, and the ninety minutes of atmosphere it offers will feel far from wasted, whatever reservations remain about the weaker of its two halves.