Wong Kar-Wai
Angeli Perduti

THE REVIEW

Recurrent in Wong Kar-wai's cinema is the impossibility of living one's emotions, a laziness that leads to drift and ultimately to solitude (if not death as in this film) the lives of the characters in his films.

Indeed, this "Fallen Angels" from '95 is no exception. The film follows the events of four characters, a lazy killer, a woman who organizes the killer's massacres, a mute boy (apparently because he ate expired pineapple, but obviously the reason is another), and a girl named Charlie, seemingly the most normal of the bunch but incapable of managing her emotions.

Four "disabled" individuals, in short, who intertwine their vain lives without ever really managing to build stable relationships, as if trapped in different dimensions (the ghosts of Kurosawa's "Pulse").

A symbolic scene is that of the mute looking distraught, after his father's death, at a recording made of him on his birthday.

It's difficult to pinpoint in this maze of relationships.

The scenario is that of a perpetually nocturnal Hong Kong, almost from another dimension, illuminated by the neon lights of signs or places; images distorted as if through a lens, grainy as if the film was about to disintegrate (thanks to Christopher Doyle's stunning cinematography).

The ending might be considered the weak point of the work, certainly out of context, sincere, weird, as if wanting to take a breath of fresh air from all that malaise; indeed, we see the mute and the murder broker speeding together on a motorcycle under the faint sky of a dawning day, perhaps a different day. One could surmise that something good has come from all this, but we are left with doubt.

For me, it is the director's masterpiece (even superior to "In the Mood for Love"), but most likely I belong to the niche.