In Chungking Express, even the shadowiest corridor of the modern condition feels like a vast expanse of possibility. Writer-director Wong Kar-wai’s unfathomably effervescent romanticism knows no boundaries other than the limits of his audience’s perception, which he also takes to be his film’s primary concern: how we see the world, and whether we can see it all at once. His film’s vigorous curiosity, a measure of our poise and flexibility, our readiness to open ourselves to uncertainty, is also a testament to a world wonderfully and unmanageably beyond our complete grasp.

With Chungking Express, Kar-wai fashioned the masterpiece of his early style, an exquisite fable of modern human friction that adopts the exploratory texture of magical realism but not its sometimes abstracting gaze. His text is not lacquered in the same kind of candy-coated wax that would go on to petrify something like Jean-Pierre Jeunet’s Amélie, so obviously indebted to this film in other ways. While I’ve always found that film to feel like a penitentiary, a cinematic prison-house designed with directorial despotism, Chungking Express is feverishly alive, attentive to momentary shifts in rhythm and tempo, feeling like it could explode into something new at any moment. Its closest predecessor may be Fellini’s mid-period, still alive to the observational particularities of his neorealist era but beginning to breathe, to newly expand and contract, into fantastical realms of a world more wonderful.

An amorous fairy-tale of frisky humanity that is also an arduous trek through the swampy terrain of maintaining, and failing to maintain, moment-to-moment human connection, Chungking Express tethers two stories with a phantom thread. It links them through a form of chance and circumstance that feels both molecule-thin and like the latchkey for some secret of the universe. This is not “hyperlink” cinema. They have no narrative connection, nor do they even occupy the same emotional temperature, but they do embody a shared hope, a vision of the world in which the everyday is a kind of delirium, a carefully controlled entropy as a kind of bliss. Their linkages are atmospheric, each second of the film implying a nebula of bubbly energy that happens to have coalesced at this very moment.

The former story focuses on He Zhi Wu (Takeshi Kaneshiro), presently interested in an unnamed woman (Brigitte Lin) in a blonde wig who, for a fragment of a second, passes him by, distracting him from his pensive obsession over his girlfriend, who has recently broken up with him on April 1. All the while, he bides his time, wondering what to do as he gives himself one month to hold onto the past, to retain hope for his relationship, by collecting cans of pineapple expiring on May 1. “Interested” in the unnamed woman, I write, but not fetishizing her precisely. He is not obsessed with the unnamed woman, as would be the case in a lesser, more conventional film. He simply happens to see her for a second and is intrigued by who she might, or might not, be, and this interest becomes a reason for the film to collect and ponder their shared emotional and affective realities. The film constellates their stories and discovers shared tendrils between them, even when the characters treat each other only as momentary curiosities.

If this story concerns possibility via happenstance, the other entertains unknowing proximity as Cop 663 (Tony Leung Chiu-Wai) meditates on the loss of one woman, his flight attendant girlfriend (Valerie Chow), while another, Faye (Faye Wong), becomes an unwelcome visitor in his life, gaining access to his apartment and freely rearranging his living quarters without him ever seeming to notice, or to try to notice.

Entirely different imaginative relationships to connection occupy both stories, but both are cinema in search of forms of life and modes of relation outside typical bindings of storytelling and accepted understandings of biological and consensual filiation. It is not the world but the film that unites these people. Art’s rhythms move them like magma, a plenitude of cinematic pure energy. There’s a dynamic delirium at the heart of Kar-wai’s imagery that feels volcanic, a perpetual detour that is also an undying interest in humans themselves, even when they do not notice what makes themselves interesting, and interesting together. Faye, repeatedly, unknown to Leung’s character, intervenes in the region he doesn’t really treat as his home, turning it into a personal play-space. While another film would frame this as an invasion of private property, entrenching in an established conception of human relation, Chungking Express understands it as an existential expansion, a way in which the world engages you even when you might be preoccupied.

Throughout, it is overlooked social ephemera that occupies the film’s eye most of all, the camera exploring the contours of those aspects of reality that are both alienating and comforting in their simultaneous omnipresence and ephemerality. When a world-redefining letter is read by one character, his unexpected scene partner is a heating dumpling rotating to his left, cyclically and unceasingly churning with an everywhere-but-out-of-the-way glow that echoes the half-ironic melancholy of a particularly beautiful Edward Hopper painting. For this scene, the dumpling heater shares space with him, being weighted equally in conceptual importance rather than relegating itself to the background space which it usually occupies. Chungking Express is interested in the fact that this composition happened to happen – that he happened to read this letter, to have his world changed forever, while this dumpling was going about its day – and the film’s interest makes us interested.

Or consider the fissile energy of rotating CD discs, catching Kar-wai’s eye multiple times as he repurposes them into a sparkling merry-go-round of sheer humanity. None of the characters in the film have any time to notice these discs. The people are busy with their memory objects and their potential narratives forward, lost in a space between past and future. As Leung converses with his stuffed toy collection, treating them with a fetishistic affection that Kar-wai smirks and frowns at but doesn’t judge, we detect radiations of He’s own obsessive affection for pineapple, for collecting totems to a history that is still alive but no longer corporeal. Their attention dilates and diffuses, breathing with the rhythms of life in ways that open up and close down potential connections, and Kar-wai is able to understand this not as an existential crisis or even a problematic but a poetics, the scattershot kineticism of life itself traversing so many moods that it can’t but overlook so much of what it simultaneously acknowledges. The people aren’t there for the discs, and the discs aren’t there for them, but they are there simultaneously. The film dares us to think that this simultaneity is, itself, worthwhile. The film is there for both of them.

This is a cinema du monde, bewitchingly on the go. It’s a visceral rumble, a magnetic meridian, out of touch with reality yet skirting its folds, becoming tangled in the crevices of the wild at heart. It floats, perhaps stubbornly, without a real goal, but it slowly accumulates into a poem for a pressurized city space played as a hallucinatory three ring circus of human eccentricity. Within this vision, modernity is wounded, ephemeral, and painfully unresolved, yes, but only so it can be radiant, ever-emergent, and wonderfully expressive. That modernity is doomed to chase a receding past and hunt for an unlikely future is both its tragedy and its romance, that which keeps us from noticing life in the margins but which also draws us ever closer to it.

Score: 10/10