Film
Fallen Angels
- Director
- Wong Kar-Wai
- Certificate
- 15
- Running Time
- 96 mins
If you’ve yet to be convinced that lauded direcotr Wong Kar-Wai’s work in anythong more than a triumph of style over substence, this 1995 film will to little to change your mind. That the term most frequently invoked to describe the director’s previous five films to is “cool” should set alarm bells ringing. Walk into Fallen Angels five minutes late and you could be forgiven for thinking they’re still showing an achingly “stylish” jeans ad. But soon the horrible realisation dawns that all those wobbly hand-held, wide-angle, extreme-close-ups interspersed with time lapse shots, slo-mo, black and white segments and all manner of other visual trickery are likely to continue for the next 90 minutes without respite, nor much in the way of dramatic substance.
Agent (former Miss Hong Kong Michele Reis) is a sultry strumpet who totters around on high heels wearing a wholly impractical black leather dress and black fishnet stockings while scrubbing the apartment of Killer (Leon Lai Ming), a disillusioned hitman who professes to love his job because he doesn’t have to make any decisions. She fancies him something rotten; a desire that manifests itself in lengthy scenes where she pleasures herself loudly on his bed. Meanwhile, he’s off gunning down large numbers of bad guys in obligatory balletic slo-mo and shagging supremely irritating Punkie (Karen Mok). Elsewhere in Killer’s apartment block resides ex-con caretaker’s son Ho (Takeshi Kaneshiro), who’s been mute ever since eating a tin of stale pineapple at the age of five. Now he breaks into stores after hours and violently browbeats passers-by into being his “customers”. Ho fancies a woman called Cherry (Charlie Young), whose hobby seems to consist of shouting at people on the phone, and agrees to help her track down her renegade boyfriend – a quest which leads them to beat up an inflatable rubber doll.
Marginally more audience-friendly than Wong’s previous film, Chungking Express (to which several self-conscious references are made), Fallen Angels follows these five characters as their lives occasionally overlap in neon-lit Hong Kong cityscapes. As cinematic wallpaper, it all looks absolutely stunning and is certain to impress those for whom “cool” is a condition defined by chainsmoking, wearing shades in all environments, and adopting an expression of mild constipation to signify existential angst.
It’s back on screen in the Watershed’s The World of Wong Kar-Wai season
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