Watching Wong Kar Wai’s early film I was struck by the similarities with Jarmusch’s early films, which I saw last year. Plot is at a minimum, style at a premium. Fallen Angels is a mess, plot-wise. What is it actually about? A hitman, which allows the director to include some balletic and completely gratuitous shoot-outs, his business partner, a beautiful woman who masturbates a lot, and blondie, a live-wire who screams and falls for the hitman, who rejects her. The only narrative logic that emerges from this potpourri is that the hitman will do one last job after deciding to get out and it doesn’t need a narrative genius to work out what will happen on that final job. The story offers little to inspire. If there is any socio-political content, it passed me by. (There might be, someone more versed in South Asian politics would have to fill me in.) But what there is is style to swoon for. The unsung hero of Kar Wai´s early film is Christopher Doyle, his cinematographer, whose woozy, sub-aqueous imagery utterly beguiles. What Kar Wai displays in Fallen Angels is a heady aesthetic, which proved more than sufficient to propel him into the mainstream of contemporary filmmakers.
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