Chungking Express - first impressions

This film is like nothing I have seen before. Chungking Express by Wong Kar-Wai is so out of the mainstream that I like just because of that. It’s something new and therefore I have nothing to compare it to. Quentin Tarantino speaks about this film as if it’s his baby and I have heard many comparisons between this film and many of Tarantino’s like Pulp Fiction. Personally, I don’t see it but maybe as the film goes on the similarities with begin to pop up. Getting away from Tarantino, there are many things about this film that intrigue me. One obvious element is the characterization. First and foremost, three out of the four main characters lead such simple lives in such weird ways. Cop 223 (Takeshi Kaneshiro) is a broken-hearted cop. That sounds simple enough. But then Wong develops his quirky idiosyncrasies: buying a can of pineapples for each day he and his girl May or separated, eating all thirty cans at once while talking to his dog, his fish, and his stuffed animals, desperately calling his girl’s house over and over and over again, and his voicemail password “undying love”. At first he was a slightly abnormal cop and then he evolves into this depressing excuse for a depressing romantic. While it becomes somewhat repetitive with the phone calls and the running it does become quite humorous, especially at the end of the first story when he and the woman in the blonde wig (Brigitte Lin) meet in the bar. She is this rough and tough alpha-female and he is a “sissy man” as Schwarzenegger would call him. Despite their difference in personality they both have a lasting impact on each other. When she remarks that “knowing someone doesn’t mean keeping someone, they change.”