Fallen Angels (1995)

I finally managed to track down the films of Wong Kar-Wai. Much of world cinema, even if they’re considered classics, seem very difficult to get your hands on at a decent quality (at least in the UK). Herzog’s voluminous back catalog only seems to exist in fits and starts, and the only place to see Kori-eda’s older work seems to be in bad rips on Youtube. BFI came to the rescue in this particular case; they have a whole ‘World of Wong Kar-Wai’ rental collection, with most of his films meticulously remastered in 4K. My girlfriend (Maggie) and I began with Fallen Angels (1995), since it seemed a little more alive than his apparently gorgeous but subdued In the Mood For Love (2000).

Alive is one way of putting it. The film is loosely a crime drama, with four tangentially and coincidentally related characters wrapped through the run-time — but in truth, the underworld elements do not exist in any traditional narrative form. There is no great conspiracy, no gang feud, no parallel police procedural. It is more precisely a film about those tangential and coincidental relations, about an inability to make them more real, less peripheral, by character’s lost in the delirium of late capitalist Hong Kong, doomed to peripheral existences themselves.

This sense of bewilderment and estrangement is evoked in spades by Christopher Doyle’s cinematography: warping wide-angles pressed close-up, people’s chins curved around the side of the frame; streets bathed in neon tungsten, in-set lighting in sickly greens and damp blues. The camera swoops in and out, as erratic and searching as its subjects. In one particularly memorable flourish, the hitman character Wong Chi-Ming (Leon Lai) finishes a job while the camera watches him in the reflection; in another, he runs into an old school friend while escaping, who proceeds to talk at him about his various bourgeois niceties (most successful insurance broker in Hong Kong; married to the girl they both fancied in high school), to which the camera respond by framing Chi-Ming in the drivers rear-view mirror, the natterer over his shoulder, the street lights whisking past around him. Chi-Ming’s apartment, a dingy single-room rectangle, whose thin walls and askew windows rattle as the train shoots by just outside, seems to indicate his rootlessness; Doyle’s ability to phase in and out of the interior and the exterior, a long, lurid yellow neon sign draping down the side of the facade, communicates his vulnerable embeddedness in the brash world around him. Much has been said about Kar-Wai’s visual style, and the tackiness, the disorientation, the seductiveness of his Hong-Kong is remarkably rendered here. The only reference points I had was to imagine what wonders Emmaneul Lubezki’s similarly wide and searching cinematography, and Gaspar Noe’s neon-drenched dissociative aesthetic sensibility, would produce together.

It is good that his style is so rich, because there is no plot nor character development to supplement it. The central stories (if one can even call them that) go nowhere; in many of the scenes, one is quite unsure exactly what is happening, to whom, and why. As Roger Ebert assures us in his review, ‘The people in his films are not characters but ingredients, or subjects’, and ‘To describe the plot is to miss the point. “Fallen Angels” takes the materials of the plot — the characters and what they do — and assembles them like a photo montage. At the end, you have impressions, not conclusions.’ Formally experimental, Kar-Wai (as is well known) took many cues from Godard. As a matter of happenstance, Maggie and I watched Godard’s Pierrot Le Fou (1965) a couple of weeks back, and it was clear in watching that Fallen Angels borrows much of the French New Wave’s techniques: an simultaneously exhausting and exhilarating kineticism courses through, punched in jump-cuts and time-shifts. But Godard’s knowing intellectualism is gone, and the welcoming joviality is replaced by a dour noir thrust. Suffice to say, it is a very different film. Aside from everything else, it is one not so obviously taunting the conventions of cinema. Fallen Angels radicalism is silent; the two-dimensionality of the characters, the sensual barrage, the montage ‘plot’ — all serve to provide a deeply aesthetic or affective sense of alienation, so that the characteristic breakdown of ‘cognitive-mapping’, the warp-speed tumble-dryer of Jameson’s postmodern hyperspace, penetrates through conscious consideration.

This is all well and good. But it would be omiss to forgive Kar-Wai’s underwriting of the three female characters. Now this seems like an unfair criticism to raise in a film defined by ‘underwriting’, but it didn’t pass us by the extent to which Chi-Ming’s ‘partner’, Charlie, and Blondie, are solely defined by their relationship to the two male characters in the film. The hitman’s partner does little else but dutifully clean his sad flat in leather dresses and stockings and masturbate on the bed when he is absent (as he, on a deeper level, always is). Blondie has a manic pixie dream girl vibe that grates more than charms. Charlie just seems to wail and wail over past loves and betrayers, and spends all her time on a payphone to a man who won’t come to see her. Yes, sure, they are yearning for connection in a world that obliterates it; but at least our hitman has some existential quandary about his profession, and Chi-mo — the other main male character, an mute ex-con who forces scams on people in a desperate bid for stability and human connection — has a minimal arc around a restaurant owner (who I think is his dad? or he just begins to call him that as a father-like figure?) and a new found love of video-cameras. They are little more than devices for the men in the film, who at least have the privilege of being devices for the wider, fragmented world Kar-Wai sumptuously renders.