If life's too short to watch French films, it's also too short to watch Wong Kar Wai's Chungking Express; random, long-winded, motion-sickness inducing chases, the lack of a coherent storyline, annoying music in some parts, large numbers of mustachioed Indians running around the streets of Hong Kong, 2 halves which are only very loosely connected to each other and characters doing things for reasons that are never fully explicated.

No wonder it would never have been shown in America is Quentin Tarantino never brought it in on his DVD collection. I bet the rest of the "Rolling Thunder" collection is just as bad. I think the moral of the film is that you can make shitty, boring and draggy films and the critics will still fawn and gush over them with post-hoc rationalisations. As Quentin Tarantino observes in the post-film lesson, Wong Kar Wai took inspiration from the "French New Wave" and combined it with the energy of other Hong Kong films, which is why you get a pool of energy without any clear direction. The "French New Wave", according to him, used to "break the rules" (probably one of them being that a film should be watchable) and "make [it] up as you go along" (if you start something with no idea what you're doing or where you're going, it's a good bet that you're going to end up with a mess on your hands).

I want 1 hour+ of my life back (luckily they ended the film screening early).