Film

Originally slated to be part of his dizzy diptych Chungking Express (1994), Wong Kar-wai’s moody ode to urban malaise has eclipsed its cinematic sibling; the more the ashes of time go by, the more this runt looms as the stronger work. A dub soundtrack replaces the pop loop of Chungking’s “California Dreamin’,” but except for the songs, everything else in Wong-world remains the same: Lonely people haunt Hong Kong’s noodle shacks and cramped flats, various voiceovers compete for authority and Christopher Doyle’s cinematography reduces environments to wide-angled neon smears. What gives this companion piece a leg up is both its sly subversion of the era’s genre preoccupations—one protagonist is a professional killer, but you won’t find bullet ballets here, fanboys—and the amplification of the director’s dreamy romanticism to an almost delirious degree. Even when the characters maintain too-cool-for-school demeanors, the aesthetics keep pushing the emotional temperature into the red.

With the exception of an existentially muddled hit man (Lai), the angels here are more tarnished than fallen. The hired assassin’s smitten “assistant” (Reis) secretly pines for her employer, cleaning his apartment when she’s not masturbating on his bed. Meanwhile, a mute jack-of-all-trades (Kaneshiro) breaks into storefronts after-hours and tries to forget his own damaged-goods girlfriend (Yeung). The story lines don’t arc so much as accumulate incidents, but in Wong’s hands, nightscapes and non sequiturs form their own narrative thrust. The effect remains narcotic; welcome to the ’90s cinema of pomo desire, distilled into a blissful 96 minutes.