Critics reviews

Chungking Express lingers in the memory, the images splashing like cold water on a quiet Saturday morning with its potential, much as the cast spend their time in the film, to unfold.

Chungking Express functions magically as a modern love story divorced from time and space. DPs Christopher Doyle and Andrew Lau twirl and whirl the camera around our heroes, dipping and diving along with their dancelike movements, bathed in the sickly, fluorescent greens and blues of urban life.

Wong and longtime cinematographer Christopher Doyle capture some of the most charming breaking-and-entering footage in recent memory... The film’s standout scene, set to Faye Wong’s Cantonese rendition of The Cranberries’ instantly recognizable hit “Dreams”, is a delightful homage to the kind of all-consuming feelings mostly reserved for teen comedies: the adrenaline rush of seeing your crush unexpectedly, or the butterflies that flutter when you lean in for a first kiss.

What's surprising is that all its melding of cross-cultural influences and cinematic rule-breaking actually works and does so in exhilarating fashion. The first half, which plays like a gangster thriller, is infused with an unexpected longing, while the second half shifts effortlessly into a rom-com that balances slapstick with a deeply felt melancholy. Perhaps this is just another case of style over substance, but Wong's masterpiece might be one of the few films in which style begets substance.

Today the film retains its playful and clumsy sexiness, its raw and rough-around-the edges appeal, its lusty lyricism, unabashed charm, and its elastic disequilibrium... A heightened awareness of passing time is imprinted on every one of the film's burnished, stylized images, is central to its enduring ode to cinephilic romance and, ultimately, spurs its longing for fleeting and infectious moments of rapture.

...Chungking Express overall has the feel and rhythm of pop music—but in its sense of constant self-creation it's more like a karaoke performance than a refined studio recording. Made over the course of three months during a break in the filming of Wong Kar-wai's grand martial arts movie Ashes of Time, it's a fantastically restless film, a rummaging through of techniques and scenarios that just might jell into an affecting tale of twinned romantic longings.

Wong sometimes gets flack for his occasionally purple dialogue (and sometimes, as in My Blueberry Nights, he damn well deserves it), but in a film like Chungking Express, words don't matter. To Wong, love isn't something you can talk about; words are inadequate, empty, inevitably reductive. Love is something you see, sense, feel, and Chungking Express is one of Wong's purest evocations of its excitement and heartbreak.

Chungking Express (1994) was the Masculin féminin of the 1990s, a pop art movie about cool twentysomethings looking for love in the city that has replaced Paris as the center of the world-cinema imagination.

Wong's dreamlike tone and Doyle's stunning cinematography make this strange love story a joy to watch.

Like all of Wong's films, Chungking Express is a meticulous exploration of human relationships and how they are affected by time and space -- notions which are constantly being redefined through both Wong's innovative narrative structure and visual style.

This is filmmaking high energy and wit... You can view it as a bright twist on the being-a-cop-is-lonely sort of police picture, or as a mini-anthology of quirky not-quite-love stories. If it's hard to say where "Chungking Express" arrives, the trip is still exhilarating.

This is the kind of movie you'll relate to if you love film itself, rather than its surface aspects such as story and stars. It's not a movie for casual audiences, and it may not reveal all its secrets the first time through, but it announces Wong Kar-Wai, its Hong Kong-based director, as a filmmaker in the tradition of Jean-Luc Godard.