Instead, “California Dreaming” tells of a place of safety and warmth in a promised land (“I’d be safe and warm / If I was in L.A”) – if one did only manage to leave. Relationships end abruptly, professions are given up easily, people leave without saying goodbye, and even life itself can end rather quickly in and around the Chungking Mansions.

The microcosm revolving around the diner is marked by perpetual liminality: nothing ever stays the same. Faye has turned up the song so loudly that he can barely understand her, but she likes it this way because, as she puts it, “ stops you from having to think.” And there is plenty to “think” (and despair) about in Kar-Wai’s visualisation of the Hong Kong milieu. 663 (Tony Chiu-Wai Leung), who unknowingly is just about to experience heartbreak of his own, steps out of the brownish street into the grey cold ceramic aesthetics of the Midnight Express. “California Dreaming” keeps on playing (“All the leaves are brown / And the sky is grey”) while this other man, police officer no.

223 (Takeshi Kaneshiro) as he bumps into the ever-daydreaming waitress Faye (Faye Wong), only to be instantly revoked by his own voiceover narration revealing that in only six hours she would be in love with another man.

The song marks the transition between the first and the second instalment, when hope sparks for the lovesick police officer no. In his two-part working-class dramedy set in the jungle of Hong Kong’s crowded streets 1, the Vietnam-era escapist hymn is utilised as a motif that changes everything by seemingly changing nothing at all. Seldom does a singular song shape an entire film’s atmosphere, nature and subtext as completely as “California Dreaming” (1965) by The Mamas and the Papas does in Wong Kar-Wai’s directorial masterpiece Chunghing Sam Lam ( Chungking Express, 1994).

Wong kar wai chungking express