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Review
by Kozo: |
Apparently Wong Kar-Wai has found his true voice. That,
or he simply insists on rehashing Chungking Express
with the added bonus of female masturbation sequences
and John Woo-esque assassinations. Fallen Angels
takes the breezy, free-flowing verse of Chungking
Express and turns it into a dark, perpetually skewed
take on Hong Kong. This dark, moody, but triumphantly
quirky tribute to the lost souls of Hong Kong loosely
follows five young people who cross paths as they try
to stop themselves from giving into their loneliness.
Sky King Leon Lai is a lifeless hit man
who feels like getting out of the biz and Michelle Reis
is his sexy (but tragically lonely) partner, who’s secretly
in love with him. She sets up his hits, but longs to
be closer to him. He doesn’t notice and instead takes
up with his former girlfriend, a showy dyed-blond played
with boundless energy and affecting emotion by Karen
Mok. Simultaneously, a mute, child-like grifter (Takeshi
Kaneshiro) wanders the night, earning money by getting
his unwilling customers to pay for his various services
(among them hairdresser, launderer, and ice-cream man).
His life changes when he runs into his first love, a
bad-hair day Charlie Young who loudly laments her lost
boyfriend Johnny.
Wong’s most audacious experiment
in cinematic language (even more than Ashes of Time), Fallen Angels succeeds at taking us further into
the dark alleys of Hong Kong’s soul. Aided and abetted
by award-winning cinematographer Christopher Doyle,
he uses whole palettes of neon color and wide-angle
lenses to imbue his trademark themes of love and loss
upon some truly dark, desperate souls. The acting is
fine all around, though Takeshi Kaneshiro is the heart
of this film and Charlie Young nearly steals the show
by chewing more scenery than Carina Lau did in Days
of Being Wild. Karen Mok won a Hong Kong Film Award
for her performance. (Kozo
1996) |
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