FALLEN ANGELS is the third tale in the CHUNGKING EXPRESS set of stories, and has no plot as such other than that of hitman Wong Chi-Ming (Leon Lai) wanting to give up his profession. The rest is just an assortment of characters that are bruised, broken, lovelorn or just plain crazy. And that, as everyone knows, is just what makes Wong Kar-Wai’s films from this period so damn great.

Wong populates the film with the denizens of the night in this strictly nocturnal film. We get the aforementioned hitman, his desperately lonely partner (Michelle Reis), a mute shop worker (Kaneshiro Takeshi – in a different role from the one he played in CHUNGKING EXPRESS) who takes over and runs other people’s businesses while they sleep, a kooky blonde (Karen Mok) who used to date Wong Chi-Ming but was so unspectacular as to be completely forgotten by him and a serial small-change thief (Charlie Yeung) who makes constant phone calls trying desperately to rekindle her love affair with the never-seen Johnny.

The characters cross at various points with different degrees of success, and watching them is a delight. It’s hard to convey to someone who hasn’t seen the film just how brilliant it is to see a hitman coming off his last job, taking the bus home and running into an old school friend who tries to sell him insurance. Or when the blonde Karen Mok sits next to Chi-Ming in McDonalds and asks if it’s OK to sit there, when the huge restaurant is ENTIRELY empty. Or when He Qiwu starts giving people shampoos against their will. It’s the mute He Qiwu (he lost his voice after eating a can of out-of-date pineapples – further deepening the canned pineapple conspiracy in Wong Kar-Wai’s films) who says it best in one of his voice-overs: “The night’s full of weirdos”. Elsewhere, we see the futility of trying to dry clothes by flashlight, extreme violence to a blow-up sex doll, the massaging of a dead pig and other weird and wonderful things you’d never expect to see in a movie – including the much talked about (at the time) fully-clothed masturbation sequences of Michelle Reis’s hyper-sexed but unfulfilled femme fatale.

It’s a bittersweet pop-art film noir with chunks of whimsy set against some fantastically placed pieces of music and filmed to perfection, as ever, by Christopher Doyle. The Teresa Teng song “Mong-kei Ta” (“Forget Him”) by Shirley Kwan must get special mention as the mood-setter on the soundtrack, but the use of the faux a cappella hit “Only You” by British group The Flying Pickets also gets the little hairs rising on the back of your neck.

The only real criticism you can make about FALLEN ANGELS is that it’s not quite as good as CHUNGKING EXPRESS, and as it is so close stylistically and thematically (He Qiwu’s “proper” job is working in the Midnight Express, just like the characters from the previous film) it is hard not to compare the two. The resolution of the Karen Mok character seemed a little anti-climactic and the voice over by Chi-Ming in this scene seemed a bit contrived and corny to me, but that’s the only thing that didn’t seem right in the film. While it may not be as good as CHUNGKING EXPRESS, the fact is that very little IS. And I’d take ten FALLEN ANGELS over one IN THE MOOD FOR LOVE any day and I strongly suspect I’m not the only one.