| REBELLIOUS JUKEBOX : Wong Kar-Wai's Fallen Angels [8/10] |
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| Tuesday, 15 February 2005 | |
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Though widely regarded as an "add-on" to Wong's 1994 'masterpiece' Chung King Express, Fallen Angels is in fact the more accomplished and enjoyable of the twin films. Both movies work perfectly well on their own - there's no real crossover in terms of plots - but they do complement each other in an organic fashion, occupying the same geographical space (most notably ChungKing Mansions apartment-block and Midnight Express take-away), and consecutive millennial/pre-HK-handover time-frames (Chung King contains numerous references to 1994, Angels to 1995); having the same relentless preoccupation with 'cool'; featuring copious product-placements for Heineken; being made by almost identical crews (including cinematographer Christopher Doyle); and providing actor Taiwanese-Japanese heart-throb Takeshi Kaneshiro with a pair of neatly contrasting roles. Kaneshiro comes across rather better in Fallen Angels, where his character doesn't have any lines apart from interior-monologue voiceover. Kaneshiro's thespian skills are, on the evidence of these two films at least, somewhat limited - his Angels turn often smacks of an actors' exercise piece. But he more than compensates by having such a wild excess of sheer burn-up-the-screen charisma. This time he's He Qiwu, an ex-con ('prisoner 223') who's been mute since the age of five after eating "bad canned pineapple" (both Qiwu's name and his pineapple connection link us straight back to Chung King). A free-spirit loose cannon, Qiwu lives with his sixtysomething father - whom he often films (and pesters) with a miniature video-camera. A hyperactive night-town drifter with a taste for the bizarre, Qiwu services the needs of his fellow night-owls by reopening small businesses after hours. These nocturnal sprees see him tag along with a variety of wild women including the irrepressible Charlie (Charlie Young) - but after his father's sudden death, Qiwu settles down and takes a job at the Midnight Express. As in Chung King, the plot featuring Kaneshiro provides only one half of the film's full story. This time the parallel tale involves a babyfaced, fashionably-clad hitman (Leon Lai) who works in tandem with a young woman (Michele Reis). But instead of Chung King's abrupt half-way-point narrative shift from one plot to the other, Fallen Angels alternates between strands throughout until they come together - in a strikingly satisfying manner - right at the end. Anyone who's seen Chung King will find it very hard to avoid comparing the two films: Fallen Angels has more offbeat humour, more spectacular action (with his twin guns, Lai has several 'John Woo' moments), more poignancy, more fragmentary wildness, and - though both films are fascinating to look at - takes more risks visually. Doyle often gets his camera right into the characters' faces - again and again, our attention is split between these magnified, foregrounded faces and the action unfolding in the rooms behind, including a pair of raucous, spontaneous restaurant brawls. Even more striking is a long monochrome scene in which two characters sit by a cafe window - the camera observes them through the rain-drenched glass, a shuttering technique casting the whole sequence as a series of seductively shimmering stills. And, as is so often the case with Wong, his choice of music for this segment is spot-on (the film features a Wurlitzer jukebox which has more screen time than many of the human characters). Fallen Angels - which admittedly has a few dull spots, and is often a little difficult to follow - works best as a cumulative series of these transcendent, breathtaking sequences, building up to a final minute that must rank among the most remarkable and indelible in the whole of cinema. Neil Young
3rd January, 2005 [seen on VHS in Sunderland, 2nd January] |
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