The Representations of Urban in Fallen Angels of Hong Kong

Wong Kar-Wai’s Fallen Angels (1995) is one of the quintessential cinematic visions of turn of the century Hong Kong. A companion piece to his international breakthrough Chungking Express (1994), Fallen Angels is its more melancholic and morose twin. With stunning cinematography by Christopher Doyle, Wong Kar-Wai captures nocturnal Hong Kong as a zone of transience, illusion, and desperate hunger for intimacy and connection. The film illuminates Hong Kong’s peculiar characteristics as a Global City, which relate to both its unique history as well as its contemporary economic role. Wong Kar-Wai achieves through his depictions of Hong Kong’s skyline and cityscape, its transit and economic infrastructure, and the strange behavior of the city’s denizens.

A Brief Summary of the Narrative

Before moving into an an analysis of the representations of the urban in Fallen Angels, it will be instructive to give a quick summary of the film’s narrative. Fallen Angels tells the interlocking stories of three characters: a solitary hitman, his lonely partner, and a mute fugitive who works as an unauthorized shopkeeper. The hitman decides to retire from his violent profession, while his partner yearns for romance. The partner lives in the same building as the the mute. The mute survives on the fringes of society, clashing with his father and his wayward customer.

The narrative hinges on the hitman’s relationship with his partner as well as a woman named Blondie, while the mute falls in love with a jealous, jilted madwoman. The hitman’s partner has him killed when she discovers he is planning to retire. The mute’s father dies, and the madwoman forgets him as she discovers a new love. The film concludes with the mute giving the hitman’s partner a ride home on his motorcycle.

Visions of a Postmetropolis

Like other Wong Kar-Wai films, Fallen Angels’ narrative unfolds with a logic that is more poetic than it is literal. This style imbues the film with a dreamlike quality that can be disorienting to some audiences. But themes of alienation, loneliness, confused memories and illusions, dislocation, and the struggle for intimacy come through clearly in the actions of the characters and the distinctly photographed images.

These themes have a context in Hong Kong’s history. Historically, Hong Kong was settled by migrants and travelers from other places. This has given the city a “floating identity” as the “refugees or expatriates” who populated the city thought of their home as “temporary stop” (Clemens and Pettman, 131). Therefore, it is no surprise that Fallen Angels shows Hong Kong as a fractured and discontinuous “liminal community” (Clemens and Pettman, 131).

The city’s and contemporary economic role is also crucial to consider. A locus of commerce and finance capital and a exemplar of rapid development in East Asia, Hong Kong has all the characteristics of a globalized postmetropolis. Post-metopolis is a term used to describe “the future-oriented urbanism of our late-capitalist age of globalization” (Lindner, 327). This makes Hong Kong the ideal setting for Wong Kar-Wai’s “mood study of urban emptiness and disconnection” (Lindner, 329).

In the densely packed urban environment of Hong Kong near the end of the 20th century, many residents of the city languish in solitude, lacking the intimacy and community that normally comes from traditional family and village ties. The hitman and his partner do not interact in person, trading information and messages via “mail-drops, faxes, and other forms of distanced and depersonalized communication” (Lindner, 330). When the hitman runs into an old schoolmate, the schoolmate reminisces about the past only to crudely switch to the language of economic transaction. Meanwhile, the mute struggles to connect with his father except through the technological medium of video. The mute’s object of affection by turns ignores and forgets him.

These are the denizens of an “unsettled society” where “loneliness and a sense of dislocation” are endemic parts of life (Clemens and Pettman, 132). Fallen Angels functions as a “vivid depiction of the people who inhabit the spaces between Hong Kong’s Shifting Identities” (Clemens and Pettman, 132). We see this in how the film’s characters interact with one another and their environment.

Grasping for Intimacy

The cast of characters in Fallen Angels share in common a sense of confusion, isolation, and alienation. They all seek or accept intimacy in a stunted manner that is reflective of the highly fractured ‘postmetropolitan’ Hong Kong described in the previous section. Their actions reflect the struggle to form a connection in an alienating environment. In these frequently absurd and often violent attempts to find intimacy and connection, Fallen Angels keenly displays the “impact of globalization on the urban imaginary” (Lindner, 327). The hitman, his partner, and the mute all exhibit behaviors that demonstrate their mutual struggle for intimacy in the atomized, diasporic city in which they reside. Each character acts out this struggle in different ways.

The hitman acts out this struggle with hesitation and reluctance. He does not seek out intimacy and even behaves in a way that suggests he rejects it altogether. But the moments in which he accepts the intimate entreaties of others reveal the loneliness and alienation he shares in common with other characters. In one scene, an old schoolmate recognizes the hitman on the bus. While the schoolmate accosts him with excitable and obnoxious blather, the hitman is cool but polite. Their interaction is shaped by the schoolmate’s objective to make an economic transaction, as the schoolmate attempts to strike up a business relationship and sell life insurance to the hitman.

But the need for shared intimacy is clear, especially in the scene’s final moments, as the schoolmate asks the hitman if he remembers a girl they both once knew in school. The schoolmate says he is soon marrying her, then proceeds to offer him a large wedding invitation envelope. In the hitman’s hesitant pause before accepting the envelope, we can feel the hitman’s strategy in the struggle for intimacy. Reluctance is his strategy. By maintaining a detached and cool manner, the hitman draws those seeking intimacy toward him.

This becomes even clearer in the hitman’s interactions with Blondie. After meeting in a McDonald’s, Blondie and the hitman have an interaction at the foot of the staircase to her apartment that serves as a fitting sequel to the earlier scene on the bus. Blondie repeatedly pushes for the hitman to follow her upstairs, but the hitman quietly demurs, choosing instead to light a cigarette and lie in wait. Finally, Blondie grabs the hitman’s jacket away from him. After another hesitant pause, he chases her upstairs and into the apartment. Reluctance is the hitman’s social mode of operation.

Blurred Lights and Big Buildings

The hitman’s partner’s sense of loneliness and isolation is much sharper. It appears most starkly in the scenes in which she masturbates. Her performance of the ultimate act of solitude is prominently accompanied by music. The first scene of masturbation begins with her playing a Laurie Anderson song off of a jukebox. The film cuts away from the hitman’s partner at the jukebox to a blurry, vertiginous shot of the Hong Kong skyline. The smeared lights of buildings in the Hong Kong night serves as a key moment that connects the loneliness and isolation of the characters to their urban environment. As the camera unsteadily pans across Hong Kong night, we see what she sees as she listens to Laurie Anderson and begins to masturbate. This is a moment of an intimacy with the self and city. The lights and the buildings of Hong Kong fill the vision of a woman as she attempts to reach sensual climax.

The buildings and the lights of the Hong Kong cityscape often enter the frame just before or after a moment of intimacy occurs on screen. At the very end of the film, when the hitman’s partner gets a ride home from the mute, the camera pans up from the pair on the motorcycle to the imposing buildings above them. In the first masturbation scene, the skyline is juxtaposed with the hitman’s partner clutching herself. In the final scene, the skyline is juxtaposed with the hitman’s partner clutching the mute on his motorcycle.

The second scene of masturbation also includes a view of the Hong Kong cityscape. The hitman’s partner once again pleasures herself in bed, but this time she breaks down crying. As she does, the camera moves out the window to the city lights, and a train racing into frame on the subway tracks. It is telling that both masturbation scenes either begin or end with shots of Hong Kong’s cityscape.

Subway Stops and Subverted Shops

Hong Kong’s transit infrastructure serves as an important location in the world of Fallen Angels. In addition to the shot of the subway train that concludes the second masturbation scene, the first scene following the opening titles of the film shows the hitman’s partner hurrying through a subway stop. This scene is later repeated, with the hitman walking the same path as his partner.

Moments in subway stops, streets, shops, bars, restaurants, and other public places frequently feature the characters moving alone in the night. Sometimes, others are present, but in these cases the encounters are fleeting and elliptical, or marked by horrifying and/or absurd violence. The hitman’s partner passes Blondie and recognizes the scent of her partner (Siegel, 290). The hitman enters a bar or restaurant and kills everyone in sight. In a sense, these are moments of intimacy, just as when the mute’s “affection for his father is expressed through his incessant production of video images” (Siegel, 290). But this intimacy is warped by technology and postmetropolitan alienation.

The mute’s struggle for intimacy emerges along the most absurd contours of any of the characters. In addition to his video-mediated relationship with his father, the mute subverts the shops and restaurants of Hong Kong late at night and opens them to earn the business of other night owls. In many cases, the mute actually uses violence and intimidation to force people to accept the products and services he vends. This is a much more bizarre form of violence than that practiced by the hitman, but it is also a very real form of intimacy. When the mute forces a haircut and beard trim on a man, he is demonstrating how “the lived experience of the global city can lead to a state of radical detachment that is far more extreme, alienating, and destructive” (Lindner, 329).

Conclusion

Fin de siècle Hong Kong is given romantic and mysterious life in Wong Kar-Wai’s Fallen Angels. The film’s urban setting is central to its characters, stories and themes. The peculiar alienation and thirst for scarce intimacy animates the characters and action and moods, which bleed into the blurred imagery of Hong Kong’s nocturnal cityscape. In this way, Fallen Angels makes real the phenomena associated with the postmetropolitan Global City, of which Hong Kong is an example par excellence.