Hong Kong is a city of a million and one stories. We encounter two of them. A mysterious killer (Leon Lai) stalks the city at night, engaging in his job as an effective hitman, eliminating various people who unfortunately fallen on the wrong side of the influential underground figures that run the city, and dictate the way in which the region should be run. He is aided by an equally mysterious woman (Michelle Reis), who he never sees, but is in constant contact with, whether speaking over the telephone where she informs him of the next job, or when she cleans his apartment when he isn’t there, and secretly starts to fall in love with a man she has apparently never met, but feels a very deep connection to. Not far away is Ho (Takeshi Kaneshiro), a mute man who has made a living from his penchant for criminal activity – he has recently escaped from prison and makes his living breaking into the businesses of others and selling their products or providing their services as if he was the proprietor himself. He meets Charlie (Charlie Yeung), a fragile young woman who has been wronged by her ex-boyfriend, and thus strikes up a friendship with the strange young man she constantly encounters, with the two finding common ground in their shared inability to be perceived as entirely normal, especially in contrast to those around them who are leading conventional lives.

Wong Kar-Wai first came to my attention, as I would assume he did for many people, with Chungking Express. A gorgeous, beautifully-constructed Hong Kong drama that allowed us to look at the city in an entirely different way than had ever been represented before, it was an entry point for many who would find themselves utterly transfixed by the astonishing mind of one of Asia’s great artists. In many ways, Fallen Angels (Chinese: 墮落天使) is a companion piece to that film, as the two have numerous similarities. Most of all, Fallen Angels is a film that was built out of an abandoned idea for a third story in the previous film, with the scraps of what was left behind flourishing into a film that can stand as a brilliant and poetic piece all on its own. Similar in structure as well, focusing on two stories that are entirely unrelated, with the exception of their shared location and underlying thematic context. It also looks at some similar ideas, such as unrequited love, loneliness and family, as well as contrasting in some ways (Chungking Express focused on two characters in law enforcement, whereas Fallen Angels looks at a pair of criminals). More than anything else, this film is an astonishingly beautiful piece about individuality, finding and maintaining an identity in a world that is in rapid flux, with cultural and social change happening at a steady pace, the threat of being left behind in the archaic traditions of the past is very real, and palpable to every character we encounter in this tremendously moving work.

Wong Kar-Wai is one of those directors who is not only acclaimed for his talents and style, but also for his work in personifying an entire city. Like many great directors, Wong’s work has been mostly set in one particular city, which he explores through the eyes of numerous different characters, creating a rich and vivid tapestry of life in that particular location at a specific time in history. Wong has commented that his intention in making his Hong Kong films is not merely to tell stories of individuals, but rather to tell the tale of a city itself, rather than just the inhabitants. Both of the films in this unofficial duology have come to be seen not only as great character studies of the individuals who form the focus of the stories but also as remarkable films about a city undergoing rapid change. Hong Kong was on the precipice of liberation – the territory was about to earn its independence, with the impending change looming clearly over the events of the film, and the characters who form the core of the film. Wong is certainly not a director whose style necessarily condones sweeping social statements or any form of direct and ardent activism towards a particular cause – rather, they are delicate and superbly elegant tales of routine and ordinary life for a subset of individuals who don’t particularly stand out on their own, but through the director’s visionary perspective, they are constructed as extraordinary, complex beings who are undergoing mental and emotional processes in much the same way as their home is undergoing political and cultural change.

We see Wong not only looking at these people but also at the region as a whole, gently observing the traditions and customs intermingling with the encroaching influence of the West, which has formed a very different landscape to what we normally see. The influence of other cultures is made very clear in Fallen Angels, but not in a way that could be mistaken as derision to the loss of unique culture, or reluctance to accept that change is inevitable – Wong is a director who has always made it very clear how he admires the blend of cultures that occurred in Asia, especially during a time when it was more a matter of cross-cultural influence rather than colonial domination. In a city such as Hong Kong, there are so many different groups and demographics, it would be misguided to make a film about such a city and not depict it as the melting pot that it is – even one of the main characters mentions how he is an outsider in the city, having been born and raised in Taiwan, moving to Hong Kong years earlier. Fallen Angels makes terrific use of cultural influences from both sides of the world, liberally borrowing from Western culture in a way that is effective rather than necessary – for example, consider Wong’s use of popular music and other iconography in his films (Chungking Express would not have been the same without Faye Wong’s memorable obsession with “California Dreamin'”, which forms the centrepiece of that film), and in Fallen Angels, he once again peers behind the cross-cultural curtain, extracting elements of other cultures to enrich this film – the ending to this film, a beautifully minimalistic moment of nihilistic ennui and content resignation to the unpredictable nature of fate – is only bolstered through the hauntingly beautiful rendition of The Flying Pickets’ cover of the seminal pop classic “Only You”, which brings this film and its underlying sense of poetic sentimentality, full circle.

There are so many different faces presented throughout the entirety of Fallen Angels, and in choosing to focus on a few of them, Wong has given us another astoundingly brilliant ensemble of actors. At the core are Leon Lai, as the quiet but sentimental assassin who does not enjoy his job, but rather sees it as a means to survive, and Takeshi Kaneshiro, as the silent and deadly criminal who compensates for his lack of vocal ability with a certain sinister charm that makes him an almost magnetic force for Charlie Yeung’s character, who may be the only person in this film who manages to penetrate the mind of this emotionally-distant but good-natured young man who is also just looking for a way to get by. Fallen Angels is not necessarily beloved for its performances, despite having some remarkable actors playing these parts. However, there is a point where we start to relate to these characters more than we normally would tend to, with their stories being truly compelling and to which we can easily connect without any difficulty, despite the fact that these are not traditionally resonant archetypes. Kaneshiro may be the best in the cast, purely because his unhinged, almost comical performance, is quite contrastive to his more subtle work that was seen before – he plays the character of Ho with a certain absurd intensity, and through the fact that his character doesn’t speak, but we are able to hear his thoughts, there is a certain intimacy evoked between the audience and his performance. Wong is a director who relies very much on his actors to bring these stories to life, and while the majority of what they do is rather pedestrian on paper, through their portrayals, where they are able to develop these characters, forming their idiosyncrasies and working on their defining imperfections, they give absolutely spellbinding performances that prove that the director is one of the most generous when it comes to giving his actors memorable characters to play.

Visually, Wong does not disappoint with Fallen Angels, and once again, he has noted how radically different his approach to this film was in contrast to its companion film. Here, the camera lingers a bit too close to the characters, which isolates them from the rest of the world – taking up the majority of the screen for most of the film, these characters are portrayed to be severely lonely, with those around them fading into the background where they fail to be noticed by the viewer, who is far too captivated by the images presented to us in the foreground. In the scenes where we peer into Hong Kong itself, Wong portrays it in a certain uncanny beauty – the streets are bathed in neon, glimmering and dazzling with consumerist propaganda and promises of some validation in the form of carnal satiation, which creates an uneasy sense of disconnect between the natural recesses of the human mind, and the world around us, where everything seems to be motivated by some capitalistic motivation. The way Wong depicts the film visually is stark and creates a disconcerting effect – and the film being set entirely at night allows for further exploration of themes of mystery and intrigue, where absolutely nothing is as it seems, and the visual style, while undeniably gorgeous, is almost unsettling in its approach. This is very much a stark contrast to Wong’s more traditionally beautiful films, which depict the poignant details of everyday life and extract every bit of meaning from them – Fallen Angels does the same, but for the purpose of commenting not on life’s beauty, but on its fragility and volatile idiosyncracies.

Fallen Angels is the quintessential Wong Kar-Wai film – it is tragic and funny in equal measure, and warms the heart of the viewer just as much as it breaks it. The director once again demonstrates his skilful ability to get to the core of the human condition, looking at the daily lives of a group of different people who just go about their routines without much thought for anything other than their own survival. It is a gorgeously empathetic work about isolation and disconnect, shown in a way that is meaningful and poignant, but not without glimmers of hope and optimism. None of the characters in Fallen Angels are particularly fortunate, even by the end of the film. Their futures are just as ambigious as their past, and it is very likely that their worst days are not yet behind them. They are ordinary individuals existing in a world that is rapidly changing, and unless they change their way of life, they will most certainly be left behind. Wong proves himself a great social commentator with this film, finding the resonance in a couple of contemporary parables that are beautifully-constructed, deeply meaningful and unquestionably memorable.