Chungking Express & Fallen Angels: Wong Kar-wai’s Ode to a Thousand Possibilities
By Sarah Jester | June 28, 2022 Wong Kar-wai wants you to make up your own mind about love. Falling in love is an inevitable side effect of living - how you choose to act on it is up to you. Kar-wai leans into this dichotomy in his celebrated sister films Chungking Express & Fallen Angels , weaving a tangled web of requited & unrequited lovers, business partners with benefits, real and fake blondes, cops with soft sides, and enjoyers of canned pineapple & chef’s salads. Chungking Express & Fallen Angels are by no means cinematic parallels to each other - they exist as more of a Venn diagram of the good and evil, the legal and illegal, the daytime and nighttime; with most characters innocuously residing somewhere in the middle. In both films, Kar-wai issues a sprawling depiction of Hong Kong’s open air markets, bars, fast food joints, illicit meeting places, and homes, full of police officers, cooks, assassins, drug dealers, lovers, and goldfish; all lit indiscrim...