The individual is at the center of Wong Kar-Wai’s movie. Everyone has their own private way of coping with loss and alienation, and how each character does it feels both uniquely odd and strangely familiar. Wong Kar-Wai isn’t concerned with happy endings, romantic platitudes or universal truths. No UFO-style pearl of wisdom surfaces in his film. One can identify with the characters or they can find their individual quirks absurd. That’s probably one of the unique joys to Chungking Express - that the characters’ quirks can affect each and every viewer differently. Wong Kar-Wai doesn’t tell you anything with the film. The moments in the film are opaque and seemingly unconnected, but beneath that the viewer just might find something revealingly personal and achingly real.
As you would expect from Wong Kar-Wai, the film is literally dripping with style, but it isn’t over-the-top like his later Fallen Angels (the unofficial third chapter to Chungking Express) nor is it bombastic like Ashes of Time. Chungking Express operates with a quicksilver, almost effervescent vibe, where chances are found and connections made with one barely noticing. The camera (handled by co-cinematographers Christopher Doyle and Andrew Lau) moves constantly and sometimes gives in to jarring step-printing or strange slow/fast motion, but the moments are appropriate. It’s those sequences that convey the interior/exterior experience of each character, be they the helter-skelter chaos of a chase or the noiseless isolation of sudden heartbreak. The style is alternately contemplative and breezy; it’s like the French New Wave with a dash of MTV sprinkled in.
Chungking Express works on many levels. It’s a stunning new wave “art film” that also succeeds as a bouncy pop-culture valentine to Hong Kong. It’s an affecting exploration of personal heartbreak and a uniquely cosmopolitan take on urban alienation. And, probably most affecting of all, it’s a marvelous demonstration of love in and of the cinema. Chungking Express seems to tell us that love and its chances could be just around the corner and out of sight. As much as the film explores the frustration of heartbreak and unrequited love, it also hints at the promise of something magical. Movies can both show and create emotion, and Wong Kar-Wai was able to do both with remarkable dexterity. Even more, he did it in a way that only the movies could - through camera, sound and space, and not through spoken dialogue or printed epiphanies. All the powers of cinema are at work in his understated little masterpiece. Chungking Express might even remind some people of why they grew to love movies in the first place. (link)