Fallen Angels

Wong Kar-Wai is widely regarded as Hong Kong cinema's greatest postmodernist - a director whom critics of his era compared to Godard and Tarantino, and who in his films merges cinephilia with music-video aesthetics. Filmasia presents one of the masterpieces from his most prolific creative period, the first half of the 1990s.

Fallen Angels follows several characters who meet only rarely, yet we find numerous parallels among them: a hired killer who prefers to have his work planned by someone else; his companion obsessed with the killer's personality despite having barely seen him; a mute young man who occupies other people's shops at night; and a girl longing to meet the woman who seduced her ex-boyfriend. The fragmented narrative relies more on internal monologues than dialogue.

The film ranks among Wong's most stylistically distinctive works - the camera alternates between color and black-and-white images, most scenes are shot with a handheld camera using an extremely wide lens that distorts the image, and the overall tone is enhanced by a trip-hop-influenced soundtrack. Wong himself stated that the city itself is the film's main character and that it is a kind of cinematic sibling to his slightly earlier work Chungking Express.