In this review, I will need to analyze the director, Wong Kar-Wai's film style in Chungking Express. Discuss how his style portrays the aesthetics of Asian Cinema.

Chungking Express is one of the weirdest films I have seen, other than the fact Wong Kar Wai was directing the film, the film does not have an ending and it feels like two films were hamburger together to play as a movie. Wong Kar Wai is famous for making films with subliminal message hiding in every action, Chungking Express is one of the bizarre films made by him. It is a romance film, but it is about two different types of love, at the beginning of the film it is about a desperate officer 223 (Played by Takeshi Kaneshiro) in search of his ex-girlfriend May. Officer 223 has a habit of collecting cans of pineapple that expires every next 30 days, which gives himself a countdown to finding another girl.

Right when the movie continues, he meets a girl in a wig that is involved in drug dealing (Played by Brigitte Chin-Hsia Lin) at the bar, she then was taken to a hotel room and the woman falls asleep. As officer 223 eats all of his canned pineapples in one night, he was recovered from the lovesickness. Before he leaves the hotel room, he polishes her shoes and went for a jog. From that scene, we can feel a bit of sadness in his love life, but we know he is free from being trapped. Right when we expect that there will be more story, the movie cuts into another officer who just broke up.

Officer 663 (Played by Tony Leung) who has just broken up with his girlfriend is a regular customer of a midnight snack place, the waitress (Player by Faye Wong) falls in love with him deeply but he does not notice it because he is still recovering from his past relationship. She eventually sneaks up into his apartment to do some cleaning when he was not at home.

In this film, there are a lot of point-of-view and distant shots to let the viewers participate in the story, in some scenes, we feel like we are the characters, understanding what is happening. In some, we are just a passerby, looking at their emotions from a distant. With this technique that Wong Kar Wai used, we can easily sympathize the characters and feel what is like to be them. The emphasis on blue tones also presents their emotions of sadness, but the vibrant colors represent there are still hope in every relationship, it makes us want to cure the characters lovesickness.


The film plays an important part in Asian cinema, it shows how directors could take modern culture to a deeper level. Every scene in this movie portrays the Hong Kong culture, how they live, where they live, how they think without much explanation, it is very a different from Hong Kong action and comedy movies.

Wong Kar Wai made films that let us think a lot about life, because life is not always simple, with each detail taken into consideration, same as love. Chungking Express demonstrated very well on how guys felt after a breakup, and how each lovesick is different from one another. Wong Kar Fai leaves us with two unfinished love story, but the thing is it doesn't have to be finished because there is no beginning and ending in real life, the process is what's most important.