Fallen Angels · essays & theory

A reading · through the lens of theory

She has a key to his apartment, though he never gave her one. The partner — the film never names her — lets herself in while the hitman is out, and she cleans. She lies on his bed in the dark. She picks through his garbage to reconstruct the night he had: what he ate, whether a woman was there. The two of them share a frame maybe twice in ninety minutes. This is the strangest thing about Fallen Angels, and the truest. It is a love story staged almost entirely in the absence of the person being loved.

Hold onto that apartment. It tells you what kind of film you are in.

The hitman picture is the most muscular thing Hong Kong cinema ever built, and it runs on what Deleuze called the action-image: a character sees a situation and acts, and the act changes the situation. See the target, pull the trigger, the world rearranges around the deed. The whole grammar of John Woo — of A Better Tomorrow, the film that taught Hong Kong a gunman could be a romantic hero and slow motion his aria — is sensory-motor. Perception pours into action with no gap in between.

Wong keeps the gunman. He keeps the neon and the slow motion. Then he snips the wire between seeing and doing. Leon Lai's hitman decides nothing, wants nothing; he takes jobs handed to him by a woman he will not touch, walks into rooms, fires, walks out. The film calls this anesthesia and flatly declines to explain it. Deleuze had a precise name for that snapped circuit — the crisis of the action-image. The character still perceives, vividly and painfully, but can no longer turn what he perceives into a response that counts. And what is left when action drains out of an image is the looking itself.

That is the opsign: the pure optical situation, a moment you can only watch because there is nothing to be done with it. The partner is its purest carrier. Deleuze would call her a seer — a voyant, a watcher and endurer rather than an agent. Her devotion has no action available to it, so it curdles into ritual: cleaning a floor, lying on sheets, riding the MTR to be near where he has been. She is not advancing a plot. She is inhabiting a condition. Across both strands the film replaces problems-to-be-solved with states-to-be-felt-from-inside, and the editing follows suit — William Chang cuts by rhythm and rhyme, a gesture here, an unrelated room there, slackening cause and effect until the diptych's two halves touch only by mood.

Look at where all this watching happens. Christopher Doyle shoots Kowloon at night on 9-to-18mm lenses, so close that a face balloons into the foreground while the room behind it caves away at impossible angles. A character crossing a small flat seems to travel a great distance and arrive nowhere nearer to anyone. These are what Deleuze called any-spaces-whatever — locations that stop being settings for action and become disconnected fragments of pure feeling. The noodle shop, the all-night McDonald's, the pedestrian underpass: real Hong Kong, photographed until its geometry expresses estrangement. People stand a foot apart and remain unreachable. The wide angle does not decorate the loneliness; it is the loneliness, drawn in glass.

Then there is the step-printing. Certain shots are printed frame-on-frame so the subject stutters in slow motion while the traffic and crowd behind smear past at full speed. The figure holds nearly still as the world streaks around it — exactly Deleuze's movement of the world, where the body goes quiet and motion migrates into everything else, the dance absorbing the dancer. It is the visual signature of a character who can no longer move the world and so lets the world move through him.

And over all of it, the voiceovers. The partner narrates a longing her body never acts on; the mute He Zhiwu (Takeshi Kaneshiro) comments on a life his face is busy contradicting. Wong keeps speech and image telling different stories — what Deleuze called the lectosign, the image that loses its self-evidence and has to be read, sound and picture pulling apart into an audiovisual disjunction. The interior monologue says one thing; the body on screen, all surface and studied blankness, does another. You assemble the person in the gap between them.

This lineage is worth naming, because film is a conversation and this is one of its sharper replies. The female voiceover as melancholy counterpoint to male action comes straight from Godard's Pierrot le Fou and Wong's own Days of Being Wild. The hitman dismantled into sensory texture rather than plot is Suzuki's Branded to Kill. The available city light treated as alienating noir landscape, neon as both lamp and mood, is Coutard's Alphaville rerouted through Kowloon. And the He Zhiwu strand was literally cut out of Chungking Express, which makes these two films genetic twins, one bright, one nocturnal. What Wong did with the inheritance was specific: he took the genre with the most kinetic body in world cinema and removed its motor half, keeping the velocity as pure sensation. Movement without resolution. A thriller that has given up on the thrill of the deed and kept only the ache of the speed.

The film ends not with a killing but with a motorcycle ride through a tunnel — a few wordless minutes of contact before the lights arrive. Nothing is solved. Two strangers are briefly, barely less alone. Watch it again and watch the rooms he has just left, the spaces she tends after he is gone. The action has emptied out of them, and what rushes in to fill the vacancy is time, and feeling, and neon. That is the whole film, hiding in its negative space.