Fallen Angelos

 

1 Fallen Angelos

At the time when I first saw Fallen Angels I was admittedly stoned and the movie was still available as a bootleg on YouTube.com. That was around January 2017. It has since been taken off YouTube. It is available to watch for free on archive.org, if you have never seen this movie before. 

When I first watched this movie, I felt that it was visually stunning and the characters were very intriguing. Plus, I loved the way Cantonese sounded, especially Li Jiaxin's voice, and I probably thought Jin Chengwu was super sexy too (Taiwan). 

Over the years, I have re-watched this movie multiple times, because it is indeed visually stunning and it is also very confusing, plot-wise. For instance, I didn't realize that Angel #2 (aka Li Jiaxin aka the assassin's partner (Cantonese: 拍档 paak dong) was printing out fake counterfeit money for the purpose of paying her boyfriend (?)/partner/hitman for the assassinations that she sets up for him to carry out. I always saw the scene where she prints out fake money from a machine and was distracted because it was the first time I'd seen counterfeit money printed out before. And because her beauty is stunning. But recently rewatching it, I realized that she was manipulating Angel #1 (the assassin) by paying him fake money for jobs that she made up for no reason (?). 

I also thought that she was a prostitute at first. 

2 Forgetting and Remembering

A major theme of Fallen Angels is forgetting. Forgetting who you were, forgetting where you are, forgetting who you were with before, and forgetting about the future. Futurities and lost pasts. 

忘记他。Mong Gei Ta (Forget him - Shirley Kwan) is my favorite song on the movie. 忘记他等于忘记一切。Mong Gei Ta deng yu mong gei yut cai. (Forgetting him is equivalent to forgetting everything.) Angel #2 forgets about Angel #1 by finally putting a hit on him, though this is probably more a metaphor than a literal murdering. She forgets about him, and this is equivalent to death. He forgets about her by serendipitously finding the girl that he once had forgotten about (Angel #5, blondie). And Charlie, whose boyfriend Johnny had initially forgotten her and left her for "blondie" (金毛leng), forgets about Angel#3 (Takeshi Kaneshiro/Jin Chengwu/金城武 (Taiwanese hottie and mute in the movie)) at the end, when she pivots in her career as crazed nightlife roamer and becomes a flight attendant, Wong's pet metaphor for someone up in space in aerial purgatory (also a minor element in Fallen Angels prequel, Chungking Express). 

Cómo olvidar alguien? How do you forget someone? Maybe the forgetting happens over a period of time, but it never really happens. Just like in the movie, nothing really happens. Yes there is a +10 body count and at least two sex (one-person, but sex nonetheless) scenes but it is still somehow a very slow movie. Even though there is a lack of the step-printing and time-slowing techniques used in the second half of Chungking Express (重庆深林), there is still a sense that time is moving very slowly and quickly at the same time, the same sensation as riding a subway train and seeing the train on the opposite tracks moving past through the window. One isn't technically moving while sitting on a subway train, but you are still moving very fast through space. #relativity 

3 The Prostitute who Masturbates

My favorite character in this movie is definitely the assassin's "partner" (拍档）. (My second favorite character is probably He Zhi Wu, Taiwanese hot mute, and third only cuz she gets so little screentime but by no means because of lack of character is Charlie, and fourth Angel #5 Blondie and fifth the assassin Angel #1 because he's kind of an incel.) In the movie, she lives in a hotel, and she dresses up in fishnet tights, and works at night, visiting seedy mahjong parlors, so it's easy to assume she's a prostitute, but actually not. She kind of just does whatever the fuck she wants. She is truly a $fallenangelo$. 

In the movie, which starts with her, she visits a bar and listens to music on the jukebox ("daddy daddy, it was just like you said, now that the living outnumber the dead" I have no idea what song this is). She returns to the hostel where she masturbates in the same bed where her partner/the "assassin" sleeps in. The concept of "partner" is loosely used here. They're partners in the sense of romantic partners, but also in the sense of business/killing partners. The assassin kills whoever she tells him to kill. (In a way, a metaphor for a toxico relationship where the boyfriend closes off the world for his 拍擋partner）。

Is this truly love? A fantasía sexual where one of the parties is not included? It is in a way a metaphor for prostitution, a one-sided transactional sexual relationship where one person is masturbating the other. In a way, aunque she is not a prostitute, she is a prostitute, in every way. It is only until the end when she is riding on the motorcycle with Taiwan angel He zhiwu (speechless ex-convict) that she is truly in love, in my opinion. I've seen online video essays and comments that seem to interpret that beautiful prostitute angel li jingxia is actually in love with her partner the putative assassin, but I don't think this is true. I think it is purely a one-sided sexual relationship. Cue Amy Winehouse, In My Bed (It's something I know you can't do/separate sex with emotion). 

4 Cigarettes 

I have to say, not smoking cigarettes really makes it easier to type. That being said, there is not a single character in the movie who doesn't smoke cigarettes (on-screen, auxiliary background characters like the homeless man in the laundromat, the woman buying eggplants, and the long-haired man with goatee don't smoke onscreen, but presumably do offscreen...). What do the cigarettes represent? Sexuality? Ennui? Time-lapsed, time passing? Fashion? I must say, even if it doesn't mean anything, li jingxia looks awesome smoking in a black vinyl dress and fishnets and heels on top of a red bedspread, the cigarette emphasizes Charlie's looniness and perhaps her wasted breath, and jin chengwu looks ssexy with a cigarette hanging out of his mouth as he rides through the tunnel. What is your favorite outfit that the assassin's girlfriend wears in the movie? Comment below (I don't know how comments work on here yet). 

5 Giving

Jin Chengwu's character is a lone mute who works at night in closed shops. He may or may not also be a murderer on the side (the machete and the unfortunate long-haired man in the latter third of the movie). He is in a way ever generous and giving, always offering services and products to people who may or may not need them. Is he a good match for Lin Jingxia's character, or does she actually belong with the assassin? 

I kind of waver back and forth on this 

6 Mental Illness 

I'm not a professional psychologist, but I would wager that Charlie out of all the characters in Fallen Angels has mental illness, and maybe suffers from delusions. In the scene where she talks to her now ex-boyfriend Johnny, she seems to be unable to accept that he is getting married to another woman. This is a common trope in media, the one of the devastated mistress being blindsided by her boyfriend marrying someone else, or at least I've seen it once or twice elsewhere. 

But what is love if not a delusion? 

7 Love, or What it Is 

A common theme throughout the 90's Wong Kar-Wai canon is the question of what is love. He compares love stories in Chungking Express through two separate couples, in Fallen Angels through a more multi-threaded love story, and in Happy Together through the expatriation of a homosexual couple from Hong Kong in 1997, the year Hong Kong was returned to China from the British. Is love a matter of coincidences, a spark amongst a densely populated city like the neon-drenched 90's Hong Kong? Or is love a deliberate and ongoing labor like Faye Wong's character cleaning the policeman's apartment in Chungking Express or Fallen Angel #2 cleaning the hostel that she and the assassin both inhabit in Fallen Angels? Is love just a fleeting moment in life, like the ending of Fallen Angels? Is love tragic...? Or is love euphoric...? 

8 No me hablès 

I would not be writing about this movie if it weren't for archive.org. The movie is available to watch for free at archive.org. Google "fallen angels internet archive" or follow this link: (__________pending)

# Personal/endnotes cómo infinite jest

a current song obsession: "aunque soy muy puta, no le digo que si" -Six Sex, Area 69

b current obsession: making a reggaeton playlist on my soundcloud so I can be more acquainted with the reggaeton genre and also trying to learn spanish for fun and for utility

c from wikipedia: the literal term "Fallen angel" does not appear in any Abrahamic religious texts, but is used to describe angels cast out of heaven or angels who have sinned. Such angels often tempt humans to sin

d word of the day: pseudepigraphic 

e soundcloud.com/60secondfairytales

~si yo lo quiero como ayer ~