Fallen Angel

-Kar Wai Wang

The way to express love is not “I love you”, but you will know the answer two minutes later.

The five protagonists in this movie are lonely. They just try to escape from loneliness in different ways, and return to loneliness again at different times.

The female killer who longs for love falls in love with the male killer who just want accompany. The lonely male bar waiter has felt lonely for the first time after falling in love with flight attendants who’s obsessed with her last lover. The male killer forgot the loneliness with the accompany of a noisy girl, but could not give her love that she wanted most and left.

The movie uses a lot of wide-angle lens which are very close to the characters. People’s faces even occupy half of the picture, which looks very unreal. The deliberate alienation makes the viewers and characters seem to be in two different worlds. The detailed facial expressions and fluid glances of the characters are shown clearly, the emotions are magnified, the surrounding environment is not important, and even a panoramic view is rarely seen in the film.

I can say this movie, doesn’t care about the story, the world, the logic, the future, but only cares about people, people’s emotions and relations between people.

Because of the distance from reality and exaggeration of emotions, their struggles and loneliness are more prominent, like a white smoke that across from the curtain to the viewer’s eyes. By watching them, we see our struggles in love, our fear and alienation of love, the obsession and warmth of love, and the loneliness rooted in ourselves. We see realness and got an understanding from this movie.

At the end of the story, the male bar waiter who firstly failed in love and the female killer who once again fell in loneliness met in a restaurant. They all felt the winter of that year was earlier than before. She put down the bangs and they looked at each other.

The female killer asked him to send her home. They sat on the motorcycle and drove into the tunnel. She leaned on his back and they didn’t talk.

The female killer thought: “I haven’t been on a motorcycle for a long time, and I haven’t tried to be close to a person for a long time, although I know that this road is not very long. I know that I will get off soon. But, at this minute, I feel so warm.”