77. Fallen Angels

Wong Kar-Wai is clearly a fella who just LOVES making moving pictures. He’s far less interested, it seems, in telling stories, at least in the conventional (you know, the kind that have linear plots, characters motivated and “arcing”-- that sorta thing) sense. In Fallen Angels, WKW continues the existential cinematic riff on man’s modern urban condition that dominated his masterpiece Chungking Express (indeed, WKW originally intended to include the stories of FA with this film). Like Chungking Expresss, Fallen Angels tells parallel tales of romantic longing, this time involving gangsters rather than cops, but their desperation remarkably similar.

Set in a jittery and dingy-looking contemporary Hong Kong and centering on the lives of a professional killer (pop singer Leon Lai), his agent (Michelle Reis), and a mute (Takeshi Kaneshiro), WKW shows how we come into this world alone and crying, and no matter how desperately we try, we will never quite overcome that state of loneliness and sadness. Critics of WKW point to the stylish excesses and complain that he has no discipline, and that his razzle dazzle is self-aggrandizing -- that he sacrifices narrative at the altar of his sizable ego. Pish! The film’s energy is organic, arising out of the characters and their modern sensibilities, which are infused with a palpable angst and affecting yearning. You sense that WKW’s characters are patterned after rebellious urban teens of American teen flicks past (Rebel w/o a Cause, The Wild Ones), reflecting the global influence of American culture on today’s kids. It makes sense, then, that WKW apprehends MTV storytelling techniques such as frenetic jump cuts, fish-eyed lens-work, visual punnery, kinetic hand-held camerawork, extended and repetitive use of pop music and an abundance of pop-culture references, to convey these characters’ journeys (as in CE, Christopher Doyle's emotive cinematography and the machine-gun editing of William Chang and Ming Lam Wong's take centre stage in FA).

Much darker and less forgiving than Chungking Express, Fallen Angels is not only a desperate search for permanence and love in a transient world where people are commodities and relationships are negotiated, but also a desire to discover a distinct identity as well as a place in this diseased and dysfunctional world. The film is rife with wide-angled shots of its central characters lost in the crowd, pensive and distracted, detached from but looking for connection to the world, free atoms bouncing around each other, looking for meaning in life. As one character says near film’s end, “The road isn't that long, and I know I'm getting off soon. But I'm feeling such warmth this very moment.” There’s a lot more to WKW than tremendous cinematic skill and distinctive style. He’s got something to say about the modern condition, if yer caring to lissen. (Dan Jardine)