FALLEN ANGELS (1995)
"Partners should never get involved emotionally with each other."
3.5 out of ****
Starring Leon Lai, Michelle Reis, Takeshi Kaneshiro, Charlie Yeung Written & Directed by Kar-wai Wong Cinematography by Christopher Doyle
FALLEN ANGELS is the work of a man in love, a man infatuated, intoxicated by the act of making a movie. It is love of the dizzying, unconditional kind, where the lover does not question his love, but simply immerses himself in it. He surrenders to it. Here, Kar-wai Wong (CHUNG KING EXPRESS) surrenders to cinema; he revels in everything it has to offer. There is sex and violence and comedy, there are slow-motion hand-held shots and distorted overlit close-ups, there are shadows and smoke and mirrors and neon. It is a sensory overload, orgasmic in its intensity.
It's also very good, which is somewhat surprising, since the whole thing is so self-indulgent that it should, by all rights, be an incoherent mess.
The narrative, such as it is, involves two parallel love stories, which intersect in intriguing ways. The first of these plots involves a hired killer (Leon Lai) and his partner (Michelle Reis), who tells him who he has to kill. Their relationship is strictly professional, but there is substantial sexual tension, which is not surprising, considering how good-looking they are. This plot depends heavily on a fascination with things Hong Kong movies have long been fascinated with: there is a hip hitman who performs his job with ice-water in his veins, but is troubled in his heart, and there are gorgeous, pouty women in fabulous clothes, who fall in love with him.
The other plot, played mostly for comedy, is like some bizarre hyperkinetic adapation of a Banana Yoshimoto story; it features two young lovers (Takeshi Kaneshiro, Charlie Yeung) who meet in the night (the whole movie happens at night), and who have the sort of relationship befitting two disingenuously innocent oddballs. This pair is more original and potentially interesting than their counterparts in the first storyline--but the hitman's story, clichéd as it may be by now, lends itself far better to Wong's ultra-cool, ultra-flashy style. The first plot calls for manic energy, the second for subtlety and reflection. The latter qualities are in short supply in FALLEN ANGELS, but that's not necessarily a bad thing.
Wong goes to great lengths to make every single shot interesting. He and cinematographer Christopher Doyle (TEMPTRESS MOON) use lenses that distort everything so we seem to be watching through one of those fish-eye peepholes in apartment doors. They use filters that give everything a grainy, overlit look. The lights are abnormally bright and the darkness is abnormally dark and pervasive. Colours are washed-out and monochromatic. Hong Kong becomes the ultimate millennial urban sprawl, a place of garish neon lights, subway trains blazing in the night, McDonalds, and featureless undergound corridors. The camera is always calling attention to itself: moving or tilting or looking at the action from a strange angle. The editing is of the breathless, breakneck, MTV-ish variety.
But, while he seems to be plunging ahead with reckless abandon, Wong has a good feel for rhythm and pacing. The two plots are more or less dispensible, since FALLEN ANGELS is primarily concerned with how it looks, and the look is what makes it compelling. Some of the best sequences in the film have no dialogue--they are streams of images, set to music, spendidly integrated.
It would be easy to think that the movie is so hectic and frenetic because Wong doesn't want us to realize there is no substance to it. There is probably some truth to that idea, but I was surprised to find myself touched by a couple of scenes, and it seems to me that despite his rather unsubtle techniques, Wong develops a kind of poetry in the film, a poetry of sound and image, rather than words and meanings. Those moments which seem most superficial, concerned purely with visual play, are, finally, the most telling, because of Wong's intuitive sense of the language of cinema, the language of sound and image.
Case in point: the scene I remember most vividly (admittedly, this might have more to do with hormones than great cinema) is a totally gratuitous masturbation scene. It starts with Michelle Reis in a moodily lit bar, taking long sensuous drags on her cigarette, then playing a dreamy song on the jukebox, caressing herself through her shimmery silver dress, then we cut to her bedroom, where she pursues her onanistic pursuits to their end, now wearing black leather and fishnet tights. There's no nudity, and all things considered, the scene is actually pretty tasteful despite its blatant fetishism. The eroticism has more to do with the way it's put together than any pornographic effect: the music, the editing, the images, and the lighting tease out the sexuality of the act, rather than thrusting it upon us.
And while it may be gratuitous, the sequence is also incredibly cool and sexy, and that's what counts. Indeed, that's not a bad way to describe the whole movie. It's flashy and energetic, effervescent and evanescent. It's rather like a 90-minute-long ad, but the only thing FALLEN ANGELS is selling is itself--and it's very persuasive.
A Review by David Dalgleish (June 28/98)
dgd@intouch.bc.ca
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