Fallen Angels

Hong Kong shortly before the turbulent year of 1997. A city whose night streets are filled with figures who rarely cross paths, yet between them we find a number of parallels. A hitman (Leon Lai) who prefers to have his work laid out for him by someone else, his companion obsessed with the killer’s persona (Michelle Reis), even though she has almost never seen him, and a silent young man (Takeshi Kaneshiro) who occupies strangers’ shops at night—these are some of the protagonists of a masterfully constructed, fragmentary narrative in which internal monologues far outnumber the characters’ conversations. In one of his melancholic films, Wong Kar Wai composes a hypnotic audiovisual poem about loneliness under the cover of darkness. In a bold style, he skillfully combines handheld camerawork, extremely wide-angle lenses, and a pulsating soundtrack, allowing the film’s main character—Hong Kong—to shine. Come and let yourself be swept away by the cinematic sibling of Chungking Express and one of the most distinctive titles of 1990s Hong Kong cinema.