Talk To Her

Indian cinema is in a period very similar to the 40s era in the United States when actors cranked out several movies a year. It's even been given a name---Bollywood. The typical Indian who watches a movie is looking for a good time. They want singing. They want dancing. They want simple storylines. Where musicals are almost unheard of in American cinema, musicals are the most common way to disseminate popular music to the masses. Storylines involving a good brother and a bad brother and an evil uncle, and how the bad brother sees the errors of his way and helps the good brother defeat the uncle are common.

Even if we allow for the fact that American viewers expect more sophistication from their films, there are still films like The Rock or pretty much any Jerry Bruckheimer film that has sufficient explosions, and a relatively simple story arc that keep most fans entertained. Most people go to film to be entertained, and they want to have a story. Funny though, how people's lives aren't that way at all. Ask a person the story of their lives, and the best they can do is tell you where they are from, and where they've lived, and then eventually snippets of their lives.

Their stories don't have simple beginnings or simple endings and not everything in between follows a dramatic arc. Yet, stories are what people expect out of film. Listen to a symphony sometime. As you get to the end, the orchestra swells up, then does a duh, duh, duh. The emphatic ending underlined over and over and over again, so you know, yes, this is the ending, please clap.

Both film critics and makers of films challenge the notion of what makes a film good. Film critics see so many films that they want to be challenged. Part of the reason critics are where they are stem from the ability to appreciate a wide variety of film. With so many filmmakers, there are some that are interested in telling stories or images or whatever in new ways, that may not be traditionally exciting.

When Picasso or any number of modern painters rebelled against photorealistic paintings, the average person would complain that "that's not art". Anyone could do what Jackson Pollack did, they'd say. Those are just red squares painted. How hard can that be?

Great filmmaking can share those same qualities. They lack traditional forms of story telling.

I just saw Fallen Angels. Wong Kar-Wai was having great difficulties making this film, so he took a break, and made Chungking Express as fast as he could. The creative burst he felt making that film gave him the impetus to finish this film.

The two films share some common story elements. Both involve a killer, though Fallen Angels splits the woman killer in Chungking Express into two characters, a killer and his female partner. The small apartment where Tony Leung, who played a cop in Chungking Express, lives plays a prominent role. There's even a mention of the can of pineapples which are past their expiration date.

If the film is about anything, it is perhaps being alone and unable to communicate in the modern world, where Hong Kong is that modern world. Hong Kong is in a location that attracts plenty of people, from China, Taiwan, Japan, and India. It is a global hodgepodge, and as a large city, it shares much in common with other large bustling cities. It take a careful ear to understand that Wong Kar-Wai understands this melting pot of Hong Kong.

If you listen to the dialogue, parts of it are in Cantonese, mostly spoken in southern China and in Hong Kong, parts are in Mandarin (spoken in Beijing), and there is even a little bit in Japanese. Wong Kar-Wai also uses music as well as anyone, picking music from the US, from the Middle East, even ending with Alison Moyet's 80s theme, "Only You".

The film focuses on two men, and the various women in their lives, and their basic inabilities to communicate, and yet their basic desire to want to be with someone. One man is a hit-man. He works with a female partner, whose job is not quite clear. She is emotionally attached to this guy, but expresses it in a most repressed way. She cleans his apartment. She even masturbates in his bed, imagining what it would be like to be close to this man.

As he kills, he begins to ponder his own mortality, and perhaps like so many Godfather films, he wants to get out of the business after being shot a few too many times. He meets up with a wildly exuberant blond woman, who enjoys screaming and running out in the rain. He bumps into a high school mate who wants to catch up, is being generally obnoxious, and makes you want to beg to make another hit on the bus right there and then. He has a picture he took of a black woman and a kid that he gave ice cream too, and shows this picture, pretending it's his family.

The other male only ever speaks in voiceovers. He meets a woman who talks to someone called Blondie. She yells at this woman for falling for this guy Johnnie, who she has a thing for. She's upset at Blondie, and cries on this near-mute's shoulder. To pass time, he breaks into other people's shops and tries to run their business after hours, forcing a particularly hapless male to eat ice cream, get a haircut, and basically all sorts of things he'd rather not do.

In a nod to Atom Egoyan, this guy lives with his dad, a chef, and he takes videos of his dad, annoying the hell out of him, and yet, this video becomes their only means to communicate with one another. When his dad dies, the video becomes the only way for him to remember his dad.

The film does drag on for a bit, having more endings than a Spielberg movie and Return of the King put together. Everytime you think it's going to end, it keeps going on for one more segment. The characters in Wong Kar-Wai's world are ultra-cool and hip, but are ever searching for meaning in their lives. There are moments in their lives that are special, and yet those moments slip away. The hitman's partner wants their working relation to stay forever, and perhaps to move beyond unrequited to requited. The hitman wants out. He meets the blond and wonders if he should start his own restaurant. It's a life he's not familiar with, and will probably not satisfy him either.

The other guy doesn't even talk. He hopes the woman who's yelling at someone named Blondie falls in love with him, because he's fallen in love with her, and yet, eventually, she leaves him.

Toward the end, the hitman has been killed on a last hit, finally making one decision on his own, rather than having his partner decide everything, and even then, she has decided that he'll be killed in this last hit. She emotionally detaches from her partners, unwilling to let her repressed emotions take control of her again, and then, at long last, she and the mute dude get together.

Wong Kar-Wai isn't about to give us the sappy ending and have both their lonely dreams fulfilled. Instead, the two share a short motorcycle ride in the streets and tunnels of Hong Kong on a moonlit and cloudy evening. In this one moment, they share each other's loneliness, their aimless lives having respite, before returning to their bleak lives.