Chungking Express: Food As A Symbol Of Everlasting Love

This column is part of Slurrp's series, #TheSeasonedScreen, by culture writer Arshia Dhar.

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Based in ‘90s Hong Kong, Chungking Express chronicles a trail of loneliness that looms over its four protagonists, the first of whom we meet in the dingy bylanes of the city, chasing a man through a bustling market. Kar-Wai’s fixation with liminal and subliminal spaces occupied by people in urbanscapes is made evident in the first two minutes, when his 25-year-old Taiwanese protagonist, Cop no. 223, or Ho Chi Moo (Takeshi Kaneshiro), falls in love with a mysterious woman (Brigitte Lin) only 57 hours after he brushes elbows with her over a “0.1 centimetres” of distance, or the “closest they ever got.” The detail one often misses is that he runs into her at a towering fruit stall, and that marks our first encounter with the recurring trope of a fruit in this track of the film. Here, the “her” happens to be a cocaine smuggler in a blonde wig, beige raincoat and a pair of red-frame sunglasses on an overcast day.

Once the chase ends, Cop no. 223 finds himself telephoning his ex-girlfriend May’s parents to inquire on her whereabouts merely hours before he is turning 25 on 1 May. The call is made from a frayed little takeaway named Midnight Express, from which he orders a wrap. When its owner (Chan Kam Cheun)—a custodian of people’s romantic secrets—asks if he has not had any luck in love recently, he advises the cop to date another May, who works at his restaurant. We catch a glimpse of her, and subsequently find out that the cop and his girlfriend broke up on 1 April, which he considered a joke. To commemorate each day of living in this denial, he bought a can of pineapple—a fruit May loved—with the sell by date of 1 May, 1994. “If May doesn’t change her mind, by the time I have bought 30 cans, our love will expire,” his narrator’s voice says. Food, here, is a surrogate for love, or the conspicuous lack of it.

As he finishes his wrap, he dials his mailbox with the password “undying love,” in the hope of a message from his former lover, and when it all amounts to nothing, he buys another 30 cans of pineapple that were slated to expire only hours later, and takes them home.

In Chungking Express, food and grief are never shared with the ones you long for. Chi Moo offers some pineapple to his cat who refuses it, which makes him wonder why his pet wouldn’t even partake in his grief, as he eats his way through it by polishing off all 30 cans in one night. It gives him a stomach ache. The farthest one gets to sharing anything edible in this universe is a drink, which Chi Moo ends up doing at the Bottoms Up Club with the woman he falls in love with.

We never find out her name; however, we do know that she has just concluded a long day, in which she botched up a smuggling mission by kidnapping the child of a rogue peddler and taking her to an ice cream shop. “Some men might sacrifice a kid to save their own skin, he wasn’t one of them,” her narrator’s voice says about the man. She offers the child some ice cream and abandons her in the shop in an act of mercy that manifests in the gesture of feeding—one that is glaringly missing among the ones in search of love.

At the bar, she sits with her sunglasses on, never revealing her eyes and her motives, as she leans into a glass of iced whiskey. When Cop no. 223 sees her across the room—after throwing up all the rotten pineapple that he now wishes to replace with alcohol—he decides to strike up a conversation with her, using pineapples as the “perfect ice breaker,” of course.

He assumes she is lovelorn; she tells him off. He says he wants to know her better because his ex-lover said he never knew her well enough; she thinks to herself how little it means to know someone. “People change. A person may like pineapple today, and something else tomorrow.”

As Cop no. 223 tries desperately to retrofit someone into the May-shaped hole in his heart—especially in an attempt to not feel lonely on the momentous occasion of his 25th birthday—he finds himself slipping into lonelier corners of a dimly-lit hotel room. In it, he spends the night watching television and binging on four plates of chef’s salad, as his enigmatic lover sleeps with her glasses and Manolo Blahniks on, barely inches away from him.

He knows the arrival of dawn means it is time for them to part ways, but before leaving, he takes off her shoes to keep her feet from swelling. He cleans them with soap and water, and then goes jogging in the rain to usher in his exact birth moment at 6 AM sans the tears building up inside him. He expends all that water in his body by sweating it out.

And as he empties himself of his loneliness, his ladylove shoots a white man sipping on his beer while on her way out of the hotel. It underscores the death of the unlikely couple’s evanescent love, as the track ends with the dead man’s corpse falling next to a decaying Portho’s can of sardine, bearing the expiry date of 1 May, 1994.

In this world, pineapples are a token of the love that changes and perishes with time, almost out of habit, like it can’t help but relinquish its existence. In this world, food marks the sins that breed loneliness among the characters bearing their burden. In this world, which runs cold and dark, bones and hearts break simultaneously, with the factory-produced cans of food crumbling next to the humans who bought them. And while this world ends in a tin of dying sardines, it comes alive in the next, where, once again, a policeman finds himself looking for love in the witching alleys leading to the cabbalistic Midnight Express.

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When Cop no. 223 drops by the takeaway to grab a glass of Coke, we observe him through the befittingly misty, phantasmagoric glass panes of the eatery that seems to exist only for the ones who’ve gone astray in love. This time, the owner pitches May’s replacement, his cousin Faye (Faye Wong), as Chi Moo’s prospective lover, whom he rejects a fraction of a second before he brushes elbows with her. “This was the closest we ever got,” his narrator’s voice says, in a reminder of a pattern being repeated from only hours ago. “Just 0.01 centimetres between us. I knew nothing about her.  But six hours later, she fell in love with another man,”—his colleague, Cop no. 663, played by Tony Leung Chiu-Wai, who won the Golden Lion Lifetime Award at the 80th Venice Film Festival this year.

He, too, asks for a chef’s salad, but for his girlfriend (Valerie Chow)—a stewardess—whom we never see eating. We do, however, see her drinking soda in a flashback in his apartment. She, in her lacy bra and pencil skirt uniform, splashes the drink onto her chest, teasing Cop no. 663 to pin her to the wall, and ravenously run his mouth over every inch of her. The scene plays out to Dinah Washington’s What a Difference a Day Makes, where she sings of “heaven when you find romance on your menu.” Even if theirs featured passion and desires, it never featured food—much like that of the prevenient couple’s—sharing which would suggest domesticity and the comfort of a routine that doesn’t quite exist in the fluidity of shared drinks.

And through logical progression, we find out that the stewardess had broken up with Cop no. 663. On the takeaway owner’s advice the previous day, he had bought fish and chips for her, which she’s said to have enjoyed. But she left him regardless, driving him to live on black coffee for days to come, even at the face of the shop owner luring him with pizzas and hotdogs. When he asks the cop if he’ll take something back for his girlfriend, he announces that she’s gone. Why? “To try something else, she said. I guess she’s right. Plenty of choices in men, just like food. I guess I should’ve stuck with the chef’s salad,” he replies, vouching for the smuggler's postulation of how little it really means to know someone, and how easily some move on. And for the ones who can’t, there’s always some caffeine in a glass of Coke or a cup of coffee.

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The following day, the cop’s now ex-lover leaves a letter with his spare apartment keys at Midnight Express. He refuses to take it. The day after, while lunching at a stall in the market, he runs into Faye, who is seen lugging a fat sack of groceries that he lends a hand with. The same afternoon, she drinks at work; the alcohol, coupled with the smoke and sweat of the titchy restaurant kitchen thrusts her into a daydream where she finds herself in Cop no. 663’s apartment.

She does act upon her visions and sneak into his house, using the key his girlfriend left behind. She cooks, cleans, and holes up in the closet when the cop—who, in fact, hopes to find his ex crouching there—comes home.

On another day, Faye again runs into him in the market, solitarily feasting on a meal of barbeque pork and rice. On the next, the cop finds her hauling a tonne of lychees through the piazza, which she wolfs down in his home all by herself, to his oblivion. Throughout the entire time, she dances to California Dreaming by The Mamas & the Papas, like she did at the Midnight Express, as she builds a home, bit by bit, for the cop to return to, through repetitions and the minutest of shifts embedded in the leitmotif of the music. These shifts are invisible to the naked eye of not only the viewer, but also the cop’s. And all the while, as the two continue to eat, they never share a meal, which seems to be just out of reach in spite of them always meeting around food.

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In the middle of one work day, the cop intuits that his ex might be back in his apartment. Instead, he finds it heavily flooded. He doesn’t know if he had left the faucet open, or if the walls were sobbing out of loneliness, but he keeps mopping anyway. A second later, he sees Faye standing at his doorstep with a bag of goldfish, looking petrified and ready to run. She offers an incoherent explanation for her presence there, even as he invites her inside. He gives her a foot massage—like he would do for his girlfriend—while playing California Dreaming on the CD Faye had left there a couple of days ago—the one that he believes belonged to his ex.

Suddenly, the cop wakes up to his canned sardines tasting different one day. It’s a diminutive shift even his eyes had failed to perceive, however, it doesn’t elude his taste buds. And although he can’t explain it, it makes him more watchful of his surroundings. (If you too are still wondering how that happened, it’s because Faye had rearranged the cans according to their expiration dates.) In Kar-Wai’s universe, the characters feel their way through the world not with their eyes, ears and touch, but with their tongues that are infinitely more sensitive to movement and memory. Food, here, goes beyond being a mere plot point—it keeps score, acts as a cue, and steers the story like a master puppeteer.

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The day finally arrives when the cop finds Faye in his apartment. Like clockwork, she had come back to his home to do her chores, after lying to her cousin and bunking work. On seeing him, she scurries off like a terrified little mouse and flees. But the cop goes back to Midnight Express on the pretext of looking for his ex’s letter, when he really just wanted to ask Faye out on a date. Initially perplexed, she later finds herself dancing around the restaurant in jubilation to What a Difference a Day Makes. They had agreed to meet at the California Restaurant across the street at 8 pm for dinner. For food.

And so he turns up for the date in a plaid shirt that was gifted by his ex, only to get stood up by Faye, who had left town and a letter for the cop that is delivered to him by her cousin. “She said she was going to California,” he says—albeit a different and the real one this time.

The cop doesn’t open the letter. He waits for the snack bar manager to leave so he can talk to the beer bottles and confide in them. The promise of a meal had been lost. He takes off and goes to a neighbouring convenience store, where he runs into his ex, with whom he has a flirtatious exchange. He throws the note from Faye away, but retrieves it soon after in the midst of a thunderstorm, and dries it on the hot dog rack at the store. It turns out to be a handwritten boarding pass, whose destination got washed in the rain.

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We meet the characters a year later, and find out that Faye had indeed gone to the other California that runs 15 hours behind Hong Kong. She walks to her cousin’s takeaway, and finds Cop no. 663 setting up shelves behind a counter. The tables have clearly turned, as the two have now switched spots. She asks him what happened to Midnight Express, where California Dreaming continues to blare from the speakers, in a nod to their shared past. “Your cousin has opened a karaoke bar,” the cop shouts over the music. “He has great business sense. First he sold me fish and chips, then the whole store.”

The film ends with Faye writing a new boarding pass for the cop on a paper napkin, as she asks him where he’d like to go. “Wherever you want to take me,” he answers, leaving the audience with a glimmer of hope about the love that had stayed largely elusive in their lives thus far, much like a warm shared meal. The loop had finally broken exactly where it had started—at the Midnight Express, perhaps because now it had ceased to be the Midnight Express. The closing of the cycle allowed the two to move on, and maybe grab a meal together in the California they had promised to meet each other at a year ago, where one must imagine the food was just the perfect amount of warm…it had to be.