This is a really hopeful refraction of Wong Kar-wai’s most steadfast belief in his body of work at large, that all love really boils down to is a matter of timing. He celebrates his twenty-fifth birthday alone in a bar and wills himself to fall in love with the next woman who walks in the door.Ģ23’s arc plots a path between realizing that love has expiration dates and opening himself back up to the world in spite of that realization. When May 1st comes around and May unsurprisingly leaves the line cold, 223 finally allows himself to swallow a hard truth, to eat the physical and metaphorical thirty cans of expired pineapple. It’s a countdown of sorts, the holding of a breath, an earnest effort to extend something that has already long been extinguished.
(Her name is May and pineapple is her favorite fruit and May 1st is also his birthday. Every day, for the entire month following the fact, he buys a can of pineapple with an expiration date of May 1st. The most curious of Cop 223’s post-breakup rituals revolves around pineapple. He visits the street under her window and kicks rocks around glumly, reminiscing on the good times they had together. He develops a worrying attachment to his beeper (okay fine, I admit it, I had to look up how these things work), which has taken a vow of silence. Even after the break-up, he calls in on his ex’s family, who always happen to be on their way out (doubt), reluctant to be the ones to tell him that she’s not there at all. It understands that trailing not far behind rejection is denial, loneliness, plummeting self-interest that a bad-weather shelter need be hastily constructed, that silly rituals do the important job of anchoring us to the earth in the violent cloudbursts of grief.įor Cop 223, it’s as if someone has shifted the floor under him a couple of meters, and this floor happens to be in to a subway station. It knows how aching a first heartbreak is. But there is a reason (a number of reasons, actually) why every great contemporary auteur – Quentin Tarantino most famously has declared his undying love for it, and Barry Jenkins has spoken about it at length as well – cites Chungking Express as a key inspiration in their own filmmaking.įor one thing, it’s gentle and earnest, in a really human way.
With a superficial watch, Chungking Express can easily be written off as unambitious, purposeless, lacking the substance to merit the ardent praise heaped upon it. This version was released to promote the single version of "Something About Us".I was not expecting to see content like this on Reddit, what I consider a post-adolescent online platform, but when I did, I knew that this was how I’d be digging myself out of this bout of writer’s block.įirst, the video itself: a montage of scenes from the 1994 Hong Kong film Chungking Express, specifically stitching together all of the appearances made by Cop 223 – perhaps the forefather of today’s beam-me-up-softboi simps – overlaid with the Daft Punk track “Something About Us” from their 2001 album Discovery. The second music video is a compilation of clips featuring Shep and Stella. The band expresses their gratitude as Shep dies. When they come back, Shep then reveals The Crescendolls' true identities. She takes it and experiences a dream sequence that reveals Shep's feelings for her.
Shep raises his injured arm out to his crush Stella. They drive to a warehouse where their rescuer, Shep, is laying on the floor bleeding to death, as a result of being shot by a laser during an earlier scene in the film. After escaping their kidnapper, two members of the alien band The Crescendolls (drummer Baryl and bass player Stella) enter a waiting taxicab driven by keyboardist Octave. The first video is a scene from Interstella 5555.
There are two music videos for "Something About Us".
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