Recommended song: “Speak My Language” (1993) by Laurie Anderson.
“Fallen Angels” (1995) feels like a fever dream—perhaps even a bad trip. Combine the two elements, and the audience is left with a dazzling but dizzying, glimmering but grim nightmare.
The disorienting quality of Wong Kar-wai’s film follows the principles presented in early German Expressionist films, including distorted environments, stylized lighting, and odd angles. American film historian Foster Hirsch writes, “Expressionist artists pledged themselves to creating works that reveal personal, inner truths rather than to recording a merely objective and external reality” (53). The act of creating a new, subjective truth, which mirrors the characters’ inner selves, imbues the film with the same nightmarish quality found in Expressionist works.
“Fallen Angels” dazes the viewer with odd camera angles, extreme close-ups, and wide-angle lenses that are not afraid to show space. Like many German expressionist artists, such as Kirchner, Kokoschka, Jawlensky, Pechstein, Kandinsky, Nolde, Schmidt-Rotluff, and Beckmann (54), “Fallen Angels” cultivates “an angular, hallucinatory, violently emotional style, one that [seeks] images of chaos and despair (…)” (54).
A perfect example is the scene in which the unnamed killer agent (Michelle Agent) is listening to “Speak My Language” (1993) by Laurie Anderson. The agent is leaning over a bar’s antique radio, with a cigarette hanging loosely from her hand. The scene has a sensual aspect to it, considering the intimate framing of the camera, including close-ups on her thin dress and tights. The smoke from the cigarette curls through the dim, neon yellow light that illuminates the agent. The sexuality of the scene contrasts with the shrill sounds of the soundtrack, adding an unsettling layer to its eroticism. The scene is exempt from narrative logic; its purpose is to immerse the viewer in a purely sensory, dreamlike experience. It is in this scene that the agent allows herself to feel—be it loneliness, solitude, repressed sexual desire, or a mixture of all of them.
Hirsch writes, “A consistent vestige of Expressionism throughout noir is the nightmare sequence, where for a few moments, under the protection of a dream interlude, the film becomes overly subjective, entering into the hero’s consciousness to portray its disordered fragments.” (57). The abrupt cuts throughout the radio scene, featuring the agent’s legs, chest, lips, hands, and hair, may reflect a fragmentation of the character, as if she is being broken down into pieces.
The scene then cuts from the bar to Hong Kong, but the dreamlike quality of the previous scene follows us. The pace is in slow motion, and the scenery is blurred. The sensation while watching invokes the feeling of running down streets under the influence. Bright neon signs are impossible to read as their bright blurriness bleeds into the night.
The physical world, in “Fallen Angels”, constantly morphs into the distressed minds of the characters. All the scenarios are extremely claustrophobic, featuring cluttered apartments with narrow corridors, low ceilings, and very few windows. The viewer feels itchy to leave those tight spaces, anxious to breathe unrecycled air. Even the streets feel oppressive, cluttered, and narrow. There is no feeling of liberty. We are, like the characters, trapped in their reality.
The story of “Fallen Angels” is, like all of its cinematic elements, nightmarish. The plot is confusing, constantly shifting and switching perspectives, and operating in a nonlinear timeline. People are eccentric and act out of reality, scream at each other with little motivation for doing so, and randomly break into fights. All these factors, combined with the very same elements that give the German Expressionist movement its dreamlike quality, make “Fallen Angels” a nightmare worth having.
Works Cited
Hirsch, F. (1981). The dark side of the screen: Film noir. Da Capo Press.
Wong, K. W. (Director). (1995). Fallen angels [Film]. Jet Tone Production. Available on Amazon Prime Video.
