User:Ippantekina/Fallen Angels

Fallen Angels is a 1995 Hong Kong film written and directed by Wong Kar-wai. It interweaves two separate storylines that take place simultaneously. One focuses on a hitman (Leon Lai), his agent who unexpectedly falls in love with him (Michelle Reis), and a prostitute who becomes his fleeting romantic and sexual partner (Karen Mok). The other tells the story of a mute ex-convict who escapes from the police (Takeshi Kaneshiro) and develops an unrequited love for a mentally unstable woman dumped by her boyfriend (Charlie Yeung). Set in 1990s Hong Kong, Fallen Angels explores the characters' loneliness and yearning for connections against a backdrop of a bustling, neon-lit city. Film critics broadly categorise it as a crime thriller, and some reviews point out elements of romance and drama.

Wong first developed Fallen Angels as part of Chungking Express (1994) but split them into two separate films due to their cumulative length. Similar to Chungking Express, Fallen Angels features a fragmented narrative that emphasises mood and atmosphere over structure. Wong considers the two films complimentary counterparts examining alienated young adults in contemporary Hong Kong. Whereas its predecessor incorporates bright daytime colours, Fallen Angels comprises of scenes shot at night. Cinematographer Christopher Doyle extensively used wide-angle lens to distort the characters' faces on the screen, conveying their isolation from the surrounding world. The soundtrack extensively uses pop songs to accompany scenes of drama or extreme violence with frantic, out-of-focus visuals.

Fallen Angels premiered at the 1995 Toronto International Film Festival. Upon release, many critics took issue with what they deemed a derivative of Chungking Express and lamented that Wong had become self-indulgent. It nonetheless won three categories at the 15th Hong Kong Film Awards: Best Supporting Actress for Mok, Best Cinematography for Doyle, and Best Original Score for Roel A. Garcia and Frankie Chan. Retrospectively, critics commented that though Fallen Angels was not as groundbreaking as its predecessor, it remained one of Wong's most captivating films cementing his trademark styles. Later interpretations examined how the film's storytelling and visual styles laid the groundwork to a postmodernist genre.

Plot
The movie is composed of two stories that have little to do with each other except for a few casual run-ins when some of the characters happen to be in the same place at the same time. Both stories take place in Hong Kong.

Story one
The story begins with a hit man named Wong Chi-ming (Leon Lai) and a woman he calls his "partner." They hardly know each other and rarely see each other but she cleans his dingy apartment in club clothes and faxes him blueprints of the places where he is to commit his murders. Infatuated with him, she frequents the bar he goes to just to sit in his seat and daydream about him. One night, Wong has a late night meal at McDonald's where he meets Blondie, who invites him into her apartment. While they spend time together, she has illusions that he is the ex-lover who left her for another woman. Wong's partner finds out about the relationship and, after he tells her he wants to terminate their business relationship, she asks that he do her one more favor. Wong is killed while attempting to carry out the job.

Story two
Wong Chi-ming's partner lives in the same building with Ho Chi-mo (Takeshi Kaneshiro), a crazy delinquent who escapes prison. She helps him elude the police when they are searching for him. Ho is mute and still lives with his father. For work, he breaks into other people's businesses at night and sells their goods and services, often forcibly to unwilling customers. He keeps running into the same girl at night, Charlie. Every time they meet, she cries on his shoulder and tells him the same sob story. Her ex-boyfriend, Johnny, left her for a girl named Blondie. She enlists his help in searching for Blondie. Ho Chi-mo falls in love. Later, she stands him up and he changes his ways, beginning a friendship and work relationship with a restaurant manager. He begins to film things around him with a video camera. His father passes away; he falls back into abusive habits, going so far as to cut off the hair of a man whose family he in the past forced to eat an excessive amount of ice cream. He and Charlie do not come into contact for a few months, but they run into each other while he is masquerading as a business owner. She is in a stewardess uniform and in a new relationship. She does not acknowledge him.

Sometime later, Ho Chi-mo is in a restaurant sitting by himself one night when he sees Wong’s ex-partner also sitting by herself. There is a silent spark between them that they both feel. She asks him for a ride home on his motorbike. As they ride off into the night even though she knows it’s just a moment she enjoys his warmth.

Cast

 * Leon Lai as Wong Chi-ming / Killer
 * Michelle Reis as Killer's agent
 * Takeshi Kaneshiro as Ho Chi-mo/ He Zhiwu
 * Charlie Yeung as Charlie / Cherry
 * Karen Mok as Punkie / Blondie / Baby
 * Chan Fai-hung as Man forced to eat ice cream
 * Chan Man-lei as Ho Chi-mo's father
 * Toru Saito as Sato
 * Benz Kong as Hoi

Concept
Originally conceived by Wong as the third story for 1994's Chungking Express, it was cut after he decided that it was complete without it. He instead decided to develop the story further into its own feature film and borrowed elements of Chungking Express, such as themes, locations and methods of filming. Wanting to also try to differentiate it from Chungking and to try something new, Wong decided along with cinematographer Christopher Doyle to shoot mainly at night and using extreme wide-angle lens (9.8mm-wide), keeping the camera as close to the talents as possible to give a detached effect from the world around them.

Many of the plot devices are related to those deployed in its predecessor Chungking Express. The wide-angle distortion of images creates an effect of distance-in-proximity, conveying the characters' solitude. The visuals are frantic, out-of-focus, and neon-lit. Rather than relying on dialogues, the story is narrated through characters' voiceovers. The film's use of pop songs has also received extensive commentary.

In an interview, Wong had this to say: "...To me, Chungking Express and Fallen Angels are one film that should be three hours long. I always think these two films should be seen together as a double bill. In fact, people asked me during an interview for Chungking Express: 'You've made these two stories which have no relationship at all to each other, how can you connect them?' And I said, 'The main characters of Chungking Express are not Faye Wong or Takeshi Kaneshiro, but the city itself, the night and day of Hong Kong. Chungking Express and Fallen Angels together are the bright and dark of Hong Kong.' I see the films as inter-reversible, the character of Faye Wong could be the character of Takeshi in Fallen Angels; Brigitte Lin in Chungking could be Leon Lai in Fallen Angels. All of their characters are inter-reversible. Also, in Chungking we were shooting from a very long distance with long lenses, but the characters seem close to us."

Casting and filming
Doyle, who had shot all of Wong's previous films (Days of Being Wild, Ashes of Time, Chungking Express) continued collaborating on Fallen Angels. However, in April 1995, he had to postpone work to continue shooting for a Chen Kaige film, which led to continuous delays as Wong was dissatisfied with every other fill-in cameramen.

Wong casted all the actors save for Kaneshiro without seeing their previous performances.

Music
Typical for a Wong Kar-wai film, Fallen Angels extensively uses pop songs. Featured in the Fallen Angels soundtrack is a version of "Forget Him" sung by Shirley Kwan, a reworking of the classic by Teresa Teng, and one of the very few "contemporary" Cantopop songs ever used by Wong Kar-wai in his films. In the film, the song is used as a message from the hitman to his partner. One track played prominently throughout the film is "Because I'm Cool" by Nogabe "Robinson" Randriaharimalala. It samples Karmacoma by Massive Attack. The Laurie Anderson piece "Speak My Language" is used in scenes where the killer's agent (Reis) visits a bar and masturbates in the killer's room. "Albeit in a different vein, in Fallen Angels too, He Zhiwu makes an impromptu video of himself lip-synching “Simu De Ren” (“Missing You,” as sung by Taiwanese star Chyi Chin). The song will then become the soundtrack to a memorial, in the form of a home video, to his recently deceased father."

The Flying Pickets version of "Only You" was used in the last scene of the film.

Film music’s traditional narrative functions find expression in Wong’s cinema, though there are notable deviations from convention. Wong’s music fulfills the norms of scene setting, cuing the narrative milieu and constructing a historical period. It establishes mood, reinforces continuity, implies themes, and forges leitmotivic associations. It may be rhythmically dovetailed with ambient noise, yielding a holistically integrated soundscape—as when the opening segment of Fallen Angels alternates the rhythmic pulse of a passing train with a percussive musical beat. Or it may be subjected to large-scale patterning, presaging impending plot events. In Fallen Angels, a Leonesque music cue accompanies Killer’s brush with death near the film’s midpoint. Wong revives the cue toward the climax, when Killer is asked to commit a dangerous final murder. Wong thus engages in musical foreshadowing, hinting at the violence to come; indeed, when Killer is slain during the shooting, the somber music cue returns as a dirge. There is nothing innovative in employing film music this way, but such examples at least demonstrate a concern for narrational pattern, coherence, and unity.

Another standard function of film music—that of conveying a character’s subjective state—also obtains in Wong’s aesthetic, but it acquires unusual emphasis thanks to the subjectively opaque characters that Wong favors (think of Killer in Fallen Angels, the blonde woman in Chungking Express, and the circumspect neighbors of In the Mood for Love). Similarly, music’s propensity to “speak for” a character becomes paramount when that character suffers from mutism, as does Ho Chi Moo in Fallen Angels (though Wong takes liberties with this character trait, which I discuss in Chapter 4). Here, music operates according to what I will call “expressive displacement” or diffusion— when character expressivity is not forthcoming, the burden of expression falls upon other diegetic or stylistic devices. Peter Brunette notes a cognate instance during In the Mood for Love, wherein the camera lingers upon curlicues of cigarette smoke: the moment “works precisely because of the evocative music that accompanies narratively ‘empty’ visuals and unleashes their expressivity” (2005: 97). I will address how Chungking Express puts music to subjective effect later.

Oftentimes, as I have noted, Wong motivates music diegetically. Characters “create their own sound environment” (Martinez 1997: 31), becoming immersed in jukebox songs, radio tunes, CD albums, and the like. More than this, for Wong’s taciturn characters, music substitutes for verbal communication. In Fallen Angels the assassin obliquely conveys a message to his female contractor via a particular jukebox tune; the pair is condemned to indirect forms of interaction because of their mutual emotional and social reticence. Thus the song’s presence on the sound track is motivated narratively by the quirks of character psychology. (As a “message,” the tune is characteristically ambiguous—its refrain advises the contractor to “Forget Him,” but the lyrics caution against doing so lest one “loses” oneself. Moreover, the assassin intends his message to convey his desire to quit his job, but is he also instructing his partner to “forget him” as a romantic prospect?) Frequently, character action motivates not only the presence of specific songs but also their salience on the sound track. Hence Agent’s compulsive attraction to the song “Speak My Language” in Fallen Angels begets its conspicuous repetition. Likewise the thunderous strains of Italian opera in 2046 find justification in Mr. Wang’s strategic preference for loud music (he pumps up the aria’s volume to drown out the din of family quarrels).

"In the mid-1990s, Western critics subsumed Wong’s music scores to broad conceptual and formal frameworks. Auteurists sought evidence of individual artistry in the compilation score, which seemed to exemplify directorial choice. Song selection in Chungking Express and Fallen Angels was often interpreted as auteurist expression. Appropriated tunes, it was assumed, comprised a receptacle of personal themes, and specially commissioned scores embodied the director’s intentions. Crucially, his collage practice fortified critics eager to construct Wong as a ranking auteur. That he cherry-picked songs and assumed “sole charge” of his films’ sound tracks (Martinez 1997: 29) testified to a total authorial vision and design. In the same period Western critics gestured toward Wong’s cinephilia, albeit largely ignoring non-Occidental influences upon his style. [...] Thus, musical elements produce irony in Happy Together (Martinez 1997: 9), self-consciousness in Chungking Express (Morrison 1996), allusion in Ashes of Time (Martinez 1997: 30), and pastiche in Fallen Angels (Morrison 1995; Tsui 1995: 114). All these discoveries amounted to claims for a new (postmodern) mode of perception fostered by Wong’s aesthetic—a line of argument developed, along predominantly visual lines, by Abbas (1997b)— and led critics to harness Wong’s formal innovations to a cluster of ready-made if woolly concepts. Needless to say, the assertions of novelty and individualism also advanced the auteur-making efforts of Wong’s advocates. More recent writings continue to place his scores firmly in a postmodernist context; one critic, for instance, discerns musical self-parody in As Tears Go By and Fallen Angels (Brunette 2005: 61); another perceives postmodern irony in Chungking Express and Fallen Angels (Binns 2008). One could also posit postmodernist strategies pervading Wong’s aesthetic in the form of hybridity (the diversity— both cultural and idiomatic—within his compilation scores; see Dissanayake 2003: 65), surface structures (made palpable by sustained musical foregrounding), and acoustic fragmentation (the abruptly truncated use of music cues and the more encompassing principle of musical collage). Wong’s music tracks are culturally as well as historically wide-ranging. As the 1990s wore on, the rise of transnationalist approaches sensitized theorists to Wong’s pluralistic musical style. Emilie Yeh (1999) sets out to identify the transnational aspects of music in Chungking Express and Fallen Angels. She usefully distinguishes between international and cross-regional levels of musical engagement (128–29). Wong’s use of music, Yeh points out, taps both international musical contexts (appropriating tunes from, say, America and Europe) and cross-regional musical contexts (mining the musics of Taiwan and other pan-Asian territories). Yeh therefore characterizes Wong’s use of world music as both transnational and transcultural (129). Though crucial, the international level of Wong’s hybrid scores should not obscure local and cross-regional levels. Often Wong does not simply appropriate Western tunes—he reworks them, Sinicizes them, endows them with local features. Western vocals might be supplanted by a Chinese singer, as in Danny Chung’s cover version of “Happy Together.” Or Cantonese-language versions might be commissioned, as occurred with Massive Attack’s “Karmacoma” in Fallen Angels (Toop 2005: 160). In short, sentimentality is too “pure” an emotion for Wong, who typically trades in complex, composite, and generally low-level feeling states. He is alert to music’s potential for melodramatic excess and discovers ways to diffuse inherently emotive story action. In Fallen Angels, the scenes linking Ho Chi Moo’s father to Chyi Chin’s “Thinking of You” are moving but not sentimental—Wong undercuts sentimentality with ingratiating humor (the father’s exasperation at his son’s harassment). He also motivates the ballad by character action, tracing it to a CD selection by Ho Chi Moo. Thus the scene’s apparent sentimentality is transferred to the mute young man, as he displays open affection for his father and later mourns his passing. The scene’s emotivity, in other words, is focalized around (and motivated by) the grieving son. Rejecting sentimentality is one way that Wong distinguishes himself from Hong Kong filmmakers, but he also eschews the austerity dear to certain European art directors. In Wong’s cinema, music suffuses the soundscape, but it is apt to perform sensuously, not sentimentally. Again and again, music and image combine to sensuous effect—think of Sue Lynne floating through the Memphis bar to the strains of “Try a Little Tenderness” (My Blueberry Nights), the sensual tango that segues into erotic lovemaking in Yiu-fai’s kitchen (Happy Together), or Agent’s tactile bond with the jukebox from which “Speak My Language” issues (Fallen Angels). Wong employs music to sensuous and expressive effect, but he negates both the emotional manipulations of sentimental cinema and the affective detachment of the art film."

Box office
Kino International, who initially distributed the film on DVD, prepared a re-release of the film from a new high-definition transfer on 11 November 2008. Kino released the film on Blu-ray Disc in America in March 26, 2010. It has since gone out of print.

The film was picked up by the Criterion Collection and given a new Blu-ray release on March 23, 2021 in a collection of 7 Wong Kar-wai films.

Also, Fallen Angels could previously be streamed on FilmStruck (shut down in 2018) and is currently available on The Criterion Collection subscription service channel. In May 2019, Wong Kar Wai announced that all of his films would be remastered by his production studio, Jet Tone Productions, and be distributed in the United States through Janus Films and the Criterion Collection. It was released in the UK on DVD and Blu-ray by Artificial Eye.

The film made HK$7,476,025 during its Hong Kong run.

On 21 January 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.

In 2004, Australian distribution company Accent Film Entertainment released a remastered widescreen version of the film enhanced for 16x9 screens.

Critical reception
In the Chicago Sun-Times, Roger Ebert gave Fallen Angels three stars out of a possible four. Ebert said the film appealed to a niche audience including art students, "the kinds of people you see in the Japanese animation section of the video store, with their sleeves cut off so you can see their tattoos", and "those who subscribe to more than three film magazines", but would prove unsuitable for an average moviegoer. Stephen Holden of The New York Times said the film relied more on style than substance and wrote: "Although the story takes a tragic turn, the movie feels as weightless as the tinny pop music that keeps its restless midnight ramblers darting around the city like electronic toy figures in a gaming arcade."

In the Village Voice, J. Hoberman wrote:"The acme of neo-new-wavism, the ultimate in MTV alienation, the most visually voluptuous flick of the fin de siècle, a pyrotechnical wonder about mystery, solitude, and the irrational love of movies that pushes Wong's style to the brink of self-parody."

Hoberman and Amy Taubin both placed Fallen Angels on their lists for the top ten films of the decade while the Village Voice's decade-end critics poll placed Fallen Angels at No. 10, the highest-ranking of any Wong Kar-wai film.

The review aggregator Rotten Tomatoes reported that 95% of critics have given the film a positive review based on 22 reviews, with an average rating of 7.90/10. On Metacritic, the film has a weighted average score of 71 out of 100 based on 13 critic reviews, indicating "generally favorable reviews".

Author Stephen Teo, in the book Wong Kar-wai: Auteur of Time, considered Fallen Angels Wong's most social and political film. Meanwhile, Peter Brunette contended the nonlinear structure and "anti-realist, hyperstylized" cinematography of Fallen Angels and its predecessor Chungking Express pointed towards the future of cinema. Scholars Justin Clemens and Dominic Pettman commented on the social and political undertones of Fallen Angels: by portraying the characters' loneliness, alienation and indecisiveness, the film represents a metaphor for the political climate of contemporary Hong Kong, the impending end of British rule and transition to Chinese rule in 1997. Film critic Thorsten Botz-Bornstein highlighted Fallen Angels as a film that represented Wong's peculiar appeal to both traditional "Eastern" and "Western" audiences—it portrays Hong Kong with "post-colonial modernity" showcased through crammed apartments, public transportation, noodle parlors that were emblematic of modern Asia's consumerism. On the one hand, those elements could not be rightfully called "traditionally Asian"; on the other, Western audience viewed such elements with astounding curiosity.

If Wong’s next film, Fallen Angels (1995), looked derivative of [Chungking], the two films differed sharply in visual style, affective tone, and plot structure. Still, Fallen Angels coaxed audiences to spot connections with Chungking Express. Wong elaborates the game of cross-referencing at a metatextual level too. A dense web of intertextual allusions recycles characters, locales, and music cues across the entire oeuvre. The apparent integrity of Wong’s authorial universe tantalizes viewers into positing connections among his films’ narrative agents and events. This is the sport of an auteur cinema—presupposing an intimate knowledge of his body of work, the filmmaker rewards the initiated viewer with intertextual referencing. [...] Critics dismissed Fallen Angels as superficial, but it remains a complex work, not only a brooding noir but a delicate, poignant meditation on fatherson relationships. Sometimes the critic expands reflectionism beyond societal metaphor, so that the films are burdened with a freight of symptomatic meanings. One standard heuristic perceives the films as reflections of the biographical author. Teo (2005), for instance, construes Wong’s films as essentially autobiographical, with the director’s personal history discernible at several levels of narration. [...] Even setting aside this recourse to speculation, the author-reflection heuristic becomes murky when Teo slides between the director as biographical individual and as authorial “personality.” Teo appears to invoke the latter when claiming that Killer in Fallen Angels “reflects Wong Kar-wai, the author” (87). Whether this claim is persuasive (and I argue in Chapter 4 that Killer does not embody Wong’s authorial worldview), the author-reflection schema is here clearly of a different order than that employed previously (e.g., when discussing Wong’s shy nature). Likewise, Teo means to denote authorial personality, rather than biographical figure, when stating that voice-over in Fallen Angels “expos[es] [Wong] as perhaps dangerously schizoid, split into several personalities. I am not suggesting that Wong himself is psychotic” (88). Wong’s characters are assumed to reflect both the biographical individual with a personal history and the cinematic author who articulates a personal vision.

The author-reflection heuristic becomes murkier still when applied to contrasting, even contradictory, cases. For Teo, “Fallen Angels, like all of Wong’s films, is told from the multiple perspectives of its characters, and all of them reflect Wong, the writer and author” (2005: 88). Among the problems with this sweeping claim is that it irons out crucial differences among the film’s characters, who are hardly of a piece and among whom Wong encourages us to weight judgments (see Chapter 4 of this book). It is not explained how the specific traits and trajectories of these various agents are unified into coherent form nor how they manifest an authorial worldview. Nor is it specified precisely in what ways the characters of Fallen Angels dovetail with those of Days of Being Wild, in whom Teo also perceives Wong’s reflection. Indeed, Teo’s point might be precisely that the characters are not alike, that, moreover, they represent contradictory subjectivities. Each one possesses a distinct personality and they all reflect Wong, hence the view of Wong as “perhaps dangerously schizoid.” By extension, Wong’s authorial personality must be read as schizophrenic, fragmented, contradictory—an interpretation consistent with Teo’s broadly postmodernist line of criticism. I will not digress here except to iterate that, as I attempt to argue in subsequent chapters, Wong’s films exhibit a highly consistent and coherent worldview. My present point is that the author-reflection model—potentially useful but beset by conceptual difficulties pertaining to the ontology of the “author”—becomes yet another mode of reflection theory imposed upon the work.

Full quotes
The complex storytelling strategies on display in Fallen Angels have received little attention even from the film’s admirers. Not surprisingly, its vivid panoply of visual devices—including fish-eye lenses, slit staging, distorted motion, splitscreen imagery, shifts in color and film stock, and canted angles—has imposed itself as the primary object of critical attention. Brunette’s critique of Fallen Angels epitomizes the film’s wider critical reception: he regards Fallen Angels as a predominantly reflexive enterprise, a mesh of allusions to Wong’s own work. Style, not story, provides the film’s raison d’être. Brunette subsumes the film’s narrative, themes, and generic strategies to Wong’s broader program of self-parody, another index of a postmodernist sensibility (2005: 57–70). More generally, he balks at the notion that Wong’s films engage plot or narrative. For Brunette, too little “happens” in a Wong Kar-wai film. Wong’s plotting is too desultory and diffuse to constitute a narrative in the conventional sense (61; 72). How, then, does the fabula, syuzhet, and narration function in a film regarded as a purely “stylistic” exercise?

It is useful at this point to recall the narrative of Fallen Angels. In modernday Hong Kong, Killer (Leon Lai), a paid assassin, performs contract killings arranged by Agent (Michele Reis), his female accomplice. Killer insists that their relationship remain purely professional, but Agent harbors a secret affection for him. In his absence, she tidies his apartment, alert for clues to his personality. At Chungking Mansions, the flophouse where Agent lodges, the mute Ho Chi Moo (Takeshi Kaneshiro) is arrested by police; looking for extra income, Ho has illegally commandeered business premises during closing hours. He becomes attracted to Charlie (Charlie Young), a feisty drifter seeking revenge on Blondie, the fiancée of the man she loves. Killer rekindles a fling with a former lover, Baby (Karen Mok). When a crime goes wrong, he decides to terminate his partnership with Agent. Ho, meanwhile, also resolves to renounce crime, acquiring a job at a bar where, by coincidence, he encounters Killer. Agent asks Killer to carry out one last execution before retiring, but the assassin perishes in the attempt. After Ho’s father passes away, the bereft youth slips into old routines, trespassing on private properties. In a diner he encounters the solitary Agent, and the pair finds solace speeding through the cross-harbor tunnel on Ho’s motorcycle.

Formally, Fallen Angels consists of two major plotlines, between which the narration alternates. Whereas Chungking Express splices its dual stories one after the other, Fallen Angels interweaves its two fabula strands. The first story, involving Agent and Killer, alternates and occasionally intersects with the second story, centered on Ho. Most of the first story also forks into two lines of action, as Wong toggles between the protagonists’ separate trajectories. Wong motivates this bifurcation by character psychology. Early in the plot, Killer explains his separation from Agent: “Partners should never get emotionally involved with each other,” he reveals in voice-over. Thus the protagonists’ exclusive pathways emanate from their own attitudes and are apparently not attributable to the narration as such. Fallen Angels teems with attention-getting devices, but Wong disguises his role in this structural conceit by motivating it diegetically. Once more, Wong exemplifies the inextricability of character and story. Part of the film’s organic unity stems from the close imbrication of characterization and narrative form.

Wong’s preliminary exposition establishes the protagonists’ itinerary, as Agent and Killer traverse the same space separately. At times, their estrangement gives rise to misleading narrational effects but in ways that sharpen character psychology. In the fourth reel, the narration crosscuts between Killer and Agent in a barbershop. Though Wong’s crosscutting implies simultaneity—as does the salon space through which both characters maneuver—the characters’ paths do not once intersect. Gradually it becomes evident that a significant ellipsis separates the parallel lines, disqualifying our assumption of synchronicity. If this narrational gambit initially bewilders, it harbors important character meaning. Most simply, it foregrounds the protagonists’ mutual isolation, the pair having pledged to seldom meet in person. But it also accents the fact that one protagonist follows a spatial path set by another. Just as the yearning figures of In the Mood for Love restage the adulterous activity of their spouses, so Killer and Agent each trace itineraries laid out in advance. Both Agent (who privately adopts the assassin’s routines) and Killer (whose work patterns are supplied by Agent) avoid mapping purposeful trajectories of their own. They obliquely renounce purposeful activity and personal responsibility (“I like others to arrange things for me,” proclaims the assassin). Like the protagonists of In the Mood for Love (as I will show in Chapter 5), Agent and Killer seek emancipation from the burden of human choice and action.

The film’s second story will not be initiated until Reel 3, but Wong plants elements from that story in earlier blocks of action. Already the film seeks to unify its plot strands into a coherent whole. Reviving a formal tactic from Chungking Express, Wong gives a key character from the second story a brief appearance in the preliminary exposition. We first glimpse Ho’s father as he fleetingly crosses paths with Agent at Chungking Mansions, but so unemphatic is this character exposition that the primacy effect can hardly be mobilized. Consequently, the first-time viewer fails to reidentify Ho’s father when the second plotline properly gets underway. Here again, a tactic to unify plotlines becomes evident only retrospectively, on subsequent viewings. If this tactic lends a certain robustness to narrative architecture, it also delineates a degreesof-separation story world, whereby protagonists share spatial proximity but remain (at least for a period) strangers to one another. All the same, within this social network lies the possibility of new intimacies being formed. (“We rub shoulders with people every day,” Ho announces at one point. “Strangers who may even become friends of confidants.”) Against this milieu Wong ironically situates Agent and Killer, their lives intimately “connected” yet spatially divorced. As so often, Wong sets his protagonists at odds with their environment and implies a psychological inauthenticity at the root of their social estrangement.

The protagonists’ degree of inauthenticity is sharpened by the syuzhet’s split structure, which impels us to compare character attitudes and behavior. The first story brings forth affinities between Agent and Killer—both characters, for instance, are denied proper names, the fabula identifying them solely by profession. This impersonal labeling suggests Brechtian Verfremdung as a narrational maneuver, commensurate with the film’s wider reflexive strategies. But at the fabula level it both accentuates the agents’ psychological opacity and reflects their effort to eliminate the “personal” from their partnership. Gradually the syuzhet, by alternating the paths of Agent and Killer, reveals contrasts too. Emotionally withdrawn, Killer epitomizes the inauthentic hero. By abdicating decision making to Agent, he renounces the freedom of action and choice that defines authentic existence. His abstention from personal communion with Agent, moreover, signals an inauthentic retreat from social intercourse. By contrast, Agent betrays a yearning for intimacy. Her fixation on the possessions in Killer’s apartment, her autoerotic revelry in his bed, her habit of frequenting his favorite bar (because “it makes me feel closer to him”)—through all such actions, Agent flouts the pair’s pact not to become “emotionally involved with each other.” Though they adopt each other’s itinerary, then, Agent and Killer harbor sharply different (if similarly inauthentic) attitudes. Wong obliges us to decide which of these fallen angels is the least authentic—the assassin who rejects personal responsibility or the agent who consents to personal distance but who privately craves emotional intimacy.

The film’s parallelisms become more elaborate in the third reel, which launches the second plotline. Prima facie, Ho appears comparable to Killer and Agent, a wrongdoer hiding out from the law. The three characters are also aligned formally, each assigned a voice-over track. (This narrational maneuver is crucial inasmuch as it grants subjective access to a mute and two subjectively opaque protagonists.) The primacy effect thus establishes Ho as somewhat akin to Agent and Killer. These are but superficial affinities, however. Whereas Killer’s voice-over espouses detachment, Ho’s narration affirms intimacy: “strangers [may] become friends or confidants,” he says. Wong establishes all three characters as outsiders, but here again their situations are not analogous. Ho’s social alienation stems not from an inauthentic aversion to intimacy, as in the case of Killer, but from his own condition of muteness—”for this reason,” he explains, “I have very few friends.” His desire for intimate relationships endows him with purposefulness; Killer, by contrast, studiously avoids both intimacy and goal formation. By a principle of simultaneous parallelism, Fallen Angels registers contrasting attitudes toward social existence.

Once Ho’s story initiates its own line of action, we become alert for moments when the branching plotlines might intersect. The second story starts with one such intersection—at Chungking Mansions, Agent conceals Ho during a police raid. But for several reels thereafter, Wong keeps the protagonists on separate tracks. Gradually the syuzhet whittles away our expectations of plot convergence. We might predict, for instance, that Agent and Ho will cross paths regularly, given their early complicity and their mutual place of residence. We might hypothesize that the trio of protagonists will become enmeshed in a romance triangle or conspire in a criminal scheme. But Wong substitutes such generic hypotheses with a premise altogether more mundane—Ho and Agent are linked only tangentially, as neighbors. If Wong lets genre expectations fizzle out, he also heightens the impression of loose plotting by foregrounding coincidence as the primary connecting force.

Indeed, the contingent nature of the intersecting plotlines has led critics to remember Fallen Angels as being more loosely plotted than it is. Ma claims that the dual plotlines intersect only twice during the film (2010: 130), while Bordwell suggests that Ho and Killer “never meet” in the course of the narrative (Bordwell 2008b: 200). In fact the syuzhet’s twin plotlines intersect on at least three occasions:9 first, at the launch of the second story line, when Agent shelters Ho from the cops; second, when Ho encounters Killer at the restaurant where he works; and, last, at the film’s conclusion, when Agent and Ho reunite by chance. The second point of connection—Ho’s chance meeting with Killer—is motivated by analogous shifts in character psychology. Echoing the character arc of Wah in As Tears Go By, both Killer and Ho separately pledge to end their lawless ways and pursue purposeful plans of action. For Killer in particular, this resolution constitutes a major volte-face. No longer content to leave decisions to others, Killer—like Ho—now gravitates toward purposeful and authentic action, his goal formation a marker of choice and responsibility.

Parallel character development, then, cues the syuzhet to dovetail its dual plotlines. Consequently, the affinities between Killer and Ho become quite salient. Following their unplanned encounter, both characters resume their separate spatiotemporal paths, thus obliging the syuzhet to continue its parallel structure. By once again setting Killer and Ho on parallel tracks, Wong is best able to highlight how two protagonists proceed from an analogous situation along sharply different paths. Yet, at the same time, parallelism renders contrasts between the protagonists relatively less explicit; hence, the viewer must be alert to rhyming actions and situations across both plotlines. After Killer and Ho part ways, for instance, the assassin reluctantly consents to one last job, during which he is slain. Shortly after, the syuzhet switches to Ho at the fast-food counter, where he endeavors to impress Charlie. Substituting ketchup for blood and lapsing into theatrical paroxysms, Ho melodramatically stages his own death. The attentive viewer perceives the syuzhet’s ironic parallelism. Ho’s playacting comes forth as a parodic restaging of Killer’s actual demise minutes earlier in the syuzhet.

These juxtaposed events produce a tonal rupture, yet they also preserve the contrasting tones of the foregoing action—for instance, a ludic, surreal atmosphere predominantly accompanies Ho’s plotline throughout Fallen Angels. More importantly, however, these distinct episodes reflect the different fates and psychologies distinguishing Killer from Ho. On the one hand, these contrasts pertain to authenticity and responsibility. After Killer briefly encounters Ho, he accepts Agent’s request to commit an assassination. Killer’s submission to Agent proves both inauthentic and fatal: he not only regresses to a position of passivity vis-à-vis his own activity but follows a path of action that ends his life. Wong places responsibility for this tragic outcome squarely at the assassin’s door, for Killer has once again rejected authentic desire—he has, in other words, negated his own desire to repudiate crime and reclaim personal autonomy. Understood this way, Killer’s death is a comeuppance for his backslide into inauthentic behavior. On the other hand, the difference between Killer and Ho is one of morality. At no time does the assassin reflect upon the immorality of his crimes. (“I love my job,” he announces near the start of the film.) His decision to go straight stems not from an awakening of moral conscience but from a fear of physical injury. By contrast, Ho’s desire to change springs from moral self-reflection. “I realized how irresponsible I had been in the past,” he remarks. “I shouldn’t have taken over people’s shops the way I did.” Ho’s moral reflection sets him apart from Killer and earns the film’s approbation—as evidenced by the happy end afforded the mute hero.

Fallen Angels also arranges its parallel plot to highlight affinities between Ho and Agent. Echoic situations cue us to notice correspondences, as when both characters are stood up by their prospective partners. More meaningful are the psychological affinities highlighted during the course of the film. Both Agent and Ho are distinguished by their authentic capacity for intimacy, a kinship hinting at their romantic compatibility. Parallelism—and genre expectations—here arouses the viewer’s desire for well-matched protagonists to be united. Wong relies on this desire to motivate narrative closure, as the climactic reunion of Agent and Ho concludes a series of character pairings that the syuzhet has systematically worked through. The culminating and longdeferred intersection of plotlines, moreover, creates strong narrative closure. Structurally, Wong finesses the second story with a symmetrical opening and end. “We rub shoulders with people every day,” Ho observes at the start of the story when he briefly encounters Agent. “Strangers who may even become friends or confidants.” The second plotline, having kept Agent and Ho apart throughout, reunites both protagonists at the climax—no longer “strangers,” and with intimacy a genuine prospect.

If Wong’s parallelism suggests structural looseness, this impression is compounded by the plotlines’ parsing into episodes. Critic Stephen Holden construes Fallen Angels as “a densely packed suite of vignettes that have the autonomy of pop songs or stand-up comic riffs” (1997). Though this claim underestimates the film’s reliance on traditional continuity devices, it nonetheless evokes the first-time viewer’s impression of disjunctive and aleatory plotting. Several scenes display the autonomy Holden describes. When Killer meets an old classmate by chance, the encounter is apt to seem arbitrary at the levels of both fabula (a random encounter) and syuzhet (it is unmotivated and nonmotivating, providing no cause for subsequent action). Then there are the episodes depicting Killer’s crimes. These scenes signify the assassin’s empty ritual (hence the fabula is uninterested in identifying or individuating Killer’s victims). His tasks amount to a succession of isolated killings, none of which converge on a larger objective or purpose; indeed, Killer substitutes routine for meaningful goals and purposeful action. Because they are isolated events that do not trigger subsequent action, Killer’s assassinations lay bare the syuzhet’s episodic pattern.

Out of this episodic patterning come the tonal ruptures conventional toHong Kong cinema. The device suggests an incoherent narration, but Wong modulates affective tone systematically. For instance, he recruits tonal contrasts so as to broadly differentiate plotlines. Whereas the first story in Fallen Angels is generally characterized as somber, the second story mostly displays an almost antic, surrealistic tenor. Within these broad strokes, however, are subtler deviations. The gloomy first story, for instance, is punctuated by the overtly sardonic episode introducing Killer’s fatuous classmate—an episode creating a strong tonal rupture with the assassination scene that immediately precedes it. Such moments of levity are more typical of the film’s second story than the first. By the same token, the riotous second story swerves onto melancholic terrain, most notably when Ho’s father dies. In sum, Fallen Angels exhibits a greater degree of tonal coherence between its major plotlines than is commonly acknowledged. As so often in Wong’s films, moreover, a feature of style or narration (in this case, tonality) is anchored in characterization. Just as the anarchic tone accompanying the second plotline befits the idiosyncratic personality of Ho and Charlie, so the downbeat mood permeating the first story matches the emotional withdrawal of Killer and Agent. Since the narration will mostly alternate between both pairs of characters, tonal fluctuations inevitably arise across the film as a whole.

Inspired by the second story’s absurdity, Wong deviates from realistic causality. In such moments, the syuzhet’s causal links become especially tenuous. An example occurs when Ho persuades Charlie to confront her ex-lover’s fiancée. The narration grants the viewer access to Ho’s private thoughts: “You have to talk face to face. If that fails, you can punch him on the nose. I keep my thoughts to myself. But somehow [Charlie] appears to be able to read my mind.” Inexplicably, Charlie responds to Ho’s thoughts. “I think you’re right. Let’s go.” Telepathy, therefore, provides the causal link to the ensuing sequence, in which the pair search for Blondie. In no sense is the viewer led to infer that these characters are literally mind readers. Rather, the narration generates both comedy and causality by swerving from psychological realism. At the same time, the gambit is broadly consistent with this plotline’s eccentric tone and action. Ultimately, Charlie’s display of telepathy calls attention to a self-conscious narration, not least because it flaunts a mode of causation not generally admissible in popular and art cinemas. Nor, I would suggest, is it permissible in the first story of Fallen Angels, which adheres more rigorously to standards of realism.

The film’s apparently arbitrary episodes invariably harbor narrative meaning, if not causal motivation. Consider again Killer’s random encounter with his obnoxious former classmate, Hoi. Wong invites us to compare the sharply different lifestyles achieved by the pair since their adolescent school days. Despite his crude personality, Hoi epitomizes bourgeois success—a city professional, he flaunts personalized business cards, plans to marry the high school beauty (Killer’s unrequited sweetheart), and is featured in a Time magazine article. Killer, by contrast, carries only a phony business card in his wallet and a mock snapshot he passes off as a family portrait. Stressing their shared history, the episode prompts us to infer that Hoi’s success was at one time also attainable by Killer. Wong presents, in other words, a counterfactual in virtual form, another forked path promising either crime and alienation, or moral conformity and social acceptance. The sequence bristles with implications: averse to decision making, Killer passively slid down the “wrong” path. Had he behaved authentically, embracing choice and responsibility, he might have found social integration and success. The main point is that this syuzhet episode is inconsequential only at the level of causation. Otherwise, it is thematically and narratively meaningful, situating Killer’s inauthenticity within a wider network of alternative choices, missed opportunities, and possible futures.

Still, the viewer’s impression of syuzhet digression remains strong. Subsequent episodes attenuate the plot still further, making the fabula seem diffuse. After the Hoi episode, the film’s second reel refuses to assign Killer or Agent a local task or to establish large-scale character goals. To the viewer’s knowledge, Agent and Killer have not devised future assassinations. There are no cops restlessly hunting the pair or plotting to coax them into a trap. The film’s crime plot has all but dissipated. Generic schemata, often a reliable default when plots become obscure or confusing, offer the viewer little cognitive assistance here. If Fallen Angels initially primes us for romance between Agent and Killer, by the second reel it dissolves this narrative prospect. Romance films often posit two romantically destined protagonists separated by place or time or another external force, but seldom is the protagonists’ distance self-imposed, as it is in Fallen Angels. (In the Mood for Love provides another salient example.) All the tropes of the romance genre have been discarded; indeed, our generic schemata fail us. With both romance and crime plots apparently retired, the viewer is justified in wondering what has become of the film’s story. Crucially, it is at this stage in the syuzhet—as the story risks displacement by parametric style—that Fallen Angels launches its second major story. By initiating a parallel line of action at this juncture, Wong jump-starts the narrative just as its causal impetus seems spent.

Even when the first story seems vitiated, however, it does not completely disappear behind style. During its emaciated stretch of action, the syuzhet presents Agent draped over a jukebox in the bar. To some extent this sequence exemplifies what critics have labeled “the MTV moment,” a segment given over to musical style, which prompts a pause in the narrative. (I critiqued this assumption in Chapter 2.) As Agent swoons to the jukebox tune—Laurie Anderson’s “Speak My Language”—the camera glides over her body, absorbing textures of fabric and flesh (Figure 4.2). For some critics, the story seems to stand still here not only for musical expression but for fetishistic contemplation too.10 The MTV critic’s assumption of narrative retardation (i.e., that MTV moments halt the story) finds an echo in Laura Mulvey’s critique of visual pleasure. In classical Hollywood cinema, Mulvey contends, the eroticized spectacle of the female body creates “a break [in] the flow of the diegesis … [It] tends to work against the development of a story line, to freeze the flow of action in moments of erotic contemplation” (1975: 11). To be sure, the jukebox scene in Fallen Angels refuses to develop plot events; as Brunette might have it, nothing happens. Wong evidently intends for us to dwell on the scene’s mood and sensuality. But this does not engender a radical break from story and character, nor does sensuous absorption arise at the expense of cognitive effort. Narrative meaning permeates the sequence, but in ways that are relatively tacit and implied.

For instance, the jukebox tune asks to be interpreted by character and theme, and not merely subsumed to the functions of sensuousness and mood setting. The song’s lyric evokes both Agent’s profession and existential isolation: “Now that the living outnumber the dead / I’m one of many.” (That Agent herself selects this particular tune, moreover, suggests a subjective attachment to its lyrical content.) Treating the song as subjective commentary allows us to make sense of Agent’s autoerotic behavior in the next scene. If we notice the solitude expressed by the lyric (and, by extension, by Agent herself), her sexual activity becomes strikingly devoid of eroticism. From this perspective, Wong undermines the jukebox scene’s address to the male gaze. The strategies geared to “seduce” the viewer, therefore, are offset by our effort to interpret the song’s narrative significance. Moreover, the spectator responding solely to sensuous style loses sight of character revelation. Both the tune and the scene’s sensuality foreground Agent’s desire for intimacy—which, as I have discussed, is a major character trait. Finally, the jukebox sequence does have causal effect, albeit at a tacit, interpretive level, in the ensuing autoerotic scene. In sum, the film’s style-driven sequences hardly grind fabula progression to a halt.

What of voice-over narration, allegedly the last refuge of filmmakers reliant on postproduction plotting? To be sure, this device bolsters plot cohesion in Fallen Angels, but it also performs other (thematic, narrational) functions, negating the view that voice-over is simply a last-minute solution to the problem of unifying disparate, incoherent plotlines. At a narrative level, the confessional voice-over finds motivation in Killer’s decision to avoid Agent. In lieu of character interaction, voice-over here provides a major source of subjective access, alerting us to the protagonists’ romantic inclinations. Voice-over also crystallizes the theme of authenticity. Wong marks Killer’s death as poignant by reviving a foregoing stretch of voice-over dialogue: “The best thing about my profession is there’s no need to make any decisions,” states the assassin. “Who’s to die, when, where—it’s all been planned by others. I’m a lazy person. I like people to arrange things for me.” Now, however, Wong extends Killer’s monologue, foregrounding Killer as one more protagonist keen to break from routine. “It’s been a bit different lately,” Killer continues. “I want to change this habit. I don’t know if it’s a good decision or not, but at least it’s mine.” This codicil, coming in the wake of Killer’s death, marks the assassin’s fate as tragic, highlighting the folly of his regression into passive and inauthentic routines.

The film’s polyphonic voice-overs ironically underscore the brevity of dialogue spoken within the diegesis. “Speak my language,” implores Laurie Anderson—but few lines are exchanged directly between the characters. When the boisterous Hoi accosts Killer, for example, the taciturn assassin utters barely a word to his former classmate, a narrational strategy not only emphasizing Hoi’s garrulous riffing but aligning Killer with the second story’s mute protagonist (who himself is paired with a character—Charlie—given to constant verbal riffing) (Figure 4.3). Whereas Killer’s reticence signifies a characteristic retreat from social existence, Ho’s muteness conveys a bitter irony, for unlike Killer he craves social interaction and emotional intimacy.

Narrationally, moreover, Ho’s voice-over can be grasped in terms of a general deviation from realism in the film’s second story. Not only does the voice-over device grant Ho the power of speech, but realism is also compromised by Ho’s occasional direct address to camera. Precisely because Ho is unique among the film’s characters to transgress the diegetic boundary, some critics interpret Ho as a surrogate for Wong himself (Brunette 2005: 69; Stephens 1996: 18). Yet it is not necessary to presuppose a literal, autobiographical correspondence between film author and fictive agent. It is enough to understand Ho’s voiceover and occasional look at the camera as instituting art-cinema norms. By means of such localized moments of self-conscious narration, the auteur cues us to broad parallels between his protagonist and his own personal vision. But to construe Ho simply as an author surrogate is to disregard the psychological change assigned to him across the film’s duration. Which incarnation of Ho properly personifies Wong? The one with empathy for others or the one mired in routine, repudiating responsible action? I would argue that Ho’s outlook at the climax of Fallen Angels, relinquishing irresponsible routines and embracing authentic interrelationships, broadly accords with Wong’s worldview. For some critics Fallen Angels concludes on a downbeat note, positing “a chillingly desolate ending” and “a ride toward death” (Cassegard 2005: 19; Teo 2005: 91). But from the authorial perspective I have sketched, Ho’s turn toward authenticity furnishes Fallen Angels with an irreducibly optimistic ending.

I have demonstrated that Wong’s fabula material, syuzhet structures, and narrational strategies possess greater robustness and formal unity than some critical accounts have assumed. The “wispy” and “disorganized” narrative is not to be found in Wong’s oeuvre. Still, it must be acknowledged that for all their strategies of cohesion, Wong’s plots are not eternally fixed structures. Notoriously, the films exist in different versions. Contrasting theatrical prints may be prepared for release in different territories, as per common practice in Southeast Asia. Bordwell (2008a) has examined structural disparities within different cuts of Days of Being Wild, noting contrasts in plot order and preliminary exposition. More than most filmmakers, Wong lets us imagine alternative manifestations of his stories. DVD editions carry swathes of tantalizing footage excised from theatrical versions. The Kino release of Fallen Angels includes an extended ending in which Ho and Agent share a romantic kiss before parting ways, seemingly for good. Criterion’s In the Mood for Love DVD carries a deleted liaison between Chow and Su. Entire plotlines and characters jettisoned from Happy Together emerge as deleted fragments and outtakes in Buenos Aires Zero Degree (1999), which documents the film’s production. And alternative versions of Wong’s films may yet be created. His fondness for revisiting his own work, as in the case of Ashes of Time Redux, augurs the possibility of past films re-emerging in fresh incarnations. Just as Wong’s characters are presented with virtual alternative pathways, so Wong’s spectator is invited to imagine the finished plot in myriad different forms. The films exude “a certain interactive splendor,” as critic Kent Jones remarks. “Somewhere, there’s an alternate universe where the character played by Stanley Kwan [sic] in Happy Together is alive and well, and Maggie Cheung and Tony Leung make love with abandon” (2001).

To a great extent, this narrative miscellany finds its origin in Wong’s strategy of postproduction plotting. Wong assembles a particular syuzhet out of many possible fabulas, but innumerable alternatives are possible. In this regard, Wong is a filmmaker for the twenty-first century—an era of liminal storytelling, fan fiction, Borgesian forking paths, choose-your-own-adventure tales, DVD chapter selections, multiple versions and director’s cuts, alternative endings, and so on. The film’s fabula can be constructed for high complexity (Ashes of Time) or reworked for greater accessibility (Ashes of Time Redux). Invariably, the syuzhet Wong arrives at (albeit very late in the day) furnishes narrational and plot complexity, yet it subjects its difficult strategies to classical principles of construction. In other words, an aesthetic of disturbance carries the day at the levels of story and structure. Narrative comprehension is also roughened at the level of narration, as ellipticality and suppressiveness shine forth as major tendencies. I will uncover in the next chapter how such tendencies operate to complex effect in Wong’s aesthetic of disturbance. And, more broadly, I will examine the significance of genre storytelling to Wong’s allegedly antigeneric cinema.