Fallen Angels (1995) (Blu-ray) (Taiwan Version) Blu-ray Region A

Following Chungking Express with the same colourful settings and familar character types, Fallen Angels is much more an exercise in style than Chungking Express. Wong Kar-Wai and Christopher Doyle, this time with Mark Lee Ping-Bing on second unit photography, go for a much moodier and more contemplative feel to suit the slightly darker material. The first story concerns a hitman, Ming (Leon Lai), who likes to keep both his business and his private life simple and without complications, which necessarily means keeping them apart. Someone else makes his decisions for him, where to go, when to go and who to kill - all of this is relayed to him through a partner he never meets. Disillusioned by his work, Ming quits and takes up with a girl called Blondie (Karen Mok). His partner (Michelle Reis) however wants to find him. Deeply aroused by the mental image she has built up around the mysterious killer, she has fallen in love with a man she has never met and has one last request for him, if she can find him.

The second story, which interweaves with the first rather than being presenting in sequence as in Chungking Express, features He Qiwu, again played by Takeshi Kaneshiro - the son of the door manager for Chungking Mansions. Although there are some similarities to his character in the first film, this one is a kind of playful remix. In Chungking Express, #223 was He Qiwu's police number, here it's his old prison number; in the first film, the character ate expired pineapples to extend hope that his broken relationship wasn't over, here it is a can of expired pineapples that caused He Qiwu to be mute since the age of five. Rather wild and crazy in a mostly harmless way, the young man makes his living by using the premises of other businesses after hours when no one else is about, so if you are looking for late-night laundry, vegetables at 3:00am in the morning, or untimely ice-cream cravomgs, He's your man. Even if you don't have such a need, He Qiwu proves to be a persuasive businessman for all his muteness - mainly by dragging and manhandling customers into his shop. There is only one person who is a match for him, and that is Charlie Yeung (Charlie Yeung), a young woman who was dumped when her boyfriend Johnny took up with a woman called Blondie. Together, this extremely odd couple finds wild and crazy ways to get over the losses and disappointments in their lives.

Fallen Angels is not as immediately likeable as its predecessor Chungking Express, but in many ways it is all the more thrilling for seeing just how much further Wong Kar-Wai can stretch a style and a concept. This is something the director would also do later in his career with In The Mood For Love and 2046, one film being the flipside of the other - and the same principle is applied here. In The Mood For Love, like Chungking Express, explored the anticipatory thrill and the tantalising possibilities of meeting someone new and falling in love, endlessly drawing out the moment without there ever actually being any consummation of the relationship, using seductive repetitive cues of mood, colour and music to draw the viewer into its spell. Like 2046, Fallen Angels is much more moody, abstract and languidly paced, exploring the darker side of meeting when the characters share a common sense of loss or unrequited love - both parties use an intense liaison as a brief haven to shelter from the painful memories of past relationships. In many ways, this is a much more challenging concept, particularly in the manner in which Wong Kar-Wai approaches it here in Fallen Angels. You typically would not expect to find such bittersweet emotion in the ultra-stylised violence of the first section where the blood literally drips down the camera, nor in the frankly knock-about comedy of the second. You would not even expect these two very different sections to sit well side-by-side at all, but Wong Kar-Wai has a way of getting to the underlying pain that lies beneath and using one to feed off the other in a way that is barely definable and scarcely perceptible but for the simple fact that it works.

And again it works because the approach and technique supports the content in every detail, the camera fetishistically lingering over people and objects - the colour of a Wurlitzer jukebox, the slow-motion exhalation of cigarette smoke, Michelle Reis in leather, fishnet stockings and high heels writhing in bed - all contribute to mood rather than characterisation, something that is echoed in Frankie Chan's music score, which is much more abstract than the catchy music cues of Chungking Express. There are plenty of moments here nonetheless to keep fans of Chungking Express happy, not least of which is Takashi Kaneshiro's capricious performance - one of the great comedy performances of all time in my opinion - and the links his section makes with the Chungking Mansions and Midnight Express locations of the first film. Just don't expect a rerun of the first film. Like 2046, many will see the similarities in the surface technique and locations of the film that preceded it and expect more of the same, but Wong Kar-Wai is too restlessly experimental a director to repeat himself. Despite those surface similarities, Fallen Angels pushes his style and technique further and sees the director playing with light, colour and sound to express and refine mood and character with ever greater precision. As with 2046 nonetheless, many will see Fallen Angels as an indulgence too far, but there are greater treasures to be found here if one is prepared to look for them.

DVD
Fallen Angels is released in Korea by AltoDVD. The film is contained in an individual slimline cardboard digipack, held together with a slipcase displaying the poster artwork for each film on front and back. The DVD is encoded for Region 3 and is in NTSC format.

Video
The video quality is striking. I've seen the film before on a number of DVD and VCD editions, I've never seen it look as good as it does here. I wouldn't have believed it could look this good, since even the previous best editions of the film still showed numerous tiny marks and scratches that I thought must have been inherent in the rough and ready nature of the making of the film. Not so. On this edition of Fallen Angels, there are no marks or scratches on the film at all. If you have seen any other edition of the film on DVD, you can imagine exactly how big a difference that makes. What might not be evident from the screenshots accompanying this review however is just how fluid and stable the film now looks, with not a single flicker or digital artefact, perfectly detailing even the most blurred motion and time-lapse sequences of the film. Doubtlessly restored, the quality of the prints here reveals Fallen Angels to be as clear and colourful as we have become accustomed to expect from Wong Kar-Wai in films like In The Mood For Love and 2046. Only blacks are relatively less well defined, not showing a great amount of shadow detail, and Fallen Angels is slightly softer than Chungking Express, but with the use of various filters, that may well be intentional. Fallen Angels also occasionally displays some digital noise at the bottom left of the screen, but as this is about one-pixel in height, it will only be visible on displays with no overscan whatsoever. Some might find the 1.78:1 aspect ratio of the transfer an issue, but in practice it appears to make very little difference to the compositions of the film. Otherwise, the film here looks outstanding and it is hard to conceive of it looking any better than it does here.

Audio
Perhaps more controversially, the original Dolby Digital 2.0 track of the film has been dropped in favour of new Dolby Digital 5.1 and DTS 5.1 remixes. Considering the rights to the film belongs to the filmmakers themselves and that the film has doubtlessly been restored by Jet Tone/Block 2 Pictures, I would expect that these would be official restorations and remixes of the original soundtrack. (Incidentally, the copyright date at the end of the credits is 1999, but I don't know what that indicates.) The surround mixes here are fabulous. There is a fair amount of hiss still audible on the dialogue track - evidently a consequence of the improvisational nature of the original analogue recording - but the dialogue is clear with none of the roughness, crackle and sibilance found on previous editions of the film. The central channel that contains the dialogue sounded slightly low in the mix on my sound set-up, particularly when the music score and other ambient effects, both of which play a major part of in the film, were being output on the other channels - but the overall effect of the new mixes is powerful and enveloping, as this film ought to be, with no noticeable re-recording or addition of new sounds or music cues. It's hard to hold any grudge against the non-inclusion of the original 2.0 mixes, which on any previous DVD edition has always sounded very rough and crackly.

Subtitles
English and Korean subtitles are provided in a clear white font and are of course both optional. They are good and in keeping with the traditional tone of the films, but not perfect. There are no annoying grammatical or spelling errors, but rather a few typos, dropping a couple of letters here and there.

Extras
The film comes with Korean Commentary, which will not be of any use to English viewers. I would be curious about how anyone could provide a commentary for such an elliptical film as this, but without knowing what it consists of, I can't make any comment on quality or appropriateness. Other than that we have a Trailer (2:43), letterboxed but looking slightly squashed-up, for Fallen Angels. This seems to make use of a number of outtake scenes from the film.

All editions present the film at a ratio of 1.78:1. There are slight but noticeable differences in the framing of each of the editions - the US edition being clearly zoomed in. The US Miramax edition is also the least accurate in terms of colour timing, the Korean to my eyes having moreover much more clarity, detail of tone, sharpness and lack of grain than the Artificial Eye release. The most evident difference between the Korean R3 and the other editions, is in the cleaning up of the thousands of tiny marks and scratches that riddled the film.

Overall
Initially undertaken as a filler project, Chungking Express and its follow-up Fallen Angels are far from throwaway films - Wong Kar-Wai and cinematographer Christopher Doyle rather take the opportunity to do something fresh and immediate, experimenting with spontaneous storytelling and filmmaking techniques that would lead the way towards the more intuitive and improvisational explorations of character and mood in Happy Together, In The Mood For Love and 2046. Both these groundbreaking films still hold that sense of fun, freshness and willingness to take chances that lies at the heart of the characters whose stories they tell. This is all the more evident when you are able to see the films in the full-colour, unblemished glory that the Korean DVD transfers provide. If this is how good Chungking Express and Fallen Angels can look, the prospect of Ashes of Time being restored to a similar level is almost too staggering to contemplate.

by Noel Megahey - DVD Times