墮落天使 (Fallen Angels)

每天，你都會和許多人擦肩而過，他們可能會成為你的朋友或是知己。所以我從來沒有放棄和任何人擦肩而過的機會。有時候搞得自己頭破血流，管他呢！開心就行了。
You rub elbows with a lot of people every day. Some strangers might become your friends or even confidants. So I never turn my back on a chance to rub elbows. Sometimes I rub till I bleed. No big deal, as long as I'm happy.

在1995年的5月30號，我終於得到了我的初戀。我還記得那天晚上外面下著雨，當我看到她的時候，我突然之間覺得，我像一家店，而她就是我，在不知不覺之間，我讓她跑了進來。我不知道她會留多久，當然，越久越好。
On May 30, 1995, I finally fell in love for the first time. It was raining that night. When I looked at her, I suddenly felt like I was a store. And that she was me. Without any warning, she suddenly enters the store. I don't know how long she'll stay. The longer the better, of course.

My city has an international film festival going on, and part of its line-up are back-to-back screenings of the Wong Kar-wai's Chungking Express and Fallen Angels, remastered(?). ( some personal feelings and core memories, very tl;dr )

Fallen Angels movie plot: a crime-comedy movie with two briefly intersecting storylines: the one with a world-weary hitman (Leon Lai), his agent (Michelle Reis), and the chaotically blonde woman he starts seeing (Karen Mok); and the one with a mute criminal (Takeshi Kaneshiro) and his various ventures in life, as well as his relationship with family.

I don't know have loved this movie if I was watching it on a dim computer screen, but the theater experience really magnified everything for me. I loved it, though parts of it hit me too hard, particularly the ones involving

spoilers

losing the only person who's loved and taken care of you (a parent, in this case), and then regressing to the directionless version of yourself that you had only begun to grow from. I also related very hard with the hitman's inability to make decisions of his life because it was easier to just follow directions. I'm gonna cry now haha ( ･ᴗ･̥̥̥ )

The music was so good!!! Here's the Taiwanese song in Takeshi Kaneshiro's character's storyline (his father in the movie is Taiwanese), 思慕的人:

Watch on YouTube

Here's the video of the song with Chinese subs + scenes of the movie that might be spoilery.


PS. I was looking up some info about the 4k restoration; as a filthy casual I didn't notice anything off about the aspect ratio (other than it was wide), but apparently a lot of cinephiles are unhappy with significant changes. Here's an article about the restoration being HK history erasure (especially with the movies being created at the cusp of the handover) + the details that get cropped out of frame: https://www.cinemaescapist.com/2021/01/fallen-angels-restoration-wong-kar-wai/