Hong Kong, 1995Wong Kar-wai originally conceived his two-part Chungking Express as three stories, but once the first two were developed, he decided that they were enough for a full film and cut out the third. This third story, about the relationship between a hitman and his female partner, developed into his next film. Fallen Angels could be seen as a continuation of Chungking Express - both are split into two stories, take place in the same Hong Kong neighborhood, and revolve around similar themes. But Fallen Angels is also a darker, weirder, more stylistically experimental film than its predecessor - the night to Chungking Express's day.
Directed by Wong Kar-wai
The first story is about a hitman (Leon Lai) and his partner (Michelle Reis). She tells him where his next hit is, collects cash for him, and cleans his apartment hideout, but they hardly ever meet in person. Despite wanting to keep their partnership an impersonal one, they grow infatuated with each other. Both characters are romantically alienated loners, taciturn and cool. The hitman kills his targets nonchalantly, in shoot-outs filmed with woozy style, not caring who they are or why they've been targeted. The second story stars Takeshi Kaneshiro (one of the cops of Chungking Express) as an eccentric mute who breaks into closed-up shops at night and illegally runs the business, aggressively (and amusingly) coercing customers into buying whatever he's selling. He falls in love with another spastic oddball (Charlie Yeung), but his affection is unrequited.
Even more than in Chungking Express, the two stories of Fallen Angels are strikingly different from each other. The hitman's story is surprisingly violent for Wong. The hitman and his partner are classic Wong characters - cool, introspective loners - but taken to a darker extreme. They are entirely detached from everyone and everything, nocturnal creatures living by their own codes, beautiful but doomed. Wong's style is moodier and more experimental than ever. He often films characters with a fish-eye lens, their faces looming in the foreground against a distant background of neon lights and colors. It's a disorienting but perfect way to portray their alienation through visuals, loners drifting through the seductively dangerous world of Hong Kong at night.
The second story is far more sentimental and funny, even becoming an outright slapstick comedy at points. Much of its charm is due to star Takeshi Kaneshiro, reminiscent of a young Cantonese Johnny Depp. His character, though he cannot speak, is quirky and extroverted. Where many Wong characters put protective barriers between themselves and others, the mute forces himself into others' lives, in amusingly obnoxious ways. He takes his failed romance with Charlie in stride, finding happiness wherever he can. The sweetest moments of Fallen Angels involve the mute's relationship with his father, and their odd but loving friendship.
Fallen Angels is an exuberant mess, digressive and tonally all over the map (it should be noted that this sort of 'messiness' is not unusual for Hong Kong cinema, which often combines comedy, action and drama in ways that might seem incompatible to those used to Hollywood standards, which generally sticks to one or two genres per film). Fallen Angels is more about individual sequences and moments than any overarching plot or theme. These moments are sometimes funny - like Takeshi Kaneshiro harassing unsuspecting passerby into becoming his customers despite their protests. And sometimes they are mesmerizing - like when Michelle Reis leans against a jukebox as a strangely sinister pop song puts her in a trance, and for a few minutes Fallen Angels becomes an abstract music video, lingering on Reis's languid swaying as the machine's fluorescent lights run across her reflective dress. Any narrative is forgotten in the hypnotic interplay of music and color and movement. One downside to Fallen Angels's scattershot approach is that the film is, understandably, uneven - the subplot about the hitman and his other love interest, Blondie (Karen Mok), falls flat. But any dull sequences quickly give way to some new wondrous moment of discovery.
Once again, Wong Kar-wai's love for his home city shines through. Like Chungking Express, Fallen Angels is a cinematic love letter to Hong Kong, though a far stranger and more fantastic one. Fallen Angels takes place almost entirely at night, in a frightening but beautiful vision of Hong Kong that seems more like a science fiction metropolis than a real world city. The mute says that "all the weirdos come out at night" - the characters are these nocturnal weirdos, scrounging a living outside the law and the mainstream, hoping to find simple human connections in the urban purgatory they live in.
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