Wong Kar-Wai’s Fallen Angels (1995) ends with a meet-cute, a motorcycle ride and a pop song. The Flying Pickets’ a capella cover of Yazoo’s ‘Only You’ had been 1983’s Christmas Number One, a hit that suggests more about the peculiar and patchy nature of the charts that year than the song itself. (The band had their origins in the British left-wing theatre of the 1970s and the name, referring back to the successful miners’ strikes of 1972 and 1974, had a ring that would be merely nostalgic until the cataclysm of the NUM strike the following year.) The opening treated vocal syllables mimic clipped synthesiser chords in an uncanny way, both homemade and inorganic, in a manner that breaks with the low-rent neon and the light-smearing fast- and slow-cranked filming of Wong’s Hong Kong. The lyrics announce a new story at the very end of the film, one that falls into it unexpectedly—“looking from a window above / it’s like a story of love”—in a way that nothing in Wong’s characters’ lives, following their private obsessions or objective entrapment in routines, ever usually does. (When it does, in the torrid extramarital romance of
Flowers of romance
Beautiful.
just rewatched fallen angels recently, great post! always found the use of that song at the end especially perfect and fascinating