Fallen Angels

Wong Kar-Wai’s Fallen Angels (1995) isn’t as beloved as some of his other films, most notably Chungking Express (1994), because the characters that populate it aren’t as inherently likeable. They are more standoff-ish or too cool or just plain odd to invite audience identification like the ones in Chungking. As a result, Fallen Angels is a film that is admired rather than loved, which is a shame because there is a lot to love in it. Made a year after the much-celebrated Chungking, it also consists of two separate stories one of which was originally intended to be in the 1994 film but when Wong found it was getting too long removed it and saved it for Fallen Angels.

Wong Chi-Ming (Leon Lai) is a stylish hitman that believes it’s not wise to get emotionally attached to his business partner/handler (Michelle Reis) who secretly pines for him even while setting up assignments and prepping him for them. She goes through his trash and frequents the same bar even sitting in his usual spot just to feel close to him. They are very beautiful, cool-looking people with the former killing his targets to the strains of the trip-hop-like song, “Because I’m Cool” by Nogabe “Robison” Randriaharimalala remixing “Karmacoma” by Massive Attack, while using two handguns in a pretty mean Chow Yun-Fat impersonation.

Wong deflates the overt coolness of this action sequence in the next scene when Wong Chi-Ming takes public transportation home and runs into an old classmate from grade school that proceeds to babble on about his job, which is selling life insurance. This causes Wong Chi-Ming to think to himself, “I often wonder if any insurance company would insure a professional killer.” He leads a simple life because his handler arranges everything for him. As he muses via voiceover narration, “The best thing about my profession is that there’s no need to make any decision. Who’s to die… when… where… it’s all been planned by others. I’m a lazy person.” All he has to do is show up and do the job. They are quite a pair: he has no interest in making human connections, preferring to move through life like some kind of ghost, while she craves it, obsessing over a man she can never have.

In the other story, Ho Chi Moo (Takeshi Kaneshiro) is an ex-con that was rendered mute at the age of five when he ate a can of pineapples that expired – a sly nod to his cop character in Chungking who collected cans of pineapple with a very specific expiration date. Not surprisingly, he finds it hard to make friends or have a job so he sneaks into businesses after hours and works. We even get an amusing montage of him terrorizing customers unaware that he is working off the book, including one guy he forces to eat a ton of ice cream. In his spare time, Ho Chi Moo looks after his father (Man-Lei Chan) who still mourns the death of his wife.

One night, Ho Chi Moo meets an excitable woman named Charlie (Charlie Yeung) whom he lends money to use a public phone to call a girlfriend she’s mad at only to then cry on his shoulder afterwards. They make for an amusing pair as she talks incessantly, ranting and raving, while he exaggerates his reactions for comedic effect.

Wong cuts back and forth between these stories with the characters interacting briefly with each other at key moments in seemingly random fashion, much like in Chungking Express. There is a feeling that these two stories are simply just a couple of the many tales in this world – Wong’s own version of The Naked City (1948) – Hong Kong style.

The cast is uniformly wonderful. Leon Lai epitomizes the cool hitman and this is juxtaposed with his voiceover narration that suggests a self-aware killer. Michelle Reis’ handler is a tragic figure, pining for a man oblivious to her feelings towards him. Like Faye Wong in Chungking, her character gets lost in music as evident in a captivatingly hypnotic scene where she drapes herself over a jukebox while Laurie Anderson’s “Speak My Language” plays over the soundtrack.

Takeshi Kaneshiro delivers an inspired performance as he uses his expressive face and body language to convey what Ho Chi Moo is thinking and feeling towards others, often in humorous ways. The actor plays well off of Charlie Yeung whose character is akin to a verbal explosion, creating chaos wherever she goes. The most heartfelt scenes in the film are the ones depicting his touching relationship with his father. We see them goofing around as son films father cooking with a video camera and then later he watches his father checking out the tape, laughing at the memory of that moment. Their relationship is the heart and soul of Fallen Angels and prevents it from being a merely an exercise in style.

Wong and cinematographer Christopher Doyle adopt an even more intimate stylistic approach with Fallen Angels than on previous efforts as characters’ faces loom close to the camera and are distorted slightly thanks to the use of a fisheye lens. It gives the impression that they are trapped in a fish bowl, trying to find a way out. Wong and Doyle adopt a very similar restless camerawork approach and jump cut editing style as they did on Chungking, which makes Fallen Angels a spiritual sequel of sorts. It is very easy to imagine the characters in both films existing in the same cinematic world. In fact, Ho Chi Moo ends up working at the same fast food joint that Faye Wong did in the previous film.

Fallen Angels is populated by attractive characters full of existential angst as they wax philosophically about their daily ruminations and life via voiceover narration.  As a result, we get a soulful hitman, his romantic handler and a playful ex-con. Much like with Chungking Express, we get the feeling that these characters live in the moment with very little thought about their future. At one point, Wong Chi-Ming even flirts with the notion of quitting but doesn’t know how. Wong employs even more voiceover narration than Chungking so that there is more of it than actual spoken dialogue, anticipating what Terrence Malick would do later in Tree of Life (2011) and To the Wonder (2012).

Much like with Chungking, Wong uses Fallen Angels to show how fleeting and precious human contact is, whether it is a brief encounter with a chatty woman in a restaurant or cooking with your father. They are all moments to be treasured because life can be fleeting and one never knows when exactly it will all be over. Wong populates his films with dreamers and romantics. Ho Chi Moo may be one of the most distinctive – a holy goof, as Jack Kerouac would say, who sees the world from a distinctive perspective and expresses himself in an equally unique way. Wong spends more screen-time with him than with Wong Chi-Ming because he’s a more interesting character and one that best encapsulates his cinematic worldview so it makes sense that Fallen Angels ends with him riding off to an uncertain future.

Chungking Express

"If memories could be canned, would they also have expiry dates? If so, I hope they last for centuries." - Cop 223

Chungking Express (1994) is a film obsessed with time. Not only are its characters consciously aware of and thinking about time passing, but the film itself plays around with the slowing down and speeding up of time. The camera lingers on close-ups of clocks and on cans of food with expiration dates. In this film, not only do cans of food have expiration dates – so do relationships and people’s lives. Writer-director Wong Kar-Wai is acutely aware of how time features so prominently in relationships – as the old adage goes, timing is everything. The characters in Chungking Express never quite connect romantically with each other because their timing is never quite right. One person is looking for love while the other is not and by the time the other figures out what they want, it is too late.

Wong's hopelessly romantic notion of timing is apparent right from the start of the movie. Cop 223 (Takeshi Kaneshiro) accidentally jostles a woman (Brigitte Lin). Wong uses a freeze-frame to capture the first moment of contact and the cop says in a voiceover, "At the closest point, we're just 0.01 cm apart from each other. 57 hours later, I fall in love with this woman." Chungking Express is comprised of two intersecting stories. The first one focuses on the aforementioned police officer and his attempt to cope with the recent breakup with his girlfriend. He's obsessed with the time they had together and the time they now spend apart. He even buys thirty cans of pineapples that expire before May – his birthday and name of his ex-girlfriend – and proceeds to eat them. Anyone who's agonized over a failed relationship can immediately identify with his refusal to let go and to believe that there is a glimmer of hope that things will work out. Cop 223 observes, "Having a broken heart, I'd go jogging. Jogging evaporates water from my body. So I don't have any left for tears." Even though he hurts inside, he still goes on and still looks for love. He meets a mysterious woman dressed in a plain brown trenchcoat, sunglasses, and striking blond hair. She is actually a ruthless drug runner who has been betrayed by her partner and is on the run. It's an interesting blend of the traditional film noir subplot, complete with a femme fatale, mixed with a lovesick cop on the rebound right out of the romance genre.

Towards the end of the first story, the machinations of a crime thriller give way to a romantic drama, aspects of which had gradually appearing throughout. The cop and the woman meet at a bar. He’s finally accepted the fact that he and his girlfriend are quits while she is taking refuge, tired from being chased around by criminals that double-crossed her. These two lonely souls connect for a brief moment in time, hanging out in a hotel room much like the two people that become friends in Lost in Translation (2003). One can’t help but think that Sophia Coppola was more than a little influenced by Wong’s film. It’s fascinating to see the scene play out between these two contrasting personalities. The cop makes romantic gestures, which she initially rebuffs but eventually relents from sheer exhaustion. He watches over her while she gets some much needed sleep, even taking off her shoes and cleaning them before he goes in the morning. It’s a small but touching gesture.

If the first story contains more stereotypical archetypes, the second and much more interesting story goes off into uncharted territory, like some sort of wonderful dream. We are introduced to Cop 663 (Tony Leung Chiu Wai) whom his girlfriend has also dumped. He is much more accepting of it, much more logical. It's an attractive woman, Faye (Faye Wong) working at a deli that he frequents that is the hopeless romantic of this story. She's an obsessive type who listens to the song "California Dreamin'" by the Mamas and the Papas over and over. It is not only her own personal soundtrack but also represents her dream of making enough money to go to California. She dances to the song at work, losing herself in its catchy rhythms. Her fixation on "California Dreamin'" is easily identifiable to anyone who's become so taken with a song that they have to listen to it over and over again. Wong reverses the roles in this story so that it's the woman who is pining after the man who doesn't even know she exists. This story really doesn't follow any kind of set plan. In some ways it feels very improvised as the cop and the woman keep missing each other. Again, timing plays a key factor in this potential relationship. The joy in this story is watching a relationship develop between them and anticipating the possibility of blossoming romance.

Chungking Express is a study in contrasts. In the first story, it is the cop that is the extrovert, the hopeless romantic while the woman is reserved and standoff-ish. In the second story, it is the woman that is the outgoing romantic while the cop is more reserved. This is also reflected in the actors that Wong cast in their respective parts. Takeshi Kaneshiro is a physical actor that externalizes his emotions, playing the cop as an affable hopeless romantic that manages to put a positive spin on everything. This is in sharp contrast to Brigitte Lin’s no-nonsense and ruthless criminal, not above kidnapping a man’s child in order to track down those who double-crossed her. While the cop is an open book and someone who wears his heart on his sleeve, the woman is an enigma, hiding behind a bulky trenchcoat and sunglasses – her armor against the outside world (“You never know if it’s going to rain or be sunny,” she says at one point). She looks like someone trying to dress like a femme fatale out of an old film noir.

In the first story, a character is obsessed with “Things in Life” by Dennis Brown while in the second story Faye is obsessed with “California Dreamin’”. When she isn’t spending her time listening to this song, she’s obsessing over the cop that frequents the fast-food counter where she works. His girlfriend (Valerie Chow) has just broken up with him and we are given a tantalizing glimpse into their relationship via flashback as they playfully make love to “What A Diff’rence A Day Makes” by Dinah Washington, which tells us everything we need to know about their dynamic. It also shows the contrast between the two women – the cop’s ex-girlfriend’s theme music is slow jazz you might listen to on a lazy Sunday afternoon while Faye’s music is bouncy 1960s pop music symbolizing her energetic personality.

At first, the cop may seem reserved but he just expresses his emotions in a different way as evident in the scene where he deals with the breakup by consoling various objects in his apartment. He laments that a bar of soap has lost a lot of weight and tells the wet washcloth to stop crying. Tony Leung handles what could have been a silly scene very well by playing it sincerely. It is obvious that the cop is channeling feelings of loneliness through the things in his apartment and talking to them helps him process the fallout of his relationship with his ex-girlfriend. He internalizes, expressing emotions through his eyes in a way that is fascinating to watch.

Despite this rapid-fire way of filmmaking, Chungking Express never looks like it was just thrown together. If anything, it has a very slick, polished look of someone who obviously knew what they were doing and what they wanted. The film has its own tempo with each story having its own unique rhythm. The first one feels very fast and immediate, while the second story adopts a leisurely pace. In this respect, the central characters and their personalities reflect the mood and pacing of the story. Both the cop and the drug runner of the first story lead very exciting, fast-paced lives and this is reflected in the blurred camera movements during moments of action.

Wong immerses us in the sights and sounds of Chungking Mansions, a noisy, chaotic multicultural place where people live and work practically on top of each other. It is here where the cop and the woman work. Exotic music plays over the soundtrack, going back and forth between Indian music and “Things in Life” by Jamaican reggae singer Dennis Brown. Conversely, the cop and woman of the second story adopt a very lackadaisical attitude towards everything and this is in turn demonstrated in the wandering narrative and pacing.

Originally, Wong envisioned Chungking Express consisting of two stories. The filmmaker remembers, "One would be located in Hong Kong and the other in Kowloon; the action of the first would happen in daylight, the other at night. And despite the difference, they are the same stories. After the very heavy stuff, heavily emphasized in Ashes of Time (1994), I wanted to make a very light, contemporary movie, but where the characters had the same problems." Initially, Wong wanted to make these stories into a film but couldn't find a way to do it until he "had the idea to unite them in one screenplay. When I started to film, I didn't have it written completely. I filmed in chronological order. The first part happened during the night. I wrote the sequel of the story in one day! Thanks to a brief interruption for the New Year festivities, I had some more time to finish the rest of the script." He kept on writing and developed a third story. However, after filming the first two stories, he found that the film was getting too long so he used the third story as the basis for his next film, Fallen Angels (1995).

Chungking Express was made during a two-month break from the lengthy shooting schedule of his samurai epic, Ashes of Time, acquiring financing by promising backers that it would be a gangster movie. Wong had to stop production on that film to wait for equipment to redo the sound. "While I had nothing to do, I decided to make Chungking Express following my instincts." He had specific locations in mind where he wanted to set the action of the film. Wong said in an interview, "One: Tsim Sha Tsui. I grew up in that area and I have a lot of feelings about it. It's an area where the Chinese literally brush shoulders with westerners, and is uniquely Hong Kong. Inside Chungking Mansions you can run into people of all races and nationalities: Chinese, white people, black people, Indian." This is the setting for much of the first story as Lin's character uses the crowded, labyrinthine building to evade the men who double-crossed her and plot revenge on her disloyal lover. Chungking Mansions is very famous with, as Wong observed, "its 200 lodgings, it is a mix of different cultures ... it is a legendary place where the relations between the people are very complicated. It has always fascinated and intrigued me. It is also a permanent hotspot for the cops in HK because of the illegal traffic that takes place there. That mass-populated and hyperactive place is a great metaphor for the town herself."

The second half of the film was shot in Central, near a popular fast food shop called Midnight Express. "In this area, there are a lot of bars, a lot of foreign executives would hang out there after work," Wong remembers. The fast food shop is forever immortalized as the spot where Tony Leung and Faye Wong's characters met and became attracted to one another. Wong was also drawn to "the escalator from Central to the mid-levels. That interests me because no one has made a movie there. When we were scouting for locations we found the light there entirely appropriate." One of the iconic images from Chungking Express is Faye Wong traveling along the escalator, a warped reflection beside her. Wong created the title for the movie from the two prime locations from the two stories: Chungking Mansions and Midnight Express.

Inspired by the improvisational feel of the films of Jean-Luc Godard and Robert Bresson, Wong worked fast and furious on the film with his cinematographer, Christopher Doyle. The director remembers, "We filmed like madmen! I told him, we didn't need to pay much attention on lighting (except in the apartment), since it was filmed as a road movie, without any definite location. We didn't have the time to install or use everything; I wanted it to be filmed like a documentary, camera in hands. And Doyle accepted the challenge; to film very fast, while still producing a movie of high quality." Wong infamously shot thousands of feet of footage that went unused, including two weeks of film shot in Brigitte Lin’s home about a subplot that never made the final cut. In addition, he filmed Chungking Express in sequence, writing each scene the night before or on the morning of the day it was to be shot.

Filmmaker Quentin Tarantino was so taken with Chungking Express that he pressured Miramax to buy the American rights, which he released under his vanity label Rolling Thunder. This allowed Wong’s film to be exposed to American audiences and critics. Roger Ebert gave it three out of four stars and wrote, “This is the kind of movie you’ll relate to if you love film itself, rather than its surface aspects such as story and stars. It’s not a movie for casual audiences, and it may not reveal all its secrets the first time through, but it announces Wong Kar-Wai, its Hong Kong-based director, as a filmmaker in the tradition of Jean-Luc Godard.” In her review for The New York Times, Janet Maslin wrote, “While its slender, two-tiered plot links love affairs that happen largely by accident, the film’s real interest seems to lie in raffish affectation.” Jonathan Rosenbaum wrote, “Wong’s singular frenetic visual style and his special feeling for lonely romantics may remind you of certain French New Wave directors, but this movie isn’t a trip down memory lane; it’s a vibrant commentary on young love today, packed with punch and personality.” In his review for the Chicago Tribune, Michael Wilmington wrote, “Like Rohmer, Wong plays the youthful spontaneity of his lovers against the tight, repetitive structure of the plots. And, like Rohmer, he’s a champ at showing the exquisite torture of unrequited, frustrated or sublimated desire.”

First and foremost, Chungking Express is about relationships in an urban environment. The Hong Kong that we see in Wong's film is a densely populated, multi-national environment that influences the characters. He said, "I think a lot of city people have a lot of emotions but sometimes they can't find the people to express them to. That's something the characters in the film share. Tony talks to a bar of soap; Faye steals into Tony's home and gets satisfaction from arranging other people's stuff; and Takeshi has his cans of pineapples. They all project their emotions on certain objects."

Chungking Express is a hangout film as we spend time with these characters at work and during their spare time as they obsess over love lost or the possibility of love. For all of its stylish camerawork, Wong’s film is ultimately about human behavior. One of the joys in watching this film is seeing how these characters interact with one another. How they act and react to what each other says and does. The film holds a hypnotic spell over the viewer as they get sucked into these characters' lives and begin to care about them. As one character observes, "But for some dreams, you'd never wake up." And that's the feeling one gets from this film. You never want it to end.

SOURCES

Bordwell, David. Planet Hong Kong: Popular Cinema and the Art of Entertainment. Harvard University Press. 2000.

Ngai, Jimmy. “A Dialogue with Wong Kar-Wai: Cutting Between Time and Two Cities.” Wong Kar-Wai by Jean-Marc Lalanne, David Martinez, Ackbar Abbas & Jimmy Ngai. Dis Voir. 1997.