Unknown Pleasures

Jia Zhangke's third feature, Unknown Pleasures, is a naturalistic, nearly documentary-like examination of the lives of a group of teens and twenty-somethings in a poor city in northern China. Jia's aesthetic is sparse and gentle. Shooting with digital video, which gives the film a rough, shot-on-the-fly quality, he documents the emptiness and stagnation that constitute life for this aimless generation, who seem to have few opportunities and little hope despite China's prodigious leaps into the modern international economy. These young people, like friends Bin Bin (Wei Wei Zhao) and Xiao Ji (Qiong Wu), have recently finished school but they have no jobs and no prospects, so they simply drift around shiftlessly, spend dreary afternoons in front of the TV, and pursue dull and passionless relationships with girls. Xiao Ji lazily chases after the dancer Qiao Qiao (Tao Zhao) but doesn't seem to know what to do with her once he's got her, while Bin Bin spends quietly boring afternoons with his studious girlfriend (Qing Feng Zhou), the only character in the film who seems to have some ambition and some potential.

For Bin Bin and other young men like him, "there's no fucking future."
Bin Bin calls the World Trade Organization a scam, and when his shy, smart girlfriend says she's going to be studying international trade, he can't even imagine what that means — selling rabbits to Ukraine, he guesses. China is modernizing and involving itself in the international economy, jumping into the future, but young people like Bin Bin and Xiao Ji are being left behind, with no hope of profiting from the country's modernization. Factories are laying people off and cutting wages — when they're not being blown up by domestic terrorists dissatisfied with limited economic opportunities — and at times it seems as though the only real money flowing through this city is in its vibrant, flourishing criminal underworld. The aimless lives of these youths, their imaginations fired by American crime movies and pop culture, occasionally intersect with the fringes of that underworld, as they cross paths with loan sharks, petty thugs, DVD bootleggers and massage therapists who are actually prostitutes.



TV and pop culture are omnipresent here, engulfing the lives of these aimless youths. American pop culture seeps into their lives in the form of tough-guy movies like Pulp Fiction and Fight Club — "hit me," Xiao Ji says to the gangster Qiao San (Zhubin Li), copping his attitude and his lines from the latter movie. Xiao Ji especially seems to have adopted his pose and his attitude from American crime movies, and he speaks gushingly of Pulp Fiction, saying he wants to be an American bank robber, a romantic criminal like the couple who stick up the diner in Tarantino's movie. This American culture is probably even more accessible to them than their own: when Bin Bin visits a DVD bootlegger towards the end of the film, he asks for copies of Jia's previous films Xiao Wu and Platform, but the guy only has Pulp Fiction.

In a diner with Qiao Qiao, Xiao Ji sticks his finger out like a gun, shouting "freeze," and Jia's camera swings wildly to follow his threateningly pointed finger, before cutting to Xiao Ji and Qiao Qiao dancing in a club, waving their hands in front of their faces like Uma Thurman and John Travolta in the famous dance sequence, an effect heightened by Qiao Qiao wearing a wig as a deliberate tribute to Thurman's black Anna Karina wig. (There's layers of homage here: a Chinese tribute to an American movie that was itself deeply indebted to the French New Wave.)

These sad, quiet young people are always sitting in front of the TV, its flickering glow casting blue light on their faces as they sit stoically and silently, watching in pairs in their living rooms or in crowds in public places. The TV is omnipresent, showing a mix of Chinese cartoons and music videos, and news stories about Chinese/American relations, the WTO, Falun Gong, and in one notable scene, the announcement that Beijing was chosen to host the 2008 Olympics. When the announcement is made, everyone clustered around the TV cheers and applauds — except for Bin Bin and Xiao Ji, standing stoically in the back of the crowd — as Jia's camera pans away from the revelers, arcing over to a nearby street where fireworks sizzle and spark on the pavement, a few kids watching, rapt, as the sparks fly.


For all the patriotic national pride expressed by the other people in that scene, all of this news, good and bad, seems so remote from the actual lives and experiences of these young people. Trade deals, prestigious international events, monks setting themselves on fire, terrorists amiably bragging about their guns on TV: it's all related by the glowing box that's perpetually tucked into a corner of the frame. Pop culture and commercialism define these youths, who escape their humdrum lives by singing Chinese pop tunes — like the one from which the film takes its name — and attending glitzy events sponsored by the Monkey King, which is both a cartoon and a brand of liquor. Qiao Qiao dances and sings in these corporate-sponsored events, shilling liquor that she can't even stomach when she tries to drink a few sips, while her agent/boyfriend Qiao San manages her career (and her affections) with an authoritarian hand.

At times, Xiao Ji seems to have stumbled into a gangster movie, pursuing his love of Qiao Qiao even though the possessive, gun-toting Qiao San tries to intimidate him with his gang of thugs. Though the film's mood is predominantly quiet and pensive, prone to languid tracking shots and long static sequences in which no one says a word, there's a constant aura of repressed violence just below the surface. The characters talk about guns and robberies in ways informed by the American movies they've seen — presumably the same way they learned to smoke with cigarettes dangling coolly from their lips — but life isn't as glamorous or as cool as the movies. The gangster ultimately dies, offscreen, in a thoroughly undramatic fashion, and the main characters' attempt to re-enact their fantasies of being movie bad guys is inept and doomed to failure. Meanwhile, the real violence percolates in the background, in the form of domestic terrorism committed by frustrated unemployed men and bursts of fanatical religious extremism.

This is a film about deep-seated frustration and attempts to escape that only make things worse. Poignant and quietly affecting, the film's low-key, documentary-like aesthetic is a rebuttal to the kind of noisy, kinetic culture that the teens in the film consume. While they imagine they're living in a Tarantino movie or a Hong Kong gangster flick, the movie of their lives is not explosive or exciting or violent but quietly sad, a movie not of violent tragedy but of a soft, slow decline.

Eros

Eros is an anthology film that brings together shorts from three international directors — Hong Kong's Wong Kar Wai, American director Steven Soderbergh, and Italian director Michelangelo Antonioni — for an old-school throwback to the heyday of the portmanteau film. The subject, naturally, is eroticism, and all three directors come at it from very different directions.

The Hand is Wong Kar Wai's contribution to the anthology, and its eroticism is inflected with a deep, poignant sadness, a sense of regret and loss that's built into the film's very structure. The opening shot is a sustained closeup of a man having a conversation with a woman who remains offscreen throughout these introductory minutes. The woman is obviously very ill, close to death, and the fact of her imminent death seems to be encoded into their conversation, into the way they talk about the future without really seeming to believe that there's any future for her. Their words eventually trigger a reminiscence about their first meeting, and Wong transitions smoothly into the extended flashback that will eventually bring the film back, full circle, to this moment, to continue this sad goodbye. Even within the flashback, the woman remains tantalizingly offscreen for some time, as the man, younger then, goes to visit her for the first time. He is a tailor's apprentice, Zhang (Chen Chang), and she is the high-class call girl Ms. Hua (Li Gong) who, due to her many wealthy clients and suitors, is rich enough to afford the most expensive, lavish clothes, so she's attended to by the tailor like nobility.

Wong deliberately withholds the image of the woman, retaining the air of abstraction achieved by the opening's closeup on the man alone. When Zhang goes to see his client, he first has to wait in the next room while she services a lover, and the sounds of their noisy lovemaking drift through the wall as Wong shoots the back of Zhang's head and the wall behind which the woman is moaning and crying out. Then, Zhang is called in, and still the woman is hidden from view by a wall, as she interrogates the nervous, shy young man. When Wong finally cuts to an image of the woman, it's a strikingly framed shot, looking slightly down on her, with Zhang standing nearby so that his hips are around the level of her head. With her head slightly cocked back, she regards him with a sultry, hungry expression, the look of a woman with a great deal of experience and confidence. In the strikingly erotic sequence that follows, she gives Zhang his first sexual experience with her hand, eying him all the while with that steely but sexually suggestive gaze, her dark red lips slightly parted, her glamorous aura a stark contrast to the tawdry gropings of the act itself.


This one act is sufficient to provoke an erotic fascination between Zhang and Ms. Hua, one that continues to affect Zhang even as, in periodic visits to provide clothes and take measurements, he watches her age, squander opportunities for security with several of her benefactors, and eventually pass her peak and gradually begin to fade away. She grows ill, eventually, but even before that she's lost her glamor, as she pushes away the rich men who could help her, and her haughty, provocative demeanor grows tinged with sadness and regret. Soon enough, the only man for whom she really holds any fascination is her lowly and adoring tailor, to whom she gave the most casual introduction into sexuality, and who has remained an unmarried loner, sustained only by his obvious desire for a woman he has to know he'll never really have.

Eventually, the film winds back around to its opening moment: Zhang sitting by Ms. Hua's bedside in the rundown hospital room where she's wasting away. The tailor brings her a fancy new dress, intended to impress a rich American man who she hopes will be her "last chance," but that chance is of course already long gone. Instead, there's simply a startling last union between the prostitute and the tailor, replaying the first scene — this time alternating closeups so that Ms. Hua's un-made-up face is revealed for the first time, her glamor (but not her beauty) entirely eaten up by her illness — and then continuing it. This final love scene transcends its potentially tawdry details to become something bracing, and intense, infused with the kind of sadness that only comes from a wasted life, and the knowledge of just how much has been wasted.

Only Wong could make this last, defiantly un-intimate sexual contact between Ms. Hua and her longtime admirer not only erotic, but depressing and loaded with the horrible emotions that linger between them: Zhang's unfulfilled longings, Ms. Hua's regret over lost possibilities, the mutual despair over their limited lives. There's a sense that both of these people, in very different ways, are confined and restricted by class and gender roles that create only a particular set of possibilities for them, and once those possibilities are exhausted there's just nothing left for them.


Steven Soderbergh's contribution to the anthology is Equilibrium, a clever skit based around an erotic dream and the analysis of it; it's a formal game about style and structure, light and funny, buoyed by a pair of charismatic and expressive performances. Nick (Robert Downey Jr.) is an advertising executive troubled by a mysterious dream he's been having, night after night, and to decipher the meaning of this dream he goes to see the psychiatrist Dr. Pearl (Alan Arkin). The dream itself, wordless and sensuous, forms the opening minutes of the film: the first shot is a hazy closeup of a woman's face, a little Mona Lisa smile curling the corners of her lips. Soderbergh follows this image with a series of crisp, clean images of the woman walking, in the nude, around a strikingly designed apartment, decorated all in bright blue shades, the woman's often shadowed, silhouetted form contrasting against the diffuse lighting of the rooms. Soderbergh's images are appropriately sensual and dreamy, the camera dizzily wavering to evoke the lack of the title quality — a loss of equilibrium that the dream represents — as the woman shifts in and out of focus. The camera is never quite able to capture all of her: as she prepares for a bath, she is sometimes a hazy out-of-focus blur, sometimes a dark and curvy silhouette, sometimes clearly in view and yet partially obscured by the angles of walls or doors. The swaying, dizzy camerawork has a voyeuristic quality, and yet the images are unmistakably intimate as well, as though conveying the sense of spying on someone who's so close that there would seem to be no possibility of, or need for, hiding. It's a lovely, moody — and, yes, erotic — opening sequence.

The film then transitions into an equally stylized black-and-white aesthetic — the shadowy, strikingly lit chiaroscuro of the film noir, with slatted shadows falling lightly over everything — as Nick visits Dr. Pearl and describes this dream. At this point, the film becomes a low-key but goofy farce, as Dr. Pearl manipulates Nick into lying down on a nearby couch and closing his eyes, ostensibly to comfort the patient and facilitate their work, but really for a mysterious ulterior motive of his own. For as soon as Nick lays down and closes his eyes, the doctor carefully pulls out a miniature pair of binoculars and, while maintaining a conversation with Nick as the latter relives his dream, spying on an unseen sight through the window facing outside. Soderbergh stages the sequence as antic comedy, with Arkin broadly enacting his obviously ritualized set of gestures, which feel like familiar games that he plays, perhaps, during all of his therapy sessions. As Nick walks through the dream, Dr. Pearl pulls out a bigger pair of binoculars, rearranges his furniture to get a better angle on whatever he's looking at, and finally throws a paper airplane out the window and begins excitedly waving and making complicated pantomime gestures to whoever is across the street.


Soderbergh stages the best moments in deadpan deep-focus shots that capture Nick on the couch in the foreground, utterly oblivious to all the fetishistic antics happening behind him as he spills the details of this dream that has obviously affected him very deeply. The effect is of two different forms of eroticism competing against one another, the verbal sensual description of the dream and the pantomime play of the voyeuristic doctor. It's funny and charming because the actors are funny and charming — and because there's something inherently funny in the passing thought that Downey's verbal recounting of a sexual/sensual dream is perhaps a little nod to Bibi Andersson's famously steamy storytelling in Bergman's Persona.

The film's finale eventually provides a further level in a wry punchline that recontextualizes all these sensual shenanigans as semi-conscious expressions of anxiety, while calling into question exactly which part(s) of the film were dreams — maybe all of them. More than anything the film seems like an exercise in style, a chance to set hazy digital color (evoking Hollywood Technicolor extravagance and the visual language of vintage advertising by way of modern technology) off against the deep blacks of noir's shadows. As a stylish and diverting little short, Soderbergh's contribution is entertaining and easily forgotten, nowhere near the emotional depths and complexity of Wong's The Hand, but then, hardly trying to enter that territory, either.


The final segment of this anthology is Michelangelo Antonioni's The Dangerous Thread of Things, a rather empty and unsatisfying fragment, the main purpose of which seems to be providing a venue for its actresses to cavort around naked. The plot, such as it is, centers on the couple of Christopher (Christopher Buchholz) and Cloe (Regina Nemni), who are obviously teetering on the edge of a breakup, disaffected and alienated from one another like so many other Antonioni characters. The couple fight constantly, then Christopher meets another woman, Linda (Luisa Ranieri), has sex with her, leaves, and the film ends with both women completely naked on the beach, Cloe dancing at the water's edge until she comes across Linda lying in the sand. The two women stare silently at each other, Linda with a smile on her face, Cloe's face hidden from view by the slightly elevated angle of the shot, and then the film ends.

What this short suggests, perhaps more than anything, is just how thin a line there is in Antonioni's cinema between the examination of emptiness and the perpetration of emptiness. The generous interpretation is that this is another attempt at a study of disconnection, an attempt to show how sex without feeling is just a surface, glossy and perhaps attractive but lacking in depth. The not-so-generous interpretation is that the film is a flimsy excuse for the nude scenes; both women spend much of the film in various states of undress, and several leering shots of the buxom Linda running up and down stairs seem to have dubious narrative or cinematic value in comparison to their making-things-bounce value. This impression is only enhanced by the cheesy synth soundtrack, which adds to the atmosphere of bad vintage porn.


Even so, there are some striking images and some beautifully photographed seaside settings here. At one point, the central couple visits an ocean-view restaurant where the waves of the ocean, oscillating sensuously in a reflection, all but blot out the couple as filmed through the large glass windows of the restaurant. It's an image that recalls, in a vague way, the layered montages of Jean-Luc Godard's later films, with their celebration of natural beauty, their love of light, water and reflections, and their unabashed sensuality. Needless to say, the promise of such images is not followed through here. More generally, Antonioni achieves a low-key pictorial beauty, the beauty of serene landscapes and well-framed shots, like a sequence where Christopher climbs a tall staircase to Linda's home, a very memorable stone tower. Antonioni frames the image to maximize the impact of the geometric design of the tower, which broadens above its first level, creating an upside-down trapezoid, the slanted sides of which overhang the approaching visitor ominously. After Christopher and Linda have sex, Antonioni frames the woman's foot, lounging at the edge of the bed as Christopher gets dressed, a very non-sexual shot that nevertheless winds up being more erotic, in its suggestiveness and its aesthetic beauty, than the softcore explicitness of the love scene itself.

Antonioni is the only one of these three directors to approach eroticism in the most obvious way — through copious nude scenes — and perhaps that's why his film feels so slight. These are generic characters and generic situations, with no time in the short's brief span to develop into anything more, and despite the film's occasional intimations of something deeper and more mysterious — like a weird little interlude in which bathing, naked sirens sing to lure the characters into lust — it never quite adds up to a whole. The same might be said of Eros itself, which features one great short, one enjoyable one, and one fairly disappointing one, and doesn't make much effort to integrate the three parts in any real way. The anthology would be worth a look for Wong's The Hand alone, though.

Happy Together

The films of Wong Kar Wai are often about people who feel very intensely, who love and hate with a fiery passion that bursts out in the garish, expressive aesthetics of the films. In Happy Together, Wong examines this kind of passion especially intimately, through the gay relationship of Ho Po-wing (Leslie Cheung) and Lai Yiu-fai (Tony Leung), who visit Argentina together as a way to reinvigorate their on-again-off-again relationship, but wind up instead merely replaying the same troubles they always have. The film is a powerfully focused examination of this disintegrating, up-and-down relationship, capturing the violent emotions, the heartbreak, the longing and desire, and the fleeting moments of happiness that are like the glue holding this fractured romance together, momentarily bridging the gulf that's widening between these two men.

That gulf is represented, in many ways, by the waterfall at Iguaza, which they promise to visit together during one of their happier moments. The falls, seen on a lamp that Yiu-fai bought — a bright and gaudy representation of the falls, lit from within by a rotating cylinder that makes it seem as if the water is glistening in the sunlight — come to represent for Yiu-fai the potential for happiness and togetherness. This trip is something they planned to do together, a goal for their relationship, a sight they could share. Wong visually suggests that it's also an abyss that might swallow them whole. An image of the actual falls is inserted early on, as a response to the hopefulness that Yiu-fai has for the trip, but the image of the reality is very different from the lamp's sunny depiction of natural splendor. It's a sensuous color image of the waterfall, all dark blues and jungle greens, inserted into the mostly black-and-white opening section of the film. The camera slowly turns around the falls, capturing the slow churning of the water and, increasingly, the drifting white smoke that begins to fill the frame as Wong's graceful camera move pushes the tumbling water itself off to the sides. In stark contrast to Yiu-fai's optimistic desire to see this place with his lover, the image is dark and sinister, an image of destruction and apocalyptic grandeur: it is a seemingly bottomless pit, filled with smoke from the violent churning of the water as it crashes into the reservoir deep below. It's a gorgeous but foreboding image, a suggestion that what waits at the end of the trip is not reconciliation but erasure, heartlessness, brutality, the cold and cataclysmic violence of nature.


That image, so frightening and intense, lingers over the rest of the film. When that tracking shot of the falls predictably recurs at the end of the film, it provides a kind of melancholy closure, as one lover sees the falls in person, the water rushing down towards him, its spray drenching his face, while the other is left with the lamp, a gaudy and false facsimile of the real place. That's the essence of the film, the moment it's journeying towards, as Yiu-fai struggles against the confining boundaries of his unhappy relationship with Po-wing, a relationship where it's not clear who needs the other more, who's keeping who prisoner.

That dynamic plays out within some of Wong's most potent and beautiful images, as captured by his usual cinematographer Christopher Doyle. Though set mostly in Buenos Aires, Wong finds in this city a Southern hemisphere counterpart to his home base of Hong Kong, which perhaps explains the sequence where Yiu-fai, realizing that he is in the other half of the world from his home, imagines what Hong Kong would look like upside-down. The answer, as envisioned by Wong, is indeed turned upside-down but not otherwise that different, as he finds in Buenos Aires a similar late-night neon vibe, all hazy lights and poetically empty street scenes, occasionally interrupted by a bright, summery daytime scene where the sun fades the images to a white glare. That impression is introduced slowly into the film, as most of the early scenes play out in a crisp, high-contrast black-and-white, with only selected moments rendered in the characteristic warm, brilliant colors of the Wong/Doyle collaborations. When, after Yiu-fai and Po-wing are reunited following some time apart, the film explodes into full, sumptuous color during their cab ride back to Yiu-fai's apartment, it's as though the fullness of the couple's conflicted emotions have finally exploded to the surface of the film.

Despite these strong emotions, Happy Together is more relaxed and languid than previous Wong Kar Wai films, in which unpredictable violence could erupt at any moment, and this film looks forward to the slow, sensuous rhythms of In the Mood for Love rather than the the frantic tempi of most of the preceding films. The body of the film focuses on the lovers' uneasy reunion, as Yiu-fai tries to hold onto the unstable Po-wing, who obviously needs and cares for Yiu-fai but still can't help straining against the bounds of their relationship, going out, sleeping with other men, prostituting himself with American tourists. The relationship settles down slightly when Po-wing is beaten up by some of his clients for stealing a watch, and Yiu-fai tends to his lover during his recovery. The scenes of tension and arguing are offset by scenes of surprising tenderness and affection, like a sequence where Po-wing teaches Yiu-fai to dance, and the dance slowly becomes a gently swaying embrace. This scene, like the opening's disarmingly explicit and erotic sex scene between the men, establishes the stakes of their troubled love, the real depths of feeling upon which their often fractious relationship is built.


There's also tenderness in the depiction of Yiu-fai's friendship with his restaurant coworker Chang (Chen Chang), which is contrasted against the doomed love affair at the center of the film. As Yiu-fai's relationship with Po-wing collapses, his connection — platonic and hesitant, though not without suggestions of attraction and intimacy — with Chang deepens. Chang is a typically eccentric Wong character, a young man who had been nearly blind as a child and who had, as a result, developed extremely sensitive hearing and an ability to detect the smallest nuances of emotion in people's voices. He also, despite his displacement in South America, has the stability of home and family that the rootless Yiu-fai, wandering in a foreign land and disconnected from a family that's all but disowned him, only wishes he could someday return to. Those longings, the heartache and sadness of these aimless men, are expressed in typical Wong fashion. Chang carries a tape recording of Yiu-fai's tears to the "end of the world," a lighthouse in the far south of Argentina, where, it is said, his worries can be dissipated; it's a moment that looks forward to the similar scene at the end of In the Mood for Love. Po-wing also enacts the ritual of visiting his lover's apartment while Yiu-fai is not there, cleaning the place and rearranging things, a form of intimacy without direct contact that weaves through Wong's films.

Happy Together, like nearly all of Wong's films, is a deeply moving and rich work, a film about dislocation and the longing for stability. These characters have drifted far from home, isolated from their families and their homes, and they unsteadily try to make their way in an unfamiliar land even as their emotions overwhelm and unbalance them. Turned upside-down from their homes, they rush towards the churning abyss, towards the end of the world, and then pull back towards redemption and rebirth at the very last moment.

Fallen Angels

Fallen Angels is a moving, hilarious, poppy, absurd, moody film about urban disconnection and loneliness, alternately contemplative and hyperactive, filmed with the characteristic punchy stylization of director Wong Kar Wai. The city (Wong's Hong Kong home) is a peppy, colorful place, neon and bright, its colors brilliant, shining bright in the seemingly perpetual night: beautiful and dangerous. The film concerns itself with the people who live their lives almost wholly at night, shunning the daily nine-to-five grind in favor of nights packed with activity, with crime and romance and desperate attempts to connect with other wanderers of the night. In this city, it's often raining, the streets are slick and shiny, and time moves unpredictably, sometimes racing by in the blur of time-lapse traffic scenes, sometimes slowed to a crawl. The city's night is populated by a professional killer (Leon Lai) who wants to quit his job, his agent (Michelle Reis) who arranges his kills without ever meeting him in person, the mute He Zhiwu (Takeshi Kaneshiro) who spends his nights in closed stores, reopening them without their owners' knowledge and forcing passersby to partake of his wares, the emotional young woman Charlie (Charlie Yeung) who's obsessed with a guy who's left her, and the punky Blondie (Karen Mok) who just wants somebody to think she's special, to remember her.

These various drifters and loners collide off one another in the night, careening around on their oddball errands, their violent missions, their melancholy unkept dates in various smoky bars. As Zhiwu says, he's always looking to find "friends and confidants," so he "rubs elbows" with anyone he meets, which in his case usually means dragging his unwitting victims, kicking and screaming, into bizarre transactions. Running a laundromat, he forces a bum to get his clothes washed. Taking over a grocery store, he tries to convince a lady to buy eggplants — hilariously, she thinks it's improper since she's single, and what would people think? — and then saddles her with a tremendous watermelon. He keeps running into the same unfortunate guy (Fai-hung Chan) over and over again, first giving the guy a hair washing and shave under duress, then riding him and his extended family around the city in an ice cream truck, gorging them with cones and tremendous sundaes with candles flaring on top like it's a big birthday celebration. These surreal crimes are a weird way of getting attention, connecting with people — Zhiwu sees it as a kind of service, a way of making people happy in unexpected ways.

It's also a way to break through the barriers preventing communication. Zhiwu can't talk because there was an accident with expired pineapple, an in-joke based on the character with the same name and played by the same actor in Chungking Express, who was also obsessed with pineapple, and who says, as this Zhiwu does later in the film, that everything has an expiration date. The other characters in the film don't have Zhiwu's extreme communication problems, but they're similarly disconnected, isolated from one another in various ways. The killer and his partner communicate with one another primarily through technology. She faxes him maps of the locations for his missions, hand-drawn with marker, her little personal touch added to an impersonal business. Otherwise, they communicate through numbers: through the numbers of answering machine services, a common device in Wong's films, or the number of a particular song on a jukebox that the killer leaves as a message to his partner when he wants to quit. Unable to tell her his feelings face to face, he leaves a number that leads to a song about breaking up.

In the same way, he leaves behind clues for her in the apartment where he stays while on his missions. She's in the apartment before the killer, cleaning it and setting it up for him, much like Faye Wong's character in Chungking Express, rearranging the apartment of the man she loves to help him forget his ex-girlfriend. Wong films these scenes to emphasize the parallels and the disjunctions: the killer and his partner inhabit the same space in subsequent scenes, separated by time but not by space. Later, after the missions, she goes through the killer's trash, because it helps her learn about him, to feel close to someone she never actually meets face to face. And, as the killer reveals later, he knows she does this and deliberately leaves behind evidence of his actions and his personality, knowing that she'll be able to piece together information about him through what he throws away. In this way, they become closer while remaining at a physical remove; it is as close as they get to connection, as close as they get to really knowing another person intimately.


For the killer and his partner, this distance is something they try to maintain, even if they don't really want to; they pose, keeping their cool, playing their roles, even if they secretly yearn for something deeper, something more real. Towards the beginning of the film, the killer's partner says that she's not interested in any of the "friends" she visits, that it's all anonymous and impersonal for her, that these targets don't mean any more to her than the man she sics on them. She tries to live up to that image, projecting an aura of untouchable cool: her bangs combed over her forehead and hanging down into her face, nearly covering her eyes completely most of the time, as though if she hides her eyes, she can't see or, more importantly, be seen. She is, like so many of Wong's characters, an icon of cool with her rubbery fetish dresses and her bright red lips, her garters and her cigarettes, sexy and cool, remote, simmering and chilly at once. It's only in private that she betrays her reserves of feeling, masturbating violently and passionately in the empty apartment whenever the killer isn't there; in public she appears as the cold professional that her job requires her to be.

The killer is similarly haunted by emotions that don't suit his profession. He yearns, like so many other killers and criminals in the history of genre fiction, for an ordinary life, for this one last job to be his true last one; he wants to find a girl he can love, he wants to settle down. He occasionally runs into people who recognize him from a more innocent time; he wryly notes, in voiceover, that "even if you're a killer, you still have classmates from grade school around." When he meets a cheery old school friend who's about to get married, the guy tries to sell him an insurance policy, but he won't get one because it only reminds him that he wouldn't have anyone to name as a beneficiary. He's living an entirely solitary existence, with no friends, no family, no real life other than traveling from place to place, living for a day at a time in apartments scrubbed clean by his partner, killing people in a burst of gunfire and then moving on to the next mission.

The yearning for connection in this film is intense, as every character wants someone or something they can't have, while somehow remaining isolated from the people who do cross their paths. Zhiwu tries to connect with the chatterbox Charlie, a romance that seems counterintuitive but somehow perfect — a man who can't talk and a woman who can't stop pouring out her every feeling in a torrent of talk and tears — but she's still hung up on her ex and barely registers Zhiwu's presence. Blondie wants the killer, and is in fact convinced, whether rightly or wrongly, that they'd once dated and he'd simply forgotten her, but he only wants company for the short term.

Wong situates these gloomily romantic stories and characters within a glitzy, hyper city that seems to be losing its collective mind, unleashing bursts of unpredictable violence that recall the abrupt transitions from calm to bloodshed in his directorial debut As Tears Go By, or the climactic gunfight in Days of Being Wild. The overall atmosphere of slowly simmering heartache — all those shots of lonely people in lonely bars, bathed in neon glow — is thus constantly threatened by outbursts of absurdity or over-the-top violence. The most notable is a surreal but gory fight that suddenly breaks out in a restaurant around Charlie and Zhiwu, with a man named Blondie — the name of the girl who Charlie believes stole her man, though she seems to have a very different story from the Blondie who hangs around with the killer — at the center of the brawl. The sequence is frantic and motion-blurry, a frenetic outpouring of kinetic knife-fighting and screaming, streams of blood and people running desperately through the chaos.

These outbursts add to the sense of emotions flaring out of control; the city seems to reflect the turbulent confusion and desperate longings of these people, or perhaps it's the other way around. Either way, the landscape of Fallen Angels is emotionally explosive, with Wong's bold aesthetics creating the impression that the characters' feelings are being written onto the surface of the film, inscribed in every shaky pan and every over-saturated color.

As Tears Go By

Wong Kar Wai's debut feature As Tears Go By is a visceral, idiosyncratic gangster picture, a raw and stylish film that balances gritty realism with bold stylization, colorful imagery and rapid leaps into frenzied action sequences or hazy, drifting slow motion. Violence in this film erupts suddenly, its impact heightened by Wong's accelerated cutting, which signals the abrupt transition from ordinary reality to the bloody, brutal hyper-reality of the fight scenes. A fight scene at a pool hall is preceded by a slow, tense buildup as the inept Triad thug Fly (Jacky Cheung) taunts a rival, mocking him by moving balls around on the pool table, brazenly cheating and essentially daring the other man to start a fight. The tension slowly mounts, mingled with uneasy humor, but when the fight itself erupts, Wong introduces the violence with a sudden shot of a pool table, a racked triangle of balls broken by the cue ball, and then a quick cut into the rapid-fire violence as Fly and the other gangsters initiate a brawl that eventually spills out into a chase through the streets.

Fly is a familiar character in gangster lore, the volatile but pathetic loser who drags down the more balanced, intelligent friend who looks after him. Wah (Andy Lau) is Fly's "big brother" in the Triad gangs, his boss and benefactor, but Fly's unpredictable behavior and tough guy attitude continually get Wah in big trouble. The film alternates between Wah's attempts to cope with the problems stirred up by Fly, and an undercooked love story between Wah and his young cousin Ngor (Maggie Cheung), who he falls in love with when she comes to stay with him. The story is familiar, of course. Wong, inspired by Martin Scorsese's Mean Streets (especially in the bold use of pop music) and working within the genre mold of the Hong Kong gangster flick, sticks to the basics of the genre but amps up the aesthetics and the emotions into a near operatic orgy of excess.

The film's action sequences are probably its most compelling moments, bloody and ecstatic scenes of carnage, mingling fast cutting with slow motion to convey the brutality of these gangsters — and of course, to convey their sense of "cool." The film is very self-conscious about "cool," because the characters are so self-conscious about it. Wah often poses in his leather jacket, his head cocked back in a Rebel Without a Cause sneer, a cigarette dangling from his lips. When he walks into a room, it's often in slow motion, his determined expression slowly drifting through the hazy, abstract backgrounds, his surroundings erased by the prolonged contemplation of his languid cool as he prepares to kill someone or beat up some rivals or shake down a resistant debtor. That coolness is why Fly looks up to Wah, why he's so determined to impress his "big brother," even as he's very aware that his own (real) little brother, Site (Ronald Wong), doesn't think that Fly is cool. Fly is obsessed with making good, with returning to his family as a big man, but he knows that he's a failure. Towards the end of the film, he visits his brother — who's now a family man, with a regular working class job — and tells him that he just wants to be a cool big brother, even if he has to sacrifice himself to do it. The scene plays out mostly in alternating closeups on the two brothers, but Wong punctuates the scene with a kind of emphatic exclamation point, abruptly switching to an unbalanced long shot of the parking lot where this discussion takes place. The two brothers are at the bottom of the frame, with Fly facing away from his brother, the lower halves of their bodies cut off by the bottom of the frame, and Fly simply hurls the beer bottle he'd been drinking off into the distance. It's such an effective moment, a rough and evocative shot that perfectly captures the tension of this scene.


The film's dialogue also has a punchy, blunt quality that enhances the archetypal story Wong is telling here. When Wah has a fight with an old girlfriend, she tells him that she recently had an abortion, and she uses the word "abortion" or "aborted" in nearly every sentence throughout the argument, wielding the word at him like a knife to keep him at bay, wounding him with the repetition, while he ineffectually bats at her with his hands. He slaps her around and then storms out, but it's obvious who's been wounded more, who's been cut deeper, and in the subsequent scenes Wah seems to be stumbling as though bleeding out from a mortal wound, with Wong's woozy camerawork adding to the sensation of disorientation. He seems drunk, but Wong doesn't show him drinking; it's more likely he's just staggering from the emotional wounds he's suffered. This is a violent, bloody film, but this scene suggests that for Wong, the unseen psychological cuts can be just as fatal as the wounds that leave physical scars, the wounds that bleed and ooze.

Not all of the film's emotions are extravagant and noisy, however. One of the film's most affecting shots is a lengthy closeup on Ngor's face as Wah leaves her to, once again, help his loser friend out of trouble. The look on her face is subtle, but the longer Wong holds the shot, the more sadness seeps into her expression, until her eyes seem to be on the verge of tearing and, overwhelmed, she looks away, as though she can't stand holding the camera's gaze any longer. It has a feel of finality to it; one knows instantly and instinctively that the lovers will never see one another again. It's not entirely an earned moment — the romance is underdeveloped and generic — but Cheung makes the most of her scant screen time so that her character is poignant and memorable, if not exactly deep. Wong makes the romance potent through searing imagery, like a passionate kiss in a phone booth, a kiss that's nearly violent in its intensity, so hot that it burns up the screen, burning even the image itself, which is eventually erased in a white-hot burst of overexposed film stock. The individual scenes become emotionally affecting even though the romance is cursorily developed in comparison to the storyline of Wah's entanglement with Fly. The film has more of a feel for the romantic image of the gangster than it does for actual romance, which means that Cheung has little to do other than patiently wait for Wah to return to her every so often, to briefly delight in his presence before he races off into the bloody revenge storyline at the center of the film.

For what it is, though, As Tears Go By is a fairly satisfying genre picture, a gory and energetic thriller in which Fly's provocations set Wah onto a collision course with the nasty gangster Tony (Alex Man), a sadist who takes obvious joy in the increasingly elaborate beatings he hands out to his rivals. Not that Wah is actually that much better: the film places the audience on Wah's side, but only because he's portrayed as a romantic gangster, even though his violent streak is every bit as ugly. In one scene, he breaks a beer bottle over a debtor's head, the gesture fast and unflinching, a fearsome slash across the fabric of the film, drawing bright red blood. The hero's violence and amorality are simply taken for granted, so that he becomes the hero simply by default, by virtue of the fact that he's the gangster the film focuses on, the gangster with heart.