Fallen Angels is a 1995 Hong Kong film directed by Wong Kar-Wai, it’s a spiritual sequel to a previous work of his Chungking Express. Fallen Angels is a movie about Hong Kong, more specifically Hong Kong at night, more specifically the people who inhabit Hong Kong at night.
In comparison to Chungking Express which is light and carefree, you’ll find that Fallen Angels is significantly bleaker. Its characters are significantly more lost and isolated and none of them have particularly happy endings.
The film is split into two main stories. One is of Wong Chi-Ming(Leon Lai), a professional killer attempting to change his career and find love at the same time. Wong Chi’s story is one of futility, as the movie progresses it becomes clearer that Wong Chi-Ming really fundamentally wants autonomy, but every step he attempts to take towards a new life he only seems to keep finding reminders of his old one. In a parallel and somewhat unrelated story we follow He Zhiwu(Takeshi Kaneshiro), a mute man who likes to break into businesses after they close and then forcefully sell their goods and services to customers. Takeshi Kaneshiro gives this great and effortlessly likable performance as He Zhiwu, the character has a permanent grin on, even when he gets into fights he can’t help but smile. He Zhiwu’s story is lighter in contrast to Wong Chi’s more violent and dark story which helps make the movie more fun to watch.
Another thing that keeps this film from weighing a little too heavily on you is its sense of style. Fallen Angels is full of step-printing, and scenes where the main characters are moving in slow motion, but everyone in the background is moving in extreme fast motion, both of these techniques create high visual interest and are Wong Kar-Wai staples. The whole movie is full of neon and the film is almost entirely shot at night. The shots of Hong Kong’s streets are empty, no people. The whole aesthetic and editing of the film really helps us understand the alienating factor of the city.
Now I’ve been referring to this movie as being bleak, which it is, yet I haven’t really explained how so though. It’s not bleak in the sense that people die and horrible things happen to them, but bleak in that all of the main characters are unsatisfied and lonely people and remain unsatisfied and lonely by the end. More so a central theme of the film is that people can only ever be truly connected for very short periods of time. This may feel like a really cynical theme, and in some respects it is, but the movie also sweetens what could’ve been a more bitter pill. In the films final moments He Zhiwu story meets with Wong Chi-Ming’s as he gives a ride home to Wong Chi-Ming’s former killer agent, an unnamed woman who is maybe the most isolated character in the film. And while the film closes, as she is riding on the back of He Zhiwu’s bike she delivers these lines in voice over, “The road wasn’t that long, and I knew I’d be getting off soon. But at that moment I felt such warmth.”