I watched Wong Kar-wai’s film Fallen Angels, have to say it’s a wonderful movie. Perhaps what Fallen Angels talks about is the distance among human beings. Among Karwai Wong’s works, this one adopts the largest number of close shots. The closer the shot is to the actor, the closer the audiences can approach to the characters’ inner world. In this work, characters’ face or body often occupies over half of the space.

However, under the exaggerated and distorted ultra wide angle lens, a strange and alienated feeling is presented by the characters. The shot of double characters is also likewise. Let’s take the scene that Wong Chi-Ming ran into his old classmate and the emotional scene between Punkie and Chi-Ming as an example. Under the extraordinary vertical feeling spatially presented by wide-angle lens, even if characters are in the same room, it seems that ages had already passed. The shaky shots and mysterious lighting, as well as the dreamy background music also add certain illusionary taste to the film, just like the reversed time and space.

By virtue of the marginal figures, Wong delivered the loneliness feeling to us (or experienced our loneliness through these figures), but he didn’t offer an exact answer to this. Perhaps it’s because the answer is too complicated. Most of the characters in the film are on the verge of losing their job (or simply unemployment), and grumpy, making them incompatible with the mainstream society. Wong pointed to this ostentatious materialistic society. He left several shots in the film especially to those products of urban civilization. The huge sign of McDonald’s. Lay’s potato chips in the bar, the Coca Cola that attracted too much attention, Heineken beer, elevated train, TV, VHS, jukebox, and Panasonic fax machine, which was still quite prevailing in 1995, as well as Chi-Ming’s residence, which was just like a cage, it is apparent whether these products made it convenient for interpersonal communication, or enlarged the distance among people. Fallen Angels presents that distance is irreversible in a desperate way. Hence, how those people who are eager for communication and warmth, but also afraid of being hurt by the cruel reality position themselves and their happiness in the society becomes an eternal topic of Karwai Wong’s films.

Mirror is always an important tool in Karwai Wong’s films. The character’s emotions are extremely suppressed in Fallen Angels, when they cannot care about others, lamenting themselves becomes the only channel, through which they release their emotions. The five “angels” in the film sealed up their heart with mirrors. Consequently, all they could see is merely the image of their inner heart, and they could no longer understand others. It was also because of this that they exclaimed over not being understood by others. Thus, the blocked communication was stuck in a vicious circle.

Really love this film, again, it’s the style of Wong Kar-wai. His film always inspire me during this semester. Not only on the shooting style, also on the story, mise-en-scene, the emotion in his film.