Two Films by Wong Kar-Wai--Fallen Angels (1995) and In the Mood For Love (2000)

Fallen Angels (1995)--4.5/5
In The Mood For Love (2000)--5/5

I read an interesting article by A.O. Scott of the New York Times several months ago about De Palma defenders/detractors. One of his best points, among many, was that it is really De Palma's formal command that excites his fans--his wondrous sequences of purely visual storytelling, where he carries the film without often needing expository dialogue--but to say that De Palma is the only director who can be so purely visual is really to ignore other greats, including Spielberg and Wong Kar-Wai.

My knowledge of Spielberg is enough that I can think that, yeah, okay, Raiders of the Lost Ark has all those playful sequences that are purely visual jokes--such as Indy pulling out his gun to pop off the flamboyant swordsman--but about Hong Kong based Wong Kar-Wai, I knew absolutely nothing.
Four or five months later, after finally hunting down a couple of his films, I can say with confidence that Wong is probably the most exciting director working in East Asia today (though apparently he made an English-language film in the States, which flopped a couple years back, in large part because some aspects of his style were lost in translation--hopefully he's back in China working on something new.) His filmmaking technique seems rather extraordinary and extraordinarily like the working method of Jean-Luc Godard and his disciple Krzystof Kieslowski--Wong improvises with his actors on set with a bare-bones script that he writes during or shortly before filming. Unlike Kieslowski, who can sometimes feel a little contrived, and Godard, who is undeniably great, but can sometimes grate on you when he has some forceful political point to make, Wong Kar-Wai, judging from what I've seen, is naturalistic as hell, even at his most stylized.
Comparisons with Spielberg and De Palma are also apt, on the level of technique, because all three directors are known for their small sequences dispersed across their broader narratives, sequences that wouldn't feel out of place on the silent screen. But somehow Wong's sequences are more ingrained in his overall narrative technique, which is often quite experimental--Spielberg and De Palma are arty pop, but Wong-Kar Wai is pop art.


Fallen Angels is the more immediately exciting of the two films and feels like a 90s equivalent of one of Godard's earlier gangster-themed films like Breathless or Band of Outsiders. In Fallen Angels, two parallel plot lines deal with a hit man who displaces his affection for his business partner by sleeping with a girl he meets at McDonald's, who is Hong Kongian, but has bleached her hair platinum blond, and another with a young man who is mute and breaks into shops after hours and forces people to be waited upon and served by him with his fists to make a living.

There are many gunfight scenes that seem like arty allusions to John Woo and mainstream Hong Kong action cinema--these scenes are basically throwaway compared to the themes of love, longing and loneliness, which are treated in this film and in In the Mood For Love with romantic gravity without being fake or sentimentalized.

My only problem with Fallen Angels, really, is that the style of it is so over the top and overwhelming that sometimes it can be disorienting--a problem that Eisenstein, who was also very styilized, solved with some more normally shot and paced scenes in his otherwise rapidly cut, fast-paced films. It doesn't help that the picture quality of the edition I watched was somewhat poor, making film look like grainy video at times. Perhaps if I see the new Kino DVD my feeling about this film will jump from 4.5 (fucking amazing) to 5 (masterpiece.)

In the Mood For Love, though, is an out and out masterpiece. Five years and two features later, Wong is here considerably toning down his style, though his use of colors and slow motion is quite voluptuous. In the Mood For Love deals with a Shanghaiese couple living in Hong Kong in the early sixties, who find out that their spouses are cheating on them with each other and get together to discuss and sometimes re-enact the conversations that they assume their estranged husband and wife are having. It wasn't really until the second time I watched this, after seeing Fallen Angels and seeing an interview with Wong Kar-Wai on the second disc of the Criterion Edition of this film that I fully appreciated the attention to detail and emotional subtlety of it, which is a far cry from Fallen Angels on a surface level, but actually only serves to reinforce Wong's auteur status, showing him repeating and developing his same thematic concerns, while also demonstrating that he is completely capable of tailoring the style of his films to whatever he needs to tell the story.

Some things to pay attention to and think about when watching In the Mood for Love, an experience that I highly recommend:

1. Think about the placement of the camera, what is shown and not shown. You will notice that either Maggie Cheung and Tony Leung or both are almost in every frame of the film, whereas you never see the faces of their spouses.


2. Notice how spatial relationships are played with in the editing. Often, the editing conveys Tony and Maggie being close together, while your sense of the geography of each scene may prove that they're not... physically.

3. Notice Maggie's costume changes, as you can judge the passing of time by the dress she is wearing, which is often the only indicator.

4. In the interview with Michel Ciment, Wong mentioned a few details which he regretted were probably lost on Western audiences: the food that is eaten in the film, which would be familiar to Chinese, changes with the passage of time in the narrative because certain things are eaten in certain seasons--another time marker; and the characters in the film are exiles to Hong Kong, which was a British Protectorate until 1997, from Shanghai, having fled Mao, and they all speak Mandarin, whereas the Hong Kong natives speak Cantonese. It's interesting to note that too, although these are both considered "dialects" of Chinese, they are not mutually intelligible languages the way British English and American English are mutually intelligible. Thus, this is really a film about members of an ethnic minority within the Cantonese Hong Kong milieu.

All in all, Wong Kar-Wai is a filmmaker worth watching and watching again. Concurrently with my Bunuel project, which I plan to finish before November, I plan to write from time to time now about more films by Wong and forcefully encourage all my friends, film nerds or not, to give him a shot.