FILM / The Bittersweet Melancholy of Expiration Dates / Kathy Nguyen
Image © Jet Tone Production
“Do you like pineapple?”
It was indeed the “perfect ice breaker” for heartbroken Cop 233/He Qiwu, who boldly declares, with a smile, that he could detect the loneliness permeating from the mysterious unnamed woman, who is also a drug smuggler attempting to survive the rest of night after a smuggling operation goes awry. The unnamed woman’s face is essentially unseen and unrecognizable but leaves a striking impression in Hong Kong. She pairs a blonde wig with red framed sunglasses that intentionally keeps half of her face hidden. But as a police officer, Cop 233 fails at investigative detections, ignoring the unnamed woman’s suspicious outfit and overall mysterious, even dangerous, demeanor, choosing instead to focus on what he perceives as a shared solitude between two lonely people, a shared solidarity. Both she and Cop 233 sit together and wait for everything that’s affecting them outside to end inside the bar, where the contrasting warm and cool colors saturate the entire sequence, enveloping the bar in this lush romantic yet broody atmosphere while also evoking a feeling of isolation.
I can only go by the provided professional subtitles flowing on and offscreen; regardless of questions and contentions concerning translated accuracy, which is always an issue to non-native speakers. As a child with an older brother who decided to rent the DVD at a Hastings rental store that has since closed its physical stores but continues to exist in both nostalgia and memory, Cop 233’s pineapple icebreaker, while a great joke that reverbs between the family every few years if we ever encounter a pineapple or consume a variant of it, never left an impression. It was a question to be remembered and repeated over the passing years but never lingered longer than personally required other than being verbalized for subtle comedic value to me then.
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And now, rewatching the film once again during the height of the pandemic, while ironically, eating a plate of spicy, tangy Thai pineapple fried rice ordered from a local establishment, where restaurants then took orders online or on the phone and implementing a curbside pickup, marks the many social isolation and alienation the film perceptibly engages in, its beats hitting too palpably and with striking resonance. Driving to the many establishments, some of which have permanently closed because owners couldn’t maintain a steady livable income because of social distance and unprecedented changes they’ve never imagined nor planned to happen in the future, and waiting for the food orders to be delivered to my car while staring at the many parked cars and the many near empty parking lots was the most human interaction and engagement I experienced while living with my older sister during the pandemic between 2020 and 2021.
Besides time, everything just stopped.
Isolation can be lonely even if solitude is a preference. It shouldn’t be argued quarantine and social distancing were both necessary during the pandemic but there were times that when I felt increasingly lonelier and more isolated, feelings that several people most likely felt.
Remaining closer to people through texts and email remained the same. Keeping in touch with people through texts and email sustained a digitally distant relationship. Remaining close to people within the vicinity became difficult even if that bit of contact alleviated that loneliness and isolation.
With an inability to let go—of anything, including cans of pineapples and anyone in general—despite a yearning to move on from May, his past lover who loves pineapple, according to Cop 233’s memories, continues his line of questioning with a bit more specificity: “May I ask if you like pineapple?”
The unnamed woman doesn’t respond and coolly smokes her cigarette, veiling her worries and hiding behind her aloof façade and sunglasses, hiding the fact that she was just chased at every corner of death and marginally escaping them all. Though she seems physically detached, she’s cautious and aware of her surroundings, and pays Cop 233 just enough attention to curtly engage in a casual conversation with him when she decides to while hiding in an enclosed space in plain view but completely out of sight to others. Seeking companionship out of desperation from an expired relationship, Cop 233 pays close attention to her, just close enough to sensate a possible human connection with another person who seems equally lonely to him in an open but enclosed space. Given the events of what happened earlier in the film, with people attempting to attack and murder the unnamed woman, this shared space isn’t quite intimate yet. Her body, her body language never quite reach that level of human connection Cop 233 desires. Two people, two bodies together and yet there’s a tinge of displaced isolation connecting them at a distance. This simultaneity of immediate juxtapositions and textured contrasts elicit an inner sensuality but conflicting containment that outwardly suppresses, all of which are defined by Wong Kar-wai’s distinctive visual aesthetic.
Watching this scene again, after multiple rewatches, that singular impactful scene where Cop 233 and the unnamed woman first meet, where isolation and connections—even ones that are brief and in insignificant passing—and sometimes even missed connections, converge into the first story that frame the entirety of the film’s atmosphere and mood. At a glance, everything in the bar feels unwelcoming and unfamiliar, the opposite of how that bar might publicly present itself. And rather than distancing himself, Cop 233 wants to reconnect in a proximal space, entering that unfamiliar space to forget what might have initially felt intimately familiar. Before their meeting, Cop 233 reveals in the very beginning: “We rub elbows with a lot of people every day. You may not know anything about them. But they might become your friends or even confidants one day.”
The pineapple, familiar to him but unfamiliar and spoken at random to her, becomes a question that was left hanging in the air between people, an undercurrent of unspoken words that were meant to be inwardly contained and never to be directly processed.
And one memorable question the unnamed woman never responds to.
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Watching Cop 233 becoming obsessed with pineapples and expiration dates feels incredibly lonely. Because May broke up with him on April Fool’s Day, he decided to “let the joke run for a month.” Afterwards, he might move on and let the joke and the pain of heartbreak expire by that time frame. Consumed with wanting to forget May, Cop 233 decides to go through a painful night of self-inflicted episode of consuming cans of pineapple stamped with an expiration date of May 01, 1994. May and pineapples again: May loves pineapples; Cop 233’s birthday is on May 1st, one immediate close up of the can emphasizes this date, framing his obsession. Why not coalesce the two, May and pineapples, to grieve for both? He commits to his romantic idea that “if May doesn’t change her mind by the time I’ve bought 30 cans, our love will expire.” His peculiarity of remaining committed to his date-obsessive pineapple pain, but more specifically, remaining stuck in between time and past memories of May, Cop 233 consumes to concurrently remember and forget, grieving and moving forward.
A lot has been said and written about the weighted implications and impacts of memories and their inherently intimate interconnections with the chronicling of dates. Wong, and by proximal extension, his characters, are obsessed with numbers; everything with a number can be located and relocated.
Consuming food to forget or to remember is a familiar narrative everywhere. People drink to forget is a common trope seen in films, it’s an unhealthy coping mechanism. For Cop 233, consuming memories through binge eating pineapples that expire on May 1st allows him to reconcile with himself, although it’s not convincing. Eating through both a desire to return to those days or consuming to re-experience that singular loss are melancholic acts, acts that feel like a heavy burden to digest. Cop 233’s compulsive pineapple consumption is the opposite of stories and Hong Kong and Chinese dramas that center on Old Lady Meng, who gives a bowl of soups to souls to drink/consume, allowing all memories of their previous lives to completely disappear in order to reincarnate as a new human, or animal, with a new life. The present life is meant to be completely new without the burdens of the past life. Cop 233 eats to preserve his memories and image of May; afterwards, his digestion (or indigestion) enables him to move on, but not forget.
Elsewhere, after the drug smugglers abandoned her at the airport, the unnamed woman reveals something eerily similar: “the date on the can tells me I don’t have much time left.” Time itself doesn’t wait for anyone; and just like time, no one waits.
Wong is blatant with the movement of time in both stories; it moves forward to serve as a referential point of a passing moment in the past and present while also being presented as a minor background character that controls the movements of all the characters, of everyone. A minute passes by quickly and a lot can happen in a minute but that one minute feels like one longer minute for the night to end for both Cop 233 and the unnamed woman. Near the end of the first story, the Twemco flip clock is seen, creating a scene transition that perhaps disrupts the constant movements heard and seen every minute. The frame feels moody, the music sounding mellow, accompanied by a mellow rhythm, and the blueish frame, almost jazzy, shows the clock audibly flipping from 5:59am to 6:00am as Cop 233 listens to his birthday message.
From there, the movies commits to languidly moving with the characters until their convenient disappearance, Cop 233 and the unnamed woman in a blonde wig, to introduce the eccentric yet idealistic Faye and the lonely, forsaken, but equally magnetic Cop 663 who, perhaps as an act of sharing and transferring his internal misery to other things beyond his understanding, caringly talks to the many objects (a thinning soup, the many stuffed animals cohabiting with him, to his excessively washed dish towel that frequently “weeps”) as another peculiar act of overcompensation, one that regards holding onto memories that have otherwise been forgotten by the person who ended their relationship as a form of longing. And from there, melancholy and expiration dates billow to repeated overplays of “California Dreamin” by The Mamas and Papas, which is Faye’s favorite song that she constantly plays at Midnight Express and at Cop 633’s apartment. Listening to it, an inner rhythm of another form of self-inflicted painful longing for someone to reconnect with resonates and never fades as out as music often does to the eats through its repeated shuffling throughout each scene to show how time controls every repeated movement.
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And I still haven’t forgotten how the unnamed woman still never responds to or acknowledges Cop No. 233’s icebreaker. But as she divulges near the end of the first story, “Knowing a person does not mean much. People change.”
But expiration dates might not change; their time stamps remain printed, sealed, and stilled, devoid of any further progress or movements; some of those days are lost and pressed into memory while people change and wait for the next date and attempt to move forward. Like Cop 233, and to an extent Faye, who was “just 0.01 centimeters apart from” touching him, everything surrounding the consumption and intimate preserving of memories convey an idealism that hinges on subtle romantic overtures.
After receiving a message from the unnamed woman after his birthday jog, Cop 233 reveals: “If memories could be canned, would they also have expiration dates? If so, I hope they last for centuries.” Cop 233 will always remember the woman who sent him a happy birthday message. Moving forward, away from a stamped time, or regressing back to an unstamped time, still begins and ends with an expiration date. Running away or moving ahead to move forward isn’t predicated on completely forgetting a vast storage of memories reproduced. They’re timestamped and can be contained somewhere, whether inside or outside of a can to avoid being lost and forgotten somewhere. They are romanticized and unreliable as time presses on, marking the ends of several days and leaving people behind. But then when do dates truly expire when those numbers are stamped and chronicled?
Time is both invaluable and infuriating. It never stops and continues to move ahead without regard to anyone or anything within its vast orbit. But, those are a part of its soundly ticking function. It could be a romanticized metaphor for stagnation, of waiting for that one calendar date to not expire, or a beating reminder that almost everything nearly moves forward to continue that off balanced rhythm. If time ever slows down, it might be for those characters—people—to move forward into a frighteningly exciting new unfamiliar.
Who wants to—let their feelings and memories—bitterly expire with dates?
Kathy Nguyen is an Assistant Professor of Ethnic and Gender Studies at Metro State University in Saint Paul, Minnesota. Her works have appeared in Gulf Coast Literary, Short, Vigorous Roots: A Contemporary Flash Fiction Collection of Migrant Voices, which is a 2022 Foreword INDIES Finalist for Anthologies, Food of My People: The Exile Book of Anthology Series, diaCRITICS, Kartika Review, FIVE:2:ONE, Fearsome Critters, which was selected as Editors’ Choice for Top Contributor in Hybrid Work, The Activist History Review, and elsewhere. She was a former Short Fiction Section Co-Editor at CRAFT Literary.
