As so many arenas of film production continue their drift toward safe product, Wong Kar-Wai, the Hong Kong director of In The Mood For Love and Happy Together, looks more necessary than ever. Working from unfinished, often dialogue-free scripts, improvising whole scenes on the spot, pursuing and then abandoning subplots and even entire acts, and using a great deal of time and money in the process, Wong is the definition of unsafe. Newly released on DVD, Chungking Express is the film that, courtesy of Quentin Tarantino's sadly defunct Rolling Thunder imprint, first introduced Wong to American audiences in the mid-'90s. Filmed quickly in the downtime after the completion of his beautiful, elusive, almost incomprehensible kung-fu epic Ashes Of Time, Chungking explores big-city life's chaos, romance, and alienation through two lovelorn-policemen stories that overlap, fleetingly, at a short-order food stand. In the first, Takeshi Kaneshiro walks his beat with a broken heart, brushing against a bewigged femme fatale (Brigitte Lin) while collecting cans of pineapple whose expiration date has taken on a cabalistic significance in light of his failed relationship. In the second, another abandoned cop (Tony Leung) remains oblivious to the increasingly intense attentions of the food stand's newest employee as he nurses a heartbreak of his own. Wong's approach to filmmaking may be best likened to jazz, with its improvisations and significant repetitions, but he imbues his films with the spirit and drama of a great pop song. Young love, foolish love, and even fatal love all float through Chungking Express, and the possibilities and risks of each manifest in the strangest ways, all to Wong's private beat. The director takes Kaneshiro's obsession with pineapples and Leung's love interest's compulsive playing of "California Dreamin'" from the realm of private code and turns them into rich metaphors for inchoate need. The spirited direction, abetted as it would be in other films by Wong's almost psychic connection to cinematographer Christopher Doyle, has the adventurousness of the French New Wave, but never appears burdened by homage. Mere formalism seems as alien to Wong as a dull scene, and the richness of the underlying emotional landscape—which is filled with meaningful chance encounters and choices with long-lasting consequences—would hardly allow it anyway. There's nothing safe about Wong's films, and that's precisely what makes them so pleasurable.