Movie Review: Hitch a ride on the ‘Chungking Express’

This week, the library will screen writer/director Kar Wei Wong’s “Chungking Express,” a '90s movie that feels like a 90s movie. Having “come of age” in the 90s, I mean that as a compliment.
I like flannel shirts mixed with impressionistic psychotic love. And, it turns out — no offense to my Seattle-born (go figure) Anglo husband — I sometimes like Chinese men.
This is a great movie, but to be honest, it took me a long time to realize it. I was well into the film before I started to understand and care about its very messed up characters.
In some cases, it was easy, such as with the aforementioned Chinese men, by which I actually mean man, or much more specifically, Cop 663, played by Tony Liung Chiu Wai.
I enjoyed seeing a man under-dressed and a little sexually objectified on the screen, but it was more than that. His character’s warmth, strength and instinctive tenderness overwhelmed me at times.
But other characters made liking them more difficult. There is Faye (Faye Wong), obsessive and dangerous; Cop 223 (Takeshi Kaneshiro), also obsessive but more weepy and sentimental than dangerous; and finally “Woman in blonde wig” (Brigitte Lin), who, in her wig, raincoat and sunglasses, is impossible to see.

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