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 indiscriminately by the same blue sky, and in turn, the vibrant greens and reds of the lights that flicker on at dusk.

Kar-wai defies the notion of Easter eggs to be observed between the two films, or chronological timelines to be followed between the antics of each character. Though it follows Fallen Angels by over a decade, Synecdoche, New York’s Caden Cotard summarizes this notion perfectly: “None of those people is an extra. They're all the leads of their own stories. They have to be given their due.” Each life depicted in Chungking Express or Fallen Angels overlaps with another, refusing to exist in a vacuum. As characters repeatedly tell viewers throughout both films, we metaphorically and literally rub elbows with thousands of people each day - people that could be our friends or confidantes mere hours later. Sometimes, we rub elbows hard enough to tear our clothes and create a spark.

Whether or not that spark is allowed to catch fire remains to be determined by the characters. To open up to another in a disclosure of undying love is to pull apart one’s ribs and expose a beating, bloody heart. Terrifying. Kar-wai’s characters experience extreme difficulty in verbally expressing their love for each other - Chungking Express & Fallen Angels amusingly illustrate the alternative ways in which love is expressed to others, whether breaking into an apartment to clean and decorate it each day, or murdering assigned targets each night. Although characters from both films reside in the same city, their physical expressions of love could not be more different than daybreak and nightfall.

The sister films maintain a focus on individuals who often refuse to express any love or heartbreak at all, letting their surroundings express those emotions instead. Water droplets are wrung out of a towel; an apartment grows tearful and floods. Others simply stop themselves from feeling. One character takes up jogging so that his body runs out of fluids, leaving him with no tears left to cry. “We’ve been business partners for 155 weeks now,” another says. “We’re sitting next to each other for the first time today. We seldom see each other because it is hard to control one's emotions. Partners should never get emotionally involved.”

Kar-wai and cinematographer Christopher Doyle, however, have mastered the craft of visual storytelling through color palettes to the absolute highest level. Even if characters do not verbally state their emotions to one another, their environment tends to do all the talking for them. Building off of a motif that originated in Chungking Express, Fallen Angels is a highly curated color landscape full of some of the deepest, most expressive greens and reds to ever grace the silver screen. They glisten off of a jukebox that is historically partial to The Cranberries and The Mamas & The Papas; highlight a hitwoman’s cheeks as she touches herself; and swirl throughout steamy streets and bars, paying homage to a deeply stunning Hong Kong that can no longer be witnessed today. 

This expert visual storytelling makes the absence of reds and greens all the more noticeable when they disappear during significant moments, like learning of the loss of a parent or falling in love for the first time. The camera shutter slows; color drains from the screen; the viewer leans forward. Kar-wai and Doyle’s expert manipulation of shutter speed results in a genuine feeling of time slowing and coming to a stop. A coin falls; a bottle drains itself; a droplet rolls off of the sign of a restaurant where one lover awaits another. Has a year passed, or a mere second?

Wong Kar-wai is painfully aware of the multiplicity of options out there. In both our world and his, we are faced with too many choices, whether it’s deciding between a chef’s salad & fish and chips or a romantic partner. Anyone that you rub elbows with today might become your life partner, or issue the most painful heartbreak you’ve ever experienced. Rather than succumbing to doom in an overwhelmingly endless sea of options of undying love, Kar-wai turns the other cheek and makes peace with love’s pressure. 

Love is not the end-all-be-all; rather, it is a side effect of living. A great love that ends painfully can be appreciated for what it is and repurposed to inform the next one. Through Chungking Express & Fallen Angels, Kar-wai encourages us to navigate love on our own terms - and to watch for sparks the next time you rub elbows with a stranger.