Fallen Angels is an exhilarating rush of a film, with all manner of go-for-broke visual bravura that expresses the free spirits of bold young people. A disillusioned hit-man and a former convict look for love amidst the frenetic street life of Hong Kong.The film is a speedy, adrenalin-filled journey though neon-drenched Hong Kong, and encounters with its beautiful people. Its style trumps its story and fittingly, first impressions count for everything. Fallen Angels can be seen as a companion piece to Chungking Express (1994). On January 21, 1998, the film began a limited North American theatrical run through Kino International, grossing US $13,804 in its opening weekend in one American theatre. The final North American theatrical gross was US $163,145.

I have seen several of the directors other films and I must admit I find them beyond boring. This film stands out as his almost singular watchable movie as it contains action and the best shots in a film set in the real world-aka-not SF- I have ever seen. The images are truly excellent, gritty, realistic, and beautiful in a strange kind of way. The story leaves much to be desired in terms of the bombastic acting style in many places, real hyper stuff that will grate on the nerves, like a lousy martial arts movie made on a budget of 20 bucks. I think this film is worth seeing just for the visuals-you know what they say- a picture is worth a thousand words, well, in this case, I would say a picture is worth a million words. I have enjoyed many other films that are Asian Cinema, I just think the directors other films are plain bad.

I've got a strange affinity with Wong Kar-wai's movies, and they seem to somehow present themselves in reverse order to me, where often I find myself visiting his earlier works backwards. Like watching 2046 first before In the Mood for Love, or right now, watching Fallen Angels before Chungking Express, where I have both movies on DVDs sitting on the shelves, but decide to pick Angels before Chungking, knowing jolly well that this one came after, and was like the film that expanded itself so much that it had to break away and stand alone on its own two feet.Deciding between Chungking Express and Fallen Angels also boiled down to pure laziness on my part to want to pop a Region Free DVD into my default player, hence the latter. And I can't help but to chuckle at how Leon Lai's killer character Wong Chi Ming paralleled this laziness of mine, in wanting things on a sliver platter, of getting the preparation work all set out for him, and he just enters the scene with his swagger as the executioner. And the woman behind him acting as his agent and cleaning lady, is played by Michelle Reis.As his agent, she gets the contracts, does the legwork to draw up plans, and with time as she hangs out at his apartment to clean it up, she nurses an aching heart, knowing that perhaps in their profession, to fall in love would spell doom. And it doesn't take one too long to identify with such longing, of being so near yet so far, and she exorcises her unrequited passion by either visiting the places he visits just to hang on to his lingering presence long after he's gone, or by pleasuring herself on his bed. Kinda kinky, don't you think?While Chungking Express dealt with the relationship issues that two cops had to experience (from my fuzzy knowledge of it anyway), Fallen Angels seemed to be its evil twin, again dealing with relations of the heart, but now from the viewpoints centered on two criminals, one in Lai's character, and here the other in Takeshi Kaneshiro (who was also in Chungking Express) with his mute He Zhiwu, who breaks into shops and plays plenty of make belief. In his story arc, his unrequited love stems from his chance encounter with Charlie Young's Charlie, who too suffers a broken heart, but goes over the bend. In fact, I would have thought that Eating Air took a huge leaf out of certain aspects of their courtship, especially with the lovers on a bike careening through Hong Kong's underground highways. And Charlie Young I thought did substantially more than the flower vase roles she's more famous for perfecting.While Zhiwu can't speak, it is perhaps this arc that has a lot to say about love in classic WKW pathos. We listen in to the thoughts of Zhiwu as he narrates them in Mandarin voiceovers, such as topics of relationships having their expiration date, and the keeping of someone's memory alive. With Chi-Ming, he consciously rejects someone who takes an extreme liking of him, to go for a random, temporary lover in the form of Karen Mok's Blondie, who again might be another throwback to a similar character back in Chungking Express. But being cautionary here, is yet again the tale of not incurring the wrath of the wrong woman, though I chose to interpret the events in his story thereafter as being one of a set up, or a fix, versus just being a case of coincidental bad luck.And you cannot get away with not talking about frequent WKW collaborator Christopher Doyle's cinematography in this film, with its obtuse angles like a fish eye twitching all around with plenty of kinetic energy, boasting of shots within shots with its use of captured mirror images. Time lapse also gets used quite frequently, giving it a sense of broad fast forwarding motion, with the devil in the details treated quite casually. With a variation of Massive Attack's Karma Coma by Roel Garcia featured in an eclectic soundtrack, it already bowled me over with its collection of songs featured, whereLove stories that don't go anywhere except to serve as personal reminders, familiar pathos as presented by WKW, a star studded cast and excellent visuals and music, easily make this film one of my firm favourites. I suppose I shouldn't waste too much time before embarking on my journey onboard the more illustrious Chungking Express.

Wong Kar Wai doesn't play by the rules, and those who respond positively to his films wouldn't want it any other way. While he's recently gone a little more measured and controlled with style (relatively speaking) with In the Mood for Love and 2046, it's mostly in that he's now using things like dollies and steadi-cams. Looking at Chungking Express and, particularly, Fallen Angels, he reveals himself as a filmmaker total in trust with a style that in other hands would be simply amateurish. His camera, led on by Christopher Doyle, follows along these characters like in a slightly feverish documentary, with the accompanied narration adding the emphasis on inner thoughts and details. It's a crime drama, but it's also a fresh way to look at material that has a little bit of quirk, a heap-load of attitude, and at least a good lot of romance, or the lack of it or the pining for it with these characters. It's equally sweet and rough-edged, like an adorable motorcycle.For plot, there's not much: two male characters, one is a hit-man who's starting to feel the pressure of his job (ironically, he describes it as being a good one early on as "I'm a lazy person. I like people to arrange things for me"), and breaks off from his partner, a woman who cleans up his 'messes' of mass destruction, and then falls for a strange blonde girl. The other is a mute ex-con who robs people by being obnoxious at various one-night-stand type of jobs, and in the process meeting a girl whom has a freak-out one night (there's an amazing scene, I should add, where in one shot we see him fall completely for this girl with a soft blues song playing behind him describe this as his first love). At least, that's as much as I gathered from the essentials; there's also a sub-plot with the mute kid, He Zwhiu, and his father as he starts to videotape him all the time. But Wong isn't interested in plot mechanics as two central facets: mood of a scene on technical fronts, and a sensibility that's close to poetic intent.Wong's camera moves in a way that is a little dizzying, and it feels like it should be a shamble, a fiasco of an art-house item that doesn't transition well to the US. But it becomes apparent that its form is, at least, consistent to the intent at hand. We're so aware of the style that the characters are seemingly organic from this urban, post-modern spread. They're more than a little alienated (watch that shot where the woman is in the café, and the fight breaks out behind her without flinching an eyelash to the situation), and they have the tendencies of youth trapped in a situation they can only break out of (for one it's a way of life as work that gets mixed up due to emotions with the partner, the other with his father and going past disrobing the homeless and conning a family with ice cream).Wong Kar Wai presents this amusingly at times, a brisk sense of humor dropped in to let the audience know 'it's OK to laugh here and there, they ARE human after all with all their idiosyncrasies'. But at the same time there's a sorrow to the material that is given life by the hand-held, by the shots of characters in mirrors, by mixed media, by black and white shots thrown in, by editing that cuts off the head of the 180 degree rule here and there, by pumping in sad music and it does come close to diluting the emotional impact of the characters's fates. And yet, Wong has the soul of a romantic at heart, so to speak, and despite the fact that there's some pretty violence scenes in the picture (done in that hyper-speed style that is a little slow, a little fast in a way, as one has seen in many HK crime films) there's an intelligence that steers it from being TOO sloppy.This may be arguable, to be sure, in either direction; some may even call it a masterpiece of post-modernism as well as those who can't stand it period. I don't necessarily think it's even Kar-Wai's best film. But it inspires so many fresh images and thoughts I can't discard it as a warped slip-up from an otherwise avant-garde darling. If anything a film like Fallen Angels lifts up his reputation as the Chinese answer to Godard (minus, of course, the Maoism and the reading excerpts of books on camera).