Chungking Express

Wong Kar-wai made this in a gap in the middle of Ashes of Time, the script unfinished when shooting began; he wrote the second story in a single day over the New Year break. A third story, about a lovesick hitman, was set aside for length and became Fallen Angels. The halves meet at only a few points: the first runs through Chungking Mansions in Tsim Sha Tsui, the second around the Midnight Express stand in Lan Kwai Fong. The tins of pineapple the first cop buys all expire on 1 May, both the deadline he gave his ex and his own birthday. The flat of the cop Tony Leung plays was cinematographer Christopher Doyle’s own home. Wong says he picked the Central to Mid-Levels escalator because nobody had shot a film there. The smeared, stuttering movement comes from step printing, which duplicates frames. At the 14th Hong Kong Film Awards it converted 4 of 10 nominations: film, director, actor and editing. Leung also took best leading actor at the 31st Golden Horse Awards. It placed joint 88th in the 2022 Sight and Sound critics poll. A good fit if you take the two stories never joining up as the form rather than a gap. Not for anyone expecting the first half’s drug plot to become a crime picture.