When Cop 663 (Tony Leung) talks to a bar of soap or admonishes a rag, we are magically convinced to notice the inanimate objects that populate our houses as the undemanding best friends we never had. When Cop 223 (played by Takeshi Kaneshiro) expresses his concerns about the emotional trauma experienced by expired cans of pineapples that are effortlessly discarded, we are mesmerised by the philosophical depth of his spontaneous honesty.
He cited this phenomenon as a major reason for the abundant voice-overs in Chungking Express which continue to charm audiences. “Nowadays people are more likely to talk to themselves than to others,” Wong Kar-wai once explained in an interview. These connections with the director’s own past as well as the history of Hong Kong are essential to the film’s experiments with time and the effects it has on our registers of memory. His father was a nightclub manager and he grew up in old Hong Kong which had a very cosmopolitan background that was composed of several different ethnic communities, something that we find in Chungking Express as well. It is interesting that Wong chooses to focus on older parts of Hong Kong rather than the glamorous skyscrapers that tourists usually flock towards, making the film semi-autobiographical in nature.
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