Fallen Angels (1998)

You won't be disappointed!

Too much of everything

So much average

Don't Believe the Hype

"Chungking Express No. 2"Ultra cool, punk, rock hard; with intimacy, sentimental, with tales of partnership and love. Follows two tales: The Assassins: A cool couple (with hidden intimate motives) rob domino tournaments - one scouts the place the other shoots it up. But the man wants out the business and a true partner of love - and runs into a former flame, Blondie, who ignites his inner soul . Of course , this doesn't sit well with Lady Assassin, and now somebody has to pay …..Prisoner 223: An escaped convict spends his days of freedom running after-hour businesses without the owner's permission, and "rubbing shoulders" with the locals of land in hopes of making friends or confidants. He has a regular customer, and falls in love with a dating helpless woman using him for a shoulder to cry on. He makes a home video for his sick father and has random encounters with Lady Assassin from time to timeTwo men who are opposites: one is lazy one is active, one needs others to make his decisions and one makes his own choices, one is popular with the ladies and one struggles with the girls, one is a killer and the other is gentle-heartedFilmed the same way as 'Chungking' ;; up close, hand-held, bright colorful lighting and palettes, freeze frame editing .. sexy .. but a slower pace7.5/10

Although I had seen several of his films before, it wasn't until I saw Chungking Express a few months ago that I encountered a Wong Kar Wai film I found above average. Fallen Angels is loosely connected to that work and it uses a similar structure but it always feels original and unique.The most impressive part of Fallen Angels is the cinematography. Wong, working again with the great Christopher Doyle, breathes life into the garish urban nightscape of modern Hong Kong. Exhilarating shots such as the high speed motorcycle trip through a tunnel lit by green neon are so great on their own that they almost overshadow the visual mastery of the more stationary shots.The characters are less successful in their attempts to make connections here than in Wong's previous film; coupled with the violence, this makes for a darker, less optimistic viewing experience. The most effective scenes here deal with loss as when He Zhiwu, one of the film's two male protagonists, makes a spectacle of himself in front of his ex-girlfriend who completely ignores his antics.With Chunking Express and Fallen Angels, Wong established himself not only as one of the most eminent film-makers of the 1990s but also as the single greatest visual chronicler of modern urban malaise. Not since the heyday of Michelangelo Antonioni has a film director examined alienation with such skill.

Fallen Angels is an exhilarating rush of a film, with all manner of go-for-broke visual bravura that expresses the free spirits of bold young people. A disillusioned hit-man and a former convict look for love amidst the frenetic street life of Hong Kong.The film is a speedy, adrenalin-filled journey though neon-drenched Hong Kong, and encounters with its beautiful people. Its style trumps its story and fittingly, first impressions count for everything. Fallen Angels can be seen as a companion piece to Chungking Express (1994). On January 21, 1998, the film began a limited North American theatrical run through Kino International, grossing US $13,804 in its opening weekend in one American theatre. The final North American theatrical gross was US $163,145.

Wong Kar Wai doesn't play by the rules, and those who respond positively to his films wouldn't want it any other way. While he's recently gone a little more measured and controlled with style (relatively speaking) with In the Mood for Love and 2046, it's mostly in that he's now using things like dollies and steadi-cams. Looking at Chungking Express and, particularly, Fallen Angels, he reveals himself as a filmmaker total in trust with a style that in other hands would be simply amateurish. His camera, led on by Christopher Doyle, follows along these characters like in a slightly feverish documentary, with the accompanied narration adding the emphasis on inner thoughts and details. It's a crime drama, but it's also a fresh way to look at material that has a little bit of quirk, a heap-load of attitude, and at least a good lot of romance, or the lack of it or the pining for it with these characters. It's equally sweet and rough-edged, like an adorable motorcycle.For plot, there's not much: two male characters, one is a hit-man who's starting to feel the pressure of his job (ironically, he describes it as being a good one early on as "I'm a lazy person. I like people to arrange things for me"), and breaks off from his partner, a woman who cleans up his 'messes' of mass destruction, and then falls for a strange blonde girl. The other is a mute ex-con who robs people by being obnoxious at various one-night-stand type of jobs, and in the process meeting a girl whom has a freak-out one night (there's an amazing scene, I should add, where in one shot we see him fall completely for this girl with a soft blues song playing behind him describe this as his first love). At least, that's as much as I gathered from the essentials; there's also a sub-plot with the mute kid, He Zwhiu, and his father as he starts to videotape him all the time. But Wong isn't interested in plot mechanics as two central facets: mood of a scene on technical fronts, and a sensibility that's close to poetic intent.Wong's camera moves in a way that is a little dizzying, and it feels like it should be a shamble, a fiasco of an art-house item that doesn't transition well to the US. But it becomes apparent that its form is, at least, consistent to the intent at hand. We're so aware of the style that the characters are seemingly organic from this urban, post-modern spread. They're more than a little alienated (watch that shot where the woman is in the café, and the fight breaks out behind her without flinching an eyelash to the situation), and they have the tendencies of youth trapped in a situation they can only break out of (for one it's a way of life as work that gets mixed up due to emotions with the partner, the other with his father and going past disrobing the homeless and conning a family with ice cream).Wong Kar Wai presents this amusingly at times, a brisk sense of humor dropped in to let the audience know 'it's OK to laugh here and there, they ARE human after all with all their idiosyncrasies'. But at the same time there's a sorrow to the material that is given life by the hand-held, by the shots of characters in mirrors, by mixed media, by black and white shots thrown in, by editing that cuts off the head of the 180 degree rule here and there, by pumping in sad music and it does come close to diluting the emotional impact of the characters's fates. And yet, Wong has the soul of a romantic at heart, so to speak, and despite the fact that there's some pretty violence scenes in the picture (done in that hyper-speed style that is a little slow, a little fast in a way, as one has seen in many HK crime films) there's an intelligence that steers it from being TOO sloppy.This may be arguable, to be sure, in either direction; some may even call it a masterpiece of post-modernism as well as those who can't stand it period. I don't necessarily think it's even Kar-Wai's best film. But it inspires so many fresh images and thoughts I can't discard it as a warped slip-up from an otherwise avant-garde darling. If anything a film like Fallen Angels lifts up his reputation as the Chinese answer to Godard (minus, of course, the Maoism and the reading excerpts of books on camera).