Fallen Angels (Wong Kar-wai, 1995)

Leon Lai and Karen Mok in Fallen Angels

Wong Chi-ming / Killer: Leon Lai
The Killer's Agent: Michelle Reis
Ho Chi-mo / He Zhiwu: Takeshi Kaneshiro
Charlie / Cherry: Charlie Yeung
Punkie / Blondie / Baby: Karen Mok
Ho Chi-mo's Father: Chan Man-lei

Director: Wong Kar-wai
Screenplay: Wong Kar-wai
Cinematography: Christopher Doyle
Production design: William Chang

Feverish, fascinating, and violently funny, Fallen Angels is a kind of companion piece to Wong Kar-wai's Chungking Express (1994), sharing some of the same setting and, in a very different role, the actor Takeshi Kaneshiro. I'm not steeped enough in Asian pop culture to appreciate it as fully as some, but I found its frantic camera tricks and frequently over-the-top acting somewhere between tiring and tonic. I'm glad I saw it, but I'm more glad that Wong showed us that he could move on from the frenzied youth culture of these early films to the mature brilliance of In the Mood for Love (2000).

Watched on Filmstruck Criterion Channel

Chungking Express (Wong Kar-Wai, 1994)

The American title, Chungking Express, may echo Josef von Sternberg's 1932 Marlene Dietrich classic Shanghai Express, but it resembles that film only in the presence in both of a blond femme fatale -- and in Wong Kar-Wai's film the blond is one only by virtue of a wig. The translated title -- the original meant something like "Chungking Forest" or "Jungle" -- fuses the film's two major settings: the Chungking Mansions, a low-rent building in Hong Kong, and the Midnight Express, a sandwich shop that provides the linkage between the film's two segments. The first part deals with the infatuation of a young police detective, He Qiwu, aka Cop 223 (Takeshi Kaneshiro), with the woman in the blond wig (Brigitte Lin), who is mixed up in a drug-smuggling scheme that goes awry. The second part tells the story of Cop 663 (Tony Leung Chiu-Wai), and his involvement with Faye (Faye Wong), a young woman who works the counter at the sandwich shop. You might say that Chungking Express begins in the world of film noir and ends in that of romantic (and slightly screwball) comedy, but Wong's film transcends the simplicity of genres. As in his masterly In the Mood for Love (2000), Wong is dealing with characters on the brink of an uncertain future, but with a much lighter touch than the later film. The performances are uniformly fine. Faye Wong, a Hong Kong pop star, brings the quirky character of the young Shirley MacLaine to her role, but with a much greater fragility. Like MacLaine, she has been unfairly labeled with the Manic Pixie Dream Girl stereotype. The extraordinary cinematography is by Christopher Doyle and Wai-Keung Lau.

House of Flying Daggers (Yimou Zhang, 2004)

From the kaleidoscopic color of the Peony Palace at the beginning of the film through the final duel seen through the scrim of a blizzard, House of Flying Daggers is visually extraordinary, fully deserving of its Academy Award nomination for Xiaoding Zhao's cinematography. It tends, however, to be a collection of brilliant set pieces, including a spectacular battle in a bamboo forest, held together by what could be a conventional love triangle -- if only the stories of the three members of the triangle, Jin (Takeshi Kaneshiro), Leo (Andy Lau), and Mei (Zhang Ziyi ), weren't so extraordinarily complicated. In the story by director Zhang Yimou , Feng Li, and Bin Wang, it is 859 C.E., and the police are trying to root out the House of Flying Daggers, a group of Robin Hood-style rebels against the government of the Tang Dynasty. Police captain Leo and his subordinate, Jin, hear that an agent of the Flying Daggers is working incognito at the Peony Palace, a brothel, so they arrest Mei, a blind dancer. But neither Mei nor Leo is exactly who they appear to be, which is unfortunate for Jin, who falls in love with Mei, with fatal consequences. In the end, it's best just to sit back and admire the performances of the three actors, especially Zhang Ziyi , who is truly astonishing in both the action sequences and the dramatic scenes. In addition to Zhao's cinematography, the visual impact of the film depends largely on the work of production designer, Tingxiao Huo, art director Zhong Han, and costume designer Emi Wada. Most of the exterior scenes, with the exception of the bamboo forest, were filmed on location in the Carpathian Mountains of Ukraine.