Wong Kar Wai’s “Fallen Angels” is one of the director’s best known works and unquestionably part of his core oeuvre. Although I don’t feel that it measures up to his best films, it’s still a solid effort from a narrative standpoint and an absolute tour de force visually.
Leon Lei plays Wong Chi-Ming, a contract killer working in the seedy underbelly of Hong Kong, whose hits are arranged by a female handler that he never sees (Michelle Reis). Unbeknownst to him, his handler, whos is also responsible for cleaning up his squalid living space while he is out, has become interested in him after hours spent rifling through his stuff. At the same time, in a mostly unrelated parallel storyline (A recurring motif in WKW’s films) Takeshi Kaneshiro plays an excentric mute who begins an unconventional (and unilateral) romance with a jilted woman still obsessed with her former lover.
“Fallen Angels” reprises many of Wong Kar Wai’s classic themes—loneliness, urban isolation, unrequited love and the search for connections in a disappointing and cold world. Although “Fallen Angels” is much less adept than other WKW films such as “Chungking Express” or “Days of Being Wild” at exploring these themes, it doesn’t completely miss the mark either. It’s much less structured than either of the latter two films (or most of his other work, for that matter) and there’s a fair amount of throwaway scenes (particularly those involving Karen Mok), but it’s still infused with the same loneliness and melancholy that are trademarks of WKW’s core works.
Visually, however, this is no doubt Wong Kar Wai’s seminal film, the fullest realization of he and Christopher Doyle’s unique aesthetic vision. The crisp editing, neon drenched color palate and radical camera angles that came to typify Wong and Doyle’s work dominate “Fallen Angels” and the resulting sensory overload makes the films a highly polarizing, love it or hate it (or at least dislike it) experience from an aesthetic standpoint. Although I preferred the visual and audio bravura of “In the Mood for Love” or even “Happy Together”, there is no doubt that “Fallen Angels” offers a unique opportunity to see Wong and Doyle throw caution to the wind and go for broke. It also highlights Doyle’s incredible versatility with the camera and his uncanny ability to excel in diverse genres while still retaining a very distinct visual style. I recall watching “Temptress Moon”, a rather standard nineties costume melodrama, without knowing that Doyle was in charge of the cinematography and realizing, probably five minutes in, that he was behind the camera based solely on how distinctive the visual experience was.
Doyle’s collaborations with WKW remain some of the most visually fruitful in film history mostly because his visual excesses are never (or rarely) restrained by the director. It’s a collaborative approach that’s difficult to pull off but, when done well, can yield wonderful results as evidenced by Doyle and WKW’s excellent body of work together.
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