On how Wong Kar-wai's Chungking Express uses Hong Kong as a character and what that means for films that use cities this way.

Chungking Express is a film about two love stories, neither of which resolves in any conventional sense, set in the Chungking Mansions area of Hong Kong. The city is not backdrop. It's grammar.

Wong Kar-wai and Christopher Doyle shoot the film with step-printing techniques that produce an effect of objects in sharp focus against a blurred, streaked background. The effect is temporal: the city is always moving too fast, and the characters are either standing still in it or running through it, never quite synchronized with its pace.

The cinematography is expressing the film's theme before a word is spoken. These are people out of step with their city's rhythm — people who move at the speed of feeling rather than the speed of commerce and transience that Hong Kong's economy demands.

Faye Wong's Faye is the film's emotional center and Doyle's way of shooting her — always slightly apart from the space she's in, always suggesting she might be somewhere else in her imagination — is a formal performance of her character's inner life.