Written as a complementary narrative to the two love stories in Chungking Express, Fallen Angels is its more grimy and more painful counterpart. Together, their light and dark complement and interact like yin and yang. This narrative diptych intersects the lives of six main characters into two narratives about longing and heartbreak. They pose the questions: How can one be physically distant yet feel so close to another? How can one be right next to someone yet not close at all?
The film traverses in a dizzying rapid pace between characters who make their way through the chronic loneliness of the city. Its intimate and choppy camerawork makes the cast look like they’re performing in a fashion film. The use of wide-angle lens is disorientating and captivating, but also serves as a conceptual function, exploring how space and distance warps relative to individuals, hindering them from establishing stable connections.
Featuring a hitman as one of the main characters, the crime-action scenes give the film an upbeat pace. However, Fallen Angels is not like As Tears Go By which was Wong’s take on the Hong Kong crime genre. Instead, the crime is merely secondary, the primary concern is Wong’s treatment of the characters and how he expresses a melancholic narrative about reckoning with loneliness.
The restless characters desperately make memories against the passage of time which threatens to disintegrate the past. Blondie (Karen Mok) leaves a bite mark as a memento so that she will not be forgotten after her breakup with the hitman Wong Chi-ming (Leon Lai). Takeshi Kaneshiro plays the charming non-speaking delinquent who uses a camcorder to vlog his father’s daily activities. These mementos resurface in the dead of the night, letting memories linger a little longer than they are supposed to. Recognising one’s perfume on a stranger you walk past in the subway, or drinking beer at a dingy restaurant and being bombarded with the song you once shared. The film itself harks back to Chungking Express, using mementos from the film like a blonde bob, a similar late-night fast food restaurant, the metaphor of expiration dates and the personification of a space.
Out of all the screenings I’ve been to, surprisingly, this was the only one where the audience clapped as the credits rolled with The Flying Picket’s version of Only You trailing off. A testament to the potent impact of film, I was filled with a sense of warmth despite sitting in the cold theatre for 96 minutes.
Bonnie Huang