The film took off when they shot the first scene with Brigitte Lin putting on the blonde wig on Nathan Road. There is a sense of improvisation and spontaneity throughout the entire film, which became hugely influential after its release, and the camera work not only underlines the fleeting nature of human relationships, but creates a trendsetting vision of the city in motion on the eve of the 1997 handover, with Hong Kong and its inhabitants hurtling towards an uncertain future. Wong Kar Wai went out in the streets to shoot and he and cinematographer Christopher Doyle shot without permits around Lan Kwai Fong and Kowloon. And they are having fun with themselves.” The film has indeed an optimistic tone while managing to portray a very relatable story and show the real struggle of our modern-day society: communicating and connecting with one another.
I would say the characters are more living in their own world than being isolated. “All the characters are basically lonely people,” the director says in the book WKW: The Cinema of Wong Kar Wai, “but being alone doesn’t necessarily mean they are sad. Even the voiceovers are used not for narrative purposes, but in order to express the loneliness.
At once hyperkinetic and hazily romantic, Chungking Express is the quintessential film about loneliness in the postmodern metropolis, in contemporary Hong Kong, as characters brush against one another throughout the daily rush but struggle to connect.