Fallen Angels – Wong Kar-Wai
Wong Kar-Wai explores the world of chance encounters in this extremely cool film made up of parallel narratives, the style that first caught director Quentin Tarantino’s eye in the mid-1990’s. This movie dives deeper into the awesomely bad world first captured in Chungking Express. While events in Chungking Express were spread out during night and day, everything happens at night in Fallen Angels. Wong Kar-Wai also carries over many motifs, such as expiration dates of cans of pineapple, the name of the first cop in Chungking Express, and the idea of meeting people by way of brushing shoulders with them. Watching Fallen Angels is like entering the mind of a homeless person with attention deficit disorder who lives on the streets of Hong Kong. Instead of following a cohesive narrative like conventional films, where characters have specific relationship roles that are assigned to them when they appear on the scene, the various characters of the night randomly appear and fall into orbit close to each other.
The story begins with two assassins, but jumps from character to character in no particular chronological order. Continuing with the theme of courtship without actual contact, Leon Lai and Michelle Reis play partners-in-crime whose communication is limited to faxes or phone calls related to their next target. They share an apartment but are never there at the same time; the girl is left to wonder about his habits by digging through his trash, and he depends on her to scout locations and make the decisions.
Almost randomly, a wacky mute played by Takeshi Kaneshiro pops into the scene. His character has the same name as the first cop in Chungking Express, except in this film he plays a hoodlum who commandeers businesses in the middle of the night and forces unsuspecting passers-by to become his customers. He styles hair, sells ice cream, and butchers meat. In one very comical scene, while moonlighting as a butcher, he gives a dead pig a massage, supposedly satisfying his porcine customer. Other characters include a blonde woman with bad manners who desperately wants the male assassin to remember and love her and a woman on the phone who uses Kaneshiro as a shoulder to cry on. Everything comes full circle at the end of the film, when Kaneshiro takes the female assassin home after his fight in a restaurant where she was dining.
Nobody really finds any satisfaction in the relationships that they seek, as Wong Kar-Wai intended to point out. To a certain extent, Fallen Angels is still a project showing how strong alienation is in the busy metropolis of Hong Kong. On the other hand, the one minute of warmness that the female assassin experiences during her ride home with the wacky mute shows that perhaps the city has its own version of intimacy. Fallen Angels is much darker than Chungking Express, its predecessor. Without having watched the first film, it is a bit hard to catch all the subtle references that make this film a Wong Kar-Wai film.
Wong Kar-Wai takes you on an adventure that encompasses any minute detail from expired cans of pineapple, hijacked ice cream trucks, to really aptly placed soundtrack songs. In fact, the songs actually act as a form of communication between characters. That being said, this film is best saved for the viewer who is intent on paying close attention to all aspects of the film, from sound to camera speed to obscure references. Though roughly 1.5 hours long, this film seems much longer and more painful to watch to someone who only catches the assassin plot.
In terms of picture quality, Fallen Angels receives a B- for its shaky hand held camera moments and blurry slow motion moments. Wong Kar-Wai makes up for that with an A+ in originality in everything from narrative style to camera movement to incorporation of music. Though painful to watch, with a B in overall enjoyability, this film is a star on Wong Kar-Wai’s “coolest film-maker on the planet” lapel.
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