墮落天使
Neo-noir
Hong Kong
Language: Cantonese, Mandarin
Subtitles: English and Czech
Directing: Wong Kar-wai
Starring: Leon Lai, Michelle Reis, Takeshi Kaneshiro, Charlie Yeung, Karen Mok
Distributor: Block 2 Distribution
The greatest postmodernist of Hong Kong cinema. Master of melancholic mood of loneliness and unfulfilled longing. An original stylist combining cinephilia with music video aesthetics. A chronicler of Hong Kong’s last years before the city was handed over to China in 1997. This is Wong Kar-Wai.
From a filmmaker who was once compared by critics to both Godard and Tarantino, Filmasia presents one of the highlights of his most prolific creative period, the first half of the 1990s. Like many of the director’s other films, Fallen Angels follows several characters who meet each other only rarely, yet we find many parallels between them. A hired killer who likes to have his work set up by someone else, his companion who is obsessed with the killer’s personality even though she has hardly ever seen him, a mute young man who occupies other people’s shops at night, and a girl who longs to face the woman who seduced her ex-boyfriend – these are the protagonists and antagonists of a virtuosically constructed fragmented narrative, where there are far more internal monologues than character conversations. The film is also one of Wong’s most stylistically distinctive works – the camera alternates between colour and black-and-white images, most scenes are shot with a handheld camera using an extremely wide-angle lens that distorts the image, and the trip-hop influenced soundtrack contributes to the surreal atmosphere of the work. Again, Wong is more concerned with evoking a mood than with conventional storytelling. Fallen Angels can be seen as a film about loneliness in the modern city, an audiovisual poem about the melancholic numbness resulting from amorous longing, but also as an impression of Hong Kong itself at the time. After all, Wong himself has said of the film that its main character is the city itself, and that it is a kind of cinematic sibling to his slightly older work Chungking Express.
