Voxitype Good films always raise compelling questions, whether the format is fiction or documentary fact.

Nayan Gough A great movie, one of the best of this year. There was a bit of confusion at one point in the plot, but nothing serious.

Kien Navarro Exactly the movie you think it is, but not the movie you want it to be.

Cristal The movie really just wants to entertain people.

Pierre Radulescu Fallen Angels: like the companion movie (Chungking Express), it's a pure cinematographic gem born unexpectedly. Wong Kar-Wai and Chris Doyle were working on Ashes of Time, and the project was exhausting. They decided suddenly to put Ashes of Time on hold and to produce quickly something light, unpretentious, just to warm their spirits. There was no script, just a loose idea: some slices of life in today's Hong Kong, kind of romantic comedies with young heroes hanging around Chungking Mansions and Midnight Express. Two vignettes were made this way, with young cops falling in love, drug dealers wearing sun glasses and blond wigs, barmaids becoming flight attendants and flight attendants returning from San Francisco: this was Chungking Express, released in 1994.As the third vignette was unfolding, it became clear for the director that the mood of the story was different, and it deserved a separate movie: that was Fallen Angels, released in 1995. Two completely distinct plots evolving in parallel, and intertwining only in brief moments and only by hazard. A young hit-man getting his assignments through a fax machine and a sympathetic and totally immature mute (played with irresistible charm by Takeshi Kaneshiro, who was also an irresistible cop-in-love in Chungking Express).Well, a mute cannot talk, everybody knows it, but what happens in Fallen Angels is that actually nobody seems able to communicate through human speech. The agent (Michelle Reis - I saw her also in Flowers of Shanghai) who gives the assignments to the hit-man (and even visits his narrow apartment when he is out) is a gorgeous girl, unconditionally in love for his subordinate. However she never meets him and prefers to masturbate instead. It is a terrifying impression of loneliness in a frenetic city, everybody is alone there, on her or his own, deepened in her or his own thoughts and dreams, and everybody's dreams seem crazy while only dreams keep you there to not get crazy.I remember the cabs in a region I used to live for many years: the driver had a small computer on board and all communication with the dispatcher was through the screen, no room for bargaining of any kind, no space for any human feeling, of joy or sorrow, of sympathy or sarcasm. Here in Fallen Angels it's the fax machine, the same sensation of alienation, of loss of humanity. Humans transformed in robots, keeping their human condition for themselves only, through masturbating dreams of impossible love.And it remains the city itself. Mark Rothko has a great observation about the relation between foreground and background in an art work: sometimes the personages (or the objects) have only the function to glorify the background ("... may limit space arbitrarily and thus heron his objects. Or he makes infinite space, dwarfing the importance of objects, causing them to merge and become part of the space world"). The same observation is somehow made by Malevich when analyzing the way Monet had rendered the Cathedral of Rouen: "...when the artist paints, and he plants the paint, and the object is his flower-bed, he must sow the paint in such a way that the object disappears, because it is merely a ground for the visible paint with which it is painted." Is this movie about people alienated by Hong Kong, or is it here a meditative poem about the city itself? One of the personages in the movie has an unexpected sentence, "Buddha said, If I don't descend into hell, who will?" The sentence passes quickly and seems at first sight without any meaning in the logic of the story. Maybe it offers the clue: Hong Kong, this space of "hyper-sub-reality" (as one of the reviewers puts it), this "Űbertraumstadt of ultimate nightmare" (apud another reviewer), actually offers the image of hell, and the heroes of the story descend there, why? To follow the archetype? And if we go again to the observation made by Malevich on Monet and Rouen Cathedral, here in Fallen Angels subject and city disappear in the gorgeous cinematic language: a great movie pushing the cinematic language to its ultimate expression. A couple of great creators: Wong Kar-Wai and Chris Doyle. Let me add here that another great contemporary cinematographer was also part in the team: Mark Lee Ping-Bin.And if I were to choose an image from Fallen Angels, this one would be: the city in the night with its endless traffic and movement and changing lights, near the narrow apartment where the hit-man inspects quietly the fax machine.

chaos-rampant Some movies are tableaux observed from a fixed distance, a remnant of old theatrical ways they don't whisper so we will get up close and listen they shout out at us in our seat, their motions stopping at the edge of that figurative stage created by the camera. A Wong Kar Wai movie throws itself at you, or it stays the distance and invites you to climb the stage and take intimate looks, and none does it better from what I've seen so far than Fallen Angels. This is a movie that sends us hurling at top speed through the electric night of Hong Kong, blurred neon colors bleeding by the camera in splashes of light and shape, then it holes itself up in cheap fleabag rooms or dingy bathrooms to stare itself at the mirror or lie in bed exhausted and inert. This is stylish and cool but Wong Kar Wai is so terrific he goes the extra mile, he makes his stylish awfully poignant. And I like how he can make his films funny without breaking up the tone, without the movie making it seem like it's stopping in its tracks to relieve tension, it's all part of the journey.As with previous films, Fallen Angels tells us a vibrant expressionist story of lonely souls aching for connection, now when the normal folks go to bed the movie's characters crawl out of their holes to call out in the dead of night to anyone who might listen, even those who won't, each character only a moment's stop in another's journey through life. It is frantic, in a constant flux and motion and search for something, as though driven by instinctive Bedouin locomotion. The movie is motioning towards a sense of destination, a warm place those characters can call home and finally rest in, but it starts and finishes before that destination can be reached, hanging in the existential middle like the blurry snapshot of something that moves. The snapshot here is not simply the memento of something come and gone, it's something to be celebrated for its own momentary fleeting beauty. They might go on to reach home or not, but a girl is riding on a motorbike with a man she doesn't know, she knows the road is not that long and that she'll be getting off soon but at that moment she feels good. Then the movie comes out of a tunnel into the break of dawn, and it would be years (maybe not until Mann's Collateral) before we'd get another movie that takes us on a ride like this through the electric night.

RainDogJr Is a shame that here in Mexico city the cinemas are full of American films, i love a lot of American films but i prefer a film like Fallen Angels or Chungking express than films like The day after tomorrow or Rocky Balboa. Here is very difficult to find a film of Hong Kong in the cinemas and also is a little difficult to find it on a DVD store.But i have the luck to buy Fallen Angels and i consider myself a very lucky person because i have the chance to watch a film like this.Fallen Angels is perfect.........for my is the best of Wong Kar Wai (i haven't see all his films but by now i think that this is the best).Fallen Angels is the story of a couple: a hit-man and his girlfriend, the other character is a mute and a girl that he meets in a store and finally there's another character that is a young lady that spend some time with the hit-man.This film is about love and also about relationships.There are two stories: the one of the hit-man, that show to us that he only see his girlfriend for work and also show to us the lonely life of the two....the hit-man meets this young lady and spend some time with her but nothing serious.Finally the hit-man gets killed.The other is about the best character of the film and maybe the best character in a Wong Kar Wai film : a young mute that in the night have a lot of different jobs like sells ice cream or a work as a barber but the problem is that this aren't his business so he enter like a criminal to this places. Later he meets a girl that always is fighting with her boyfriend and the mute fells in love. He has very good times with the girl, goes to a soccer match and also his hair has become blonde because of the love. Finally the girl never come to the other soccer match because she never love him.Also show to us his relationship with his dad, and how he spend most of the time recording to is dad.......Great character and awesome played by Takeshi Kaneshiro (Chungking Express).Finally his dad die and he spend a lot of time watching the tape of his dad........finally he meets the hit-man's girlfriend and he starts to hanging around with her.Well this is a great story but i love a lot all the characters and for me that is the best part of the film.If you want to see one of the greatest love stories and one of the best films ever you must see Fallen Angels...another masterpiece of Wong Kar Wai.Also the best scene in the film is when the mute is watching the tape and remembering his father and also when he meets a boy in the barbershop and later he meets the same boy with his family in the ice cream truck.FALLEN ANGELS 10/10

tbyrne4 I was first introduced to this film about ten years ago (man, its already been ten years!!), along with Takeshi Kitano by a friend who was really into Asian cinema. At the time Beat Takeshi and Wong Kar Wai were not well known in the US at all. All the little fan boys (myself included) were still stuck on John Woo. My friend handed me a bootleg of "Fallen Angels" along with a copy of Beat Takeshi's "Violent Cop". I went home and put them in and thought, "what the hell am I watching!!!?!?? "Fallen Angels" had to be the weirdest, most unorthodox, most elliptical piece of film I'd ever looked at. EVERY SHOT looked weird and wrong. It seemed the director looked at every rule in the Hollywood filmmaker's guide and did the exact opposite! Also, it looked like the whole thing was shot with a security camera. Everything was fish-eyed. Too strange. But something about it made me keep watching. It actually took me a couple of tries to get all the way through it. It was just so odd, and hallucinatory.Then finally, I was able to get through the entire thing in one sitting, and that's when the magic happened. You MUST watch this film all the way through till the end in one sitting in order to "get it". The very end of the film is when the illuminating flash happens and when the film suddenly makes sense. If you do, I promise you, it will be a magical, sad and sweet, and extremely rewarding experience. This film by miles transcends the gangster genre. It is so many things at once. More than anything, in fact, it is a love story. But a love story in the same way (odd as it may sound) that "Last Picture Show" is a love story. It's about being madly in love with someone who will never be able to love you back.I actually liken this film to some of Sam Shepard's absurdist theater pieces from the 60s and 70s. Where for much of the duration you don't quite understand what you're looking at, although it seems the director MUST have some sort of plan, and then, at the end, all of the strands come together and it makes total sense.