Initially developed as part of Chungking Express, Fallen Angels shares a similar freewheeling spirit but it’s a much darker and moodier affair, exploring the nocturnal lives of assassins, femme fatales and mute ex-cons. Shot with frenetic verve by Wong’s frequent cinematographer Christopher Doyle, it’s a stylish drama laced with quirky humour that glimmers with the neon magic of Hong Kong at night.
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“Wong is a wildly acclaimed filmmaker whose work I didn't take to straight away, when I first saw Chungking Express (1994). The droll, lazy, meandering feel of that film – the dwelling on the rather groovy surface of everything in sight, whether hairdos or tableware or CD players – all alienated me rather than drew me in. But with Fallen Angels, I just fell headlong into the fragile and sensual world of Wong Kar-wai. It is truly a sad, sexy, hypnotic film. And the condition of modern love, the disputed passage towards unlikely or impossible moments of romantic union, that is the central, perhaps sole topic of this quietly obsessive masterpiece.
[...]
Everyone in Fallen Angels is either too close, or too far apart. Lovers never meet, but strangers suddenly grasp each other in bars to rave, or wail and cry on a shoulder. They all search for a middle distance, a comfortable, shared ground, that they can never find. The pathos of Wong Kar-wai's films is very terse and new and particular. On the one hand his films are elegies to loneliness – ‘Loneliness is ultimately the film's centrifugal force’, as Tony Rayns said of Fallen Angels. With reference to the extraordinarily compelling scenes of masturbation in this film, Larry Gross puts it even better: ‘Nothing is more typical of the world of Wong Kar-wai than a sex scene where one of the participants isn't present’. All his characters spend all their wasted, waking moments trying to mark the time, to mark their territory, as all lived meaning slips right through their fingers. And yet there is still some sort of longing for origins, for family, for the memory of some fragile community in this shattered world.”
Adrian Martin1
“It’s the sheer density of the film’s address that takes it a step beyond Days of Being Wild, Ashes of Time and Chungking Express. The offhand wit familiar from the earlier films is still plentiful. But the resonances of the jokes are often quite melancholy; as is the fact that the hitman’s instructions to carry out a killing are coded as messages to meet friends. Loneliness is ultimately the film’s centrifugal force. It coalesces in the anguished images of the agent masturbating to assuage her longings for the hitman. Balancing these are moments of intense joy, the most spectacular being Baby’s brazen pick-up of the hitman and He Zhiwu’s videotaping of his father.
The overall sense of the coexistence of pain and pleasure, anomie and elation, is new in Wong Kar Wai’s work. The central ambivalences are rooted in the film language: the wide-angle distortions of Chris Doyle’s virtuoso cinematography create an effect of distance-in-proximity, while William Chang’s intricate montages never shy away from visual and tonal mismatches. The same ambivalence informs the voice-overs, which address the audience with the kind of easy intimacy that the characters fail to achieve with each other. Hence the disturbing ever-present sense that each emotion and each passing thought can be flipped to reveal its opposite.
Fallen Angels finesses these complexities in a world which bears exactly the same relation to the Hong Kong of 1995 as Alphaville did to the Paris of 1965. If the film misses greatness, it’s partly because of weak casting: neither Leon Lai nor Michele Reis comes alive on screen, although Takeshi Kaneshiro and Charlie Young are impossibly wonderful, and Karen Mok will probably find ‘Baby’ as hard to shake off as Tony Perkins found Norman Bates. The bottom line is that Fallen Angels takes every risk known to filmmaking, and succeeds triumphantly a whole lot more often than it fails.
Tony Rayns2
Gilles Ciment: Do you rehearse with your actors?
Wong Kar-wai: No.
And how many [takes]?
Well, it depends. When we start shooting we have to find the rhythm, so it’s very slow. Every day can have ten or twelve setups. But when everybody’s going in the same direction, the shooting actually moves very fast.
What’s the role of the music in the process of shooting and editing?
To me, music creates the rhythms. So if I want to explain to [director of photography] Chris Doyle the rhythm of the film, then I would play the CDs, play the music instead of showing him the script, because he wouldn’t read the script anyway. It’s very effective in a way, and also it helps me because I think the rhythm of the film is very important. So you have to get the rhythm, and then everything comes out slowly after that.
Wong Kar-wai in conversation with Gilles Ciment3
- 1Adrian Martin, “Fallen Angels (Wong Kar-wai, HK, 1996). Love Action,” www.adrianmartinfilmcritic.com, June 1997.
- 2Tony Rayns, “Fallen Angels/Duoluo Tianshi,” Sight and Sound 6, nr. 9 (September 1996): 42.
- 3Gilles Ciment, “Interview with Wong Kar-wai (Cannes Film Festival, 2001),” in Wong Kar-wai, Peter Brunette. (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2005), 127-128.
