It follows the intersecting lives of a drug-smuggling blond (Brigitte Lin) and a lovelorn policeman designated as Cop 223 (Takeshi Kaneshiro). The first narrative is a noire drama set in an area of Hong Kong called Chungking Mansion – an arcade-like hub for multi-cultural families, small businesses, and criminal activity (Teo 2005, 50-53). The film is a dual-narrative, what Teo calls a diptych, though both stories feature policeman protagonists and characters from the second story appear in the background of the first.

Wong’s characters, like those in the Murakami story, identify chance moments in life and struggle to act on them. Chungking Express, though set in Hong Kong, breaks with the local film industry's generic models. It was in this setting that Wong conceived and shot Chungking Express over a three-month period in the midst of working on his epic martial arts film Ashes of Time (1994) (Teo 2005, 8). The transfer also provided a glimmer of hope expansion into the Chinese mainland could resuscitate abysmal sales, yet rigid state censorship laws tempered this hope (Teo 1997, ix). An economic downturn and trepidation over the transfer of sovereignty also contributed to the industry’s decline. Despite the international ascendancy of Hong Kong stars like Jackie Chan and Chow Yun-Fat, Hollywood dominated the home box office (Teo 1997, vii). Genre films, particularly kung fu, melodrama, and gangster movies dominated the industry’s output, though in the eighties a new wave of directors began challenging generic boundaries. The golden age of Hong Kong cinema was drawing to a close by the time Wong began filming Chungking Express, (Teo 1997, vii). Sound and Indeterminacy in Chungking Expressīefore looking at specific examples of this phenomenon, we must couch Chungking Express in its historical and cultural context. I argue that this indeterminate positioning of music in cinematic space reinforces the film’s final theme – the future is unwritten. 1 Throughout Chungking Express, music moves between onscreen, offscreen, and nondiegetic space. But more important than the fact that Wong selected old songs is the way the music appears in the soundtrack.

The soundtrack, mostly consisting of popular songs of decades past, reinforces this notion of expiration and hints at nostalgia (Teo 2005, 53-54). Life, Wong seems to be saying, is also about expirations. He notes that Wong makes time tangible via expiring objects – soap, canned pineapple, old rags (Teo 2005, 63). Teo’s argument is particularly perceptive. Many scholars (Teo 2005 Abbass 1997 Huang 2002) have analyzed Wong’s manipulation of time, space, and chance in Chungking Express via narrative and visual analysis. Wong grasped this apprehension and wove it into his film’s dual narrative. Apprehension about chance, change, and the future permeated Hong Kong at the time of the film – in three years, Great Britain would return control of the city to mainland China. The film, like the short story, emphasizes that life is a string of chances to which we react. This quote from a simple three-page tale inspired Wong Kar-wai’s 1994 film Chungking Express (Teo 2005, 50). «Was it really alright for one’s dreams to come true so easily?» Murakami Haruki’s narrator asks in his short story, On Seeing the 100% Perfect Girl One Beautiful April Morning (Murakami 1993, 71).

Chungking express soundtrack