He befriends and becomes the object of affection for Faye (Faye Wong), the whimsical waif who works behind the counter of the snack bar he frequents. The second - and longer - story centres around Cop 663 (Tony Leung), who is also dealing with the aftermath of a break-up. On the first of May, he meets and falls in love with a mysterious woman (Brigitte Lin) who, unbeknownst to him, is part of a drug smuggling operation and is on the run from her partners. During this time he falls into a routine of buying cans of pineapple, all of which are due to expire on the 1st of May, for reasons which may only make sense in his lovesick mind. Having broken up with his girlfriend on April Fool's Day, he hopes that their break-up must on some level be a joke, and he decides to let the gag last for a month if May (the month) comes and May (his ex-girlfriend) doesn't come back to him, then he'll know it's truly over. Cop 223 (Takeshi Kaneshiro), a man who has recently become obsessed with the impermanence of things. Set in Hong Kong, the film is split into two separate, slightly unequal halves, both of which revolve around the love lives of lonely policemen. The on-the-fly scrappiness of Chungking Express's production bleeds into its story, or more accurately its stories, which have a vibrant unpredictability that suggests they were being written as they went along.
It's probably the best argument in favour of procrastination in the history of art. In the process he had someone made not only his best film, but also one of the best films of the 1990s, without even meaning to.
![chungking express 1994 chungking express 1994](https://loveworldcinema.files.wordpress.com/2016/01/chungking-express.jpg)
Once Chungking Express was completed, he was able to return to Ashes of Time with renewed vigour and energy. The latter was a big-budget historical epic that he was struggling to shape in the editing room, so he took a break for a couple of months and made a small, scrappy contemporary film as a way of working through whatever creative issues he was dealing with at the time.
![chungking express 1994 chungking express 1994](https://i.pinimg.com/originals/25/d9/1d/25d91d76c65e6963532d2f525af85aa5.jpg)
The film was conceived as a distraction for director Kar-Wai Wong, who at the time was embroiled in the editing of another film, Ashes of Time. Chungking Express is, for my money, unquestionably a masterpiece, but one of the most delightful things about it is that it's something of an accidental masterpiece.