Fallen Angels Film Analysis

The depictions of urban environment in Fallen Angels (1996) by Wong Kar Wai and Jean-Luc Godard's Alphaville (1965) are far from being realistic. Despite the temporal gap between the making of the two films, the cities featured in Alphaville and Fallen Angels can be compared by the atmosphere of bewilderment, fear and loneliness. Alphaville, which is imagined by Godard within the 1960s Paris, as well as Wong's Hong Kong, are the cities that embody their inhabitants' worst nightmares and often serve as a hostile space which is unable to provide neither the sense of security nor the possibility of escape. The directors build up the nightmarish quality of their cities through the use of various filming techniques, such as artificial lighting,

chaotic camera movement and unusual editing, thus creating oppressive and often claustrophobic space with no escape, either physically, as in Alphaville, or metaphorically, as in Fallen Angels. The characters in the films become parts of the environment, in a way reflecting how being surrounded by these urban spaces can affect the psychology of an individual.
To begin with, stylistic choices of the post-modern city representation in both films is key to the atmosphere. Stephen Teo compares Wong Kar Wai to Godard in his work, saying: “His [Wong's] narratives, like Godard's, are imitations of monologic discourse: stuttered, fragmented, with abrupt transitions and changes, a series of misalliances – hence a structural pathology of narrative.”1 Indeed, both directors tend to use sequences that are fragmented and visually disturbed. This effect is often created by an alternative use of lighting in the films. It is important to note that both films are set majorly in the night-time, which instantly links them to the idea of nightmarish confusion. Thus, the night image of the city is characterized by the shots of street lights that are mysterious and, at times, deceptive. One of the most frequent examples in Alphaville is the use of neon flashing lights, featuring either a mathematical formula or an abbreviation. Firstly, a critic notices: “The flashing light is as characteristic of modern civilization as anything else you might name, and particularly appropriate to Alphaville, where direct sunlight is rarely seen.”2 However, as much as modernity is reflected in the use of neon flashing lights in the film that was made in 1960s, these lights also reflect the artificiality about the city of Alphaville. The use of flashing lights contrasted to the darkness of the city suggests that the space created by Godard very much relies on the unnatural sources of light, which builds up the sense of alienation and de-familiarizes the city for its inhabitants. …....EXPAND..... Secondly, these images serve as intermissions between separate parts of the plot, disturbing the film's continuity editing and at first sight bearing no obvious meaning behind them. These neon shots make the audience ask the question 'Why?', which, ironically, is forbidden to the characters in the film, since “there's no 'why', only 'because'” (LOOK UP THE EXACT QUOTE). However, it seems that there is no meaning intended by Godard when using these neon formulas, as they merely stand for common sense and serve as simply a part of the world with its laws of logic that are key to the very ideology of Alphaville city. The hypothesis is supported by the critic who comments on the use of the neon formulas, claiming that in effect these stand for the rational perception of the world presented in the film: “In Alphaville Godard has placed in question those codes that in effect limit our perception of urban reality, but ultimately his representation only turns on other representations, designating them for what they are and thus demystifying them.”3
Similarly, Fallen Angels manipulates the visual perception of the city through the use of light.

As one of the big advantages of the film is colour, Wong Kar Wai employs colour in almost every possible which adds to the image of the city as a surreal dark fantasy. The title of the film reminds of the biblical story of Adam and Eve, thus making Wong's city an interpretation of hell on the Earth, as Teo describes it: “...a more apocalyptic New Testament vision of angels who left their first estate and descended into the hell of the city, reserved in everlasting chains under darkness awaiting judgement day.”4 The hell-like quality is once again reflected in the film's lighting: the red filters in various moments of the narrative resemble the torturous flames of hell that the characters are forced to endure. For example, the scene where Michelle comes to the bar and plays the track '1818' that is chosen by Lai to tell her about the end of their partnership, is lit with red, reflecting her pain and sexual frustration that can never be satisfied. Furthermore, the nightmare cities in the two films are characterised with unstable space, that continually transforms and changes. This is especially distinct in Wong's portrayal of Hong Kong in Fallen Angels, as one of the film's reviewers mentioned: “Space also fractures, folds, and reforms (picture three-dimensional Mobius strips) when chronology's spatial correlate, contiguity, is likewise cast aside...”5 This is employed through the

directors excessive use of unnatural camera angles, fish eye lens and altered speed of the video, all of which disturb the image, removing the aspect of photographic realism about the film and thus distancing it from the reality of everyday life. Godard uses shots in almost complete darkness, or highly inconsistent light, for instance when Lemmy Caution first comes to see Natasha Von Braun in the Department of Memory and Programming, he enters a dark room with a flashing light, which reflects the character's feeling of perplexity, which the audience comes to share.
The post-modern aspect of these two films further constructs the sense of alienation.

In other words, post-modern cities such as Alphaville and Wong Kar Wai's Hong Kong emphasise the gap between humanity and machinery, suggesting how at times the high speed of life and technical development is not beneficial for a human anymore. Stephen Teo points out to the reality of Hong Kong's postmodernism by highlighting “Hong Kong's special position as a postmodern city perched between East and West”6 which sets the city as a complex space that compromises between the two modern concepts. It is further clear from Wong's comments on his chose of Wanchai area since it is “a bizarre mixture of modern buildings and some very old ones.”7 Furthermore, post-modern cities are characterised by the oppressive images of modernity, such as Alpha60 in Alphaville – the artificial intelligence that possesses almost complete control over the citizens through surveillance, constructing a sort of totalitarian nightmare. In both Wong's and Godard's representation, the life in the society dominated by speed and machinery is bound to make humanity unhappy. Firstly, the idea of speed is key to post-modern reality of the films, as evident from Ackbar Abas' argument on the director's take on it: “In Wong's cinema, speed (like politics) is also represented obliquely, in terms of the characters barely conscious social adjustments or maladjustments to the new speed-dominated cultural space, a space that seems

to have lost its measure.”8 Here, Fallen Angles quite heavily focuses on speed of the city environment. The film features a few shots filmed from the moving vehicle such as a car or a train, providing a perspective of reality filtered by technological progress. One of the examples is the sequence in which Michelle takes the MTR train and looks through the window. The point-of-view shot captures the city passing at such speed that the image is blurred into an abstraction of lights and buildings. This shot demonstrates how the post-modern city indeed detaches a human from itself with the use of the recent technological advances. Additionally, speed is also employed in other aspects of the film, for instance, the speed of globalization, represented in McDonald's, where Lai meets Blondie for the first time. McDonald's as fast food stands for the speed of consumption linked to the development of food industry; it is also important that both characters meet in McDonald's being alone, demonstrating how places like this ignore the rituals of sharing food together for the sake of speed.