Fallen Angels (1995): Another dive into Wong Kar-wai’s dizzyingly dark, mercilessly exhilarating world
While nothing con top Chungking Express in my book, Fallen Angels is yet another dive into more of Wong Kar-wai’s genius — to experience his films is to immerse yourself in a realm of pure feeling and psyche, in the full spectrum between human loneliness and yearning.
Some things really only come alive at night, when you give yourself to the dizzying abandon of possibility. In watching this film, breathlessness is the only word I have to describe the feeling in my chest and throat, but of the intense, dangerously inviting kind: like pure light reflected off a sharp blade.
Perhaps not all things in life are meant to be lived through in solitude, and yet, somehow most still are: midnights spent in urban isolation, the painful moments of realizing the inevitability of growing older. The transience of human connection is never easier even after repetition — and yet the yearning for it in spite of it all is the great story of humankind, the great push and pull of being alive.
There is a certain dark beauty in the predictable regression of human nature. I could watch Wong Kar-wai’s characters meandering in that vacuum, like addicts in regress, for hours and hours, again and again.
Also: no man has ever looked as good in film as Takeshi Kaneshiro does in the Wong Kar-wai films. That’s just a fact.
