Everything in Wong Kar-Wai’s Fallen Angels feels like a dream. Maybe it’s because you recognize some remnants -blond hair, expired can of pineapples, shared spaces, a room at the edge of the subway and late night diners -echoing Chung King Express.
Fallen Angels, created from out takes of Chung King Express, essentially feels like its extension. Only, for some reason, probably because it seemed more fluid, I thought it came before rather than after Chung King Express.
In signature Chistopher Doyle style, the frenzied camera work captures the pulsating MTV rhythms in unabashed colours and intimacy and sets the backdrop for the characters adrift and alienated in their own worlds. Shot almost entirely at night, these nocturnal characters come alive under a cover of darkness. We see vignettes of their lives and a strong presence of absence. Their search in unconsummated affairs, unrequited love and unattainable release are efforts to fill this vacuum.
While the plot is merely a thin outline and the lives of the characters too too glamorous to be believed, the emptiness resonates. The self proclaimed lazy assassin (Leon Lai) leaves logistics to his fabulously dressed female ‘partner’ (Michele Reis). Though they have met only twice and communicate through fax, she harbours and acts upon feelings for him that are far from professional. She cleans his apartment (in shiny vinyl dresses and fishnet stockings I might add), examines his trash and hurts when he leaves. He attempts to break away from his past only to find it comes to reclaim him in a re-encounter with a blond haired woman (Karen Mok), a lover from a former life.
Other characters include an ex-con turned nocturnal ’store-keeper’ (Takeshi Kaneshiro), who ‘re-opens’ closed shops and coerces customers and owners alike. Enacted with an innocent charm Kaneshiro infuses his role with a childlike curiosity that makes you pine along with him as he deals with his first brushes with love and loss.
As their intersecting lives come to play out in their subjective world views, whether in claustrophobic apartments, late night eateries, noodle houses or gambling dens, Hong Kong is a distinct character within the film. At once vibrant and distant, seen though a hallucinatory gaze and enveloped in nostalgia for the now.
