One goes jogging to sweat the tears out before he can cry. The other finds them in a torn apartment towel, a thin bar of soap and a giant white teddy bear.
At some point I want this to end well.
At another, I want them to kiss.
I have two crushes: the one who falls in love with the drug smuggler and then the one who falls in love with the apartment of the night watchman.
In retrospect, I am absolutely thrilled that she goes off to California.
Long after people leave, we miss the rituals we had, more than them. But grief requires personification. That’s why men in this film talk to soaps, and coke bottles, and buy pineapple cans that expire on their birthday. The women leave and love, love and leave. They also steal apartment keys and kill to protect. I like how they just do whatever they want.
I have a few questions about love, heartbreak and moving on. I wish I had asked these when I needed them most: a) Cop 223 eats all the pineapple from the cans, before his birthday. Does that mean, his love will not end but continue in different forms? b) Do letters unread, qualify as unsent? b.a) Does that mean a letter exists in the sending or in the reading? b.b) Or in the memory of the reader/writer?
( x) What about letters unsent, but written and stored in a plywood drawer? Do they exist, long after love reduces to nothing?)
My friend H, she sees memories as little wisps filled in a jar. Sometimes, she says, I want to put some of them in one jar, so I can hold on. When she sends letters, she writes them on paper, sends them to the people she holds in love. Cop 223 says, if memories come in a can, they should never expire. If they do, it should last at least 10,000 years. I think of H and her gift of jars full of nice memories.
Cop 223 holds this movie by the closeness of a tiny number — 0.01cm. When I was in love with AGA, I would constantly wonder at the sheer probability of our un-meeting. We lived exactly 9.7 kilometres away. He worked in our city while I studied here. Still, in all the four buses I climbed and got off for 227 days every year, I never once met him by probability. Our closeness approached 0.01cm only if we (I) willed it. In a book, I just finished reading,
Marie (Li Ling) says that a really small thing will always lurk, and a small thing can also turn into a large thing in no time. I think this is really how love moves. But in math, a limit tending to zero and its indeterminacy explains chaos theory.
I think that is why you should watch Chunking Express — for the lingering of small things, and for the chaos of love. Love of people, of ourselves and of filmmaking. The images linger for as long as love does. Almost as a homage to the constancy of change.
