Wong Kar-Wai’s dazzling Chungking Express is probably the most exciting film we’ll see all year and has already had audiences in raptures after its Dublin Film Festival preview. Radiating kinetic energy and humour from every memorable frame, it’s a quirky romance set in the neon washed alleys and tiny apartments of Hong Kong, the most cosmopolitian city on earth, There are two loosely connected stories, boht featuring lovelorn cops. In the first, cop 223 encounters a mysterious blonde woman in a late-night bar, all the while unaware that she’s a big-time heroin dealer running for her life. The second tale revolves around ‘Midnight Express’, a busy fast food counter frequented by cop 663, who has also been dumpted by his lover – or at least thinks he has. For this preoccupied cop fails to notice that the new girl behind the counter has a massive crush on him, or that someone’s been going to great lenghts to clean and redecorate his flat while he is out on the heat.
Chungking Express opens with a brilliant series of fragmented scenes that take one’s breath away with their visual panache and explain why critics hav elikened the experience to watching an early Godard movie for the first time. Some viewers may finds all this movement a bit wearing, but be assured that the film settles down after the first half hour to provide a more focused but no less delirious portrait of forlorn lovers. Wth Quentin Tarantino endorsing the filmon its US release, Chungking threatens to become the hippest movie of 95.