ART OF EUROPE

Wong Kar Wai - Fallen Angels (1995)

[fallen angels] There's this X-Files, a reworking of the Robert Redford Twilight Zone (to a degree), in which a man who cannot die photographs death, once. Scully, ever the sceptic, points it out to be a lens flare.
Somewhere among the red lights and dutch tilts, the neon, the guns,
   shekinah, godhead, whatever you may.

To see Lai move is, to a degree, to imagine Chow Yun Fat to take one in the head. Aside from Lai being a bad ass the recurrent pineapples (as this was originally intended to be a third installment in Chungking Express), well, recur. This mute kid breaks into people's stores after close, pretends they're his and extorts people into buying his amateur services.

And there's a girl named Charlie, so if you were wondering what this has to do with Angels....

Leonard Maltin writes:
Slickly made but emotionally uninvolving (and practically narrative-free) portrait of cultural alienation, which like its predecessor, Chungking Express, focuses on two sets of characters: an assassin and the beautiful colleague who desires him; and a mute ex-con and the woman he covets. Dazzling cinematography, camera angles and editing aside, this is mostly meandering--and as emotionally distant as the characters it portrays.

-- from the Movie & Video Guide:

I'd want to argue this Naturalism in media res, the point of departure from a normal life being long forgotten and tactfully omitted from the material the audience is presented with. The characters suffer a sort of cellular alienation, from which they cannot entirely break free (the Reis character being incapable of touching anyone, He Zhiwu being incapable of talking to anyone, Lai's assassin being incapable of emotionally attaching himself to anyone, including himself). Allusions are made to their happier (+more interactive) pasts: He Zhiwu talks about life before, with Mom; Lai has a Grosse Point Blank episode on a bus. Eliminating the background from the presentation doesn't remove the catharsis; it simply renders that catharsis non-sentimalist. To make a film about alienation anything but detached is to slip into a low burlesque, yielding trite if not shite.

Kuleshov will tell you (if you bust out the Oujia board) that butting two pieces of celluloid together establishes a narrative (because moviegoers, like Iser, shop at the Gap). Bacon will tell you (or Derek Jacobi in proxy) that if you put two people in the same frame then you've established narrative (and one of them is a slave, the other a Hegelian). An impressionistic story is still a story; the line of plot is drawn though not heavy-handed. To claim that a movie is, overall, lacking due to a minimal amount of dialogue is to reduce cinema to mass-produced theatre, to ignore both the camera and the mag stripe as inconsequential when juxtaposed to the worth of the actor, the celebrity. Cinema is not a product of famous faces and tight asses, it is a product of machines and light and sound, projection, not demarcation (as is the novel).

But enough . . . I have Mecha-Streissand in agreement with me . . . I need no more.



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