In 1997, an entire working class was shaken up. The essential market state of Hong Kong was adopted by China and the people, shoppers, and tailors alike were unified in anxiety with the idea that their freedoms would adjust. In a lot of ways it was a transition from one world into the next, and the recent, and frankly abominable, governmental choice to ban filmmaking that fuels or sympathizes with protester parties have only accentuated that within such a short span of time, the dense culture was changing and the people’s trust in it likewise. It’s astonishing, then, that only two years earlier were we able to first experience a film that embodies Hong Kong in peak artistic form. Wong Kar-wai’s Fallen Angels, a movie composed of midnight and lipstick and bullet holes. Released in 1995 to a gust of applause, it proves itself a piece of art that is, both contextually and formatically, deserving of the highest cinematic preservation. Through noises, colors, sheer figurines, and static, it is everything beautiful about the Hong Kong New Wave and everything that censorship is tragically taking away from its own artists. It was evocative on arrival and there’s a lot to say about why it will remain that way for as long as the human appeal to grunge and fringe exist.
In keeping with the practices of Wong himself, a brunt of the lasting charm of the film is in its visual electricity, most well-known and occasionally divisive for its use of extreme wide-angle lenses that can border on fisheye scope. The film was done on a tight budget and in sporadic fashion, as Wong’s “Don’t Ask, Just Shoot” work ethic was often aggressively against the Hong Kong cinema norm. Wide-angle lenses were an easy option that Wong pushed to the edge with cinematographer Chris Doyle to note the size of the state itself. In order to make smaller rooms bigger and big streets massive, the crew had to drop as low as the millimeter numbers would go. This clearly wraps a likely Western audience into the atmosphere of what would be a foreign body for them, but it strengthens a sense of liminal awareness that Wong has held throughout his works in smaller doses. In filmmaking, we are used to voyeurism. The idea that we are “spying” on an ensemble. The constraint of voyeurism, however, is the idea that we are meant to feel vulnerable and complicit to an invasion of personal realms. Doyle’s imagery does not denote a necessity for privacy, though. If anything, it makes the vulnerable quite public. Few setups are quite as romantic or confrontationally humane as Takeshi Kaneshiro’s thousand yard stare in a football court that otherwise appears to be a thousand *miles.*
Heavier than the scale of Hong Kong, however, is the amount of experiential layers to the concrete hallways and picture-frames of the story’s underbellies. Many characters are seen majorly through reflections, deep-fried televisions, and passageways. We are placed as onlookers to the market concept in a neon recess; interjecting halls and awnings, old Ramen shops that blare Nina Simone. Each sequence is a universe itself, one that the locals know by heart but one that never comes close to reality. Under the most perfect lime green lights, something about Wong’s verve for the East feels funereal in hindsight. Many tears are shed, and there is plenty of death (mostly sensationalist but always present), but the biggest loss may just be the reef of commerce that everyone involved had to witness shrivel out with the ushering of a surveillance era. There used to be a time where the people had McDonald’s, music, and cigarette ashes on laminate with the promise of independence. A dreamscape of capital that would spoil, as it was destined to and as it definitely did throughout the past decade of million-body-count revolutionary rallies and speech-silencers seeping into the last doorway that filmmakers and film writers thought was safe. It was chaos, but it was free for a time.
In retrospect, a large portion of why ‘Fallen Angels’ survives politics and theater trends is the capsule it stands for, locked deep in the cabinets of childhoods, adult suffering, the insurmountable burn of our homes forcing our disillusionment. Similar to the way Tarkovsky mourned the Union, Wong and all the artists in symbiosis with him may mourn the republic before “The Republic.” Shanghai, Wong’s childhood home, and Hong Kong, his consistent career muse, will never greet him the same way. The youngest of the people raising their fists to be freed from a security cam future sadly may have never known the luxury of a limitless state. Yet for those who were there, its phantom is present in all the window-shoppers. Qin Qi’s “Thinking About You” holds more meanings than one. Fathers lost, sovereignty shifted, and as of this year, an entire wave of theatrical singularity vaporized in front of us. Of all the things to take away from Wong’s nostalgia, it should be the importance of preservation. We have to keep the pictures alive. Without them, the music dies, and the history dies too. From 1995 to 1997, angst and revolt were the key sentiments. All we’re left with is the encomium.
