The Emotional Impact of Colors in Wong Karwai’s early Films & Learnings for Film Colorists
Part III: Colors of Emotion in ‘Fallen Angels’
FALLEN ANGELS (1995)
Fallen Angels, like Chungking Express, features two loosely intertwined storylines: one is the story of a hitman wishing to leave the notorious Hongkong criminal underworld (played by Leon Lai), the prostitute he starts a relationship with (Karen Mok), and his female business associate and middleman (Michelle Reis), the Partner, who happens to be infatuated with him.
The other story is of a mute ex-convict on the run from the police (Takeshi Kaneshiro), and a mentally unstable woman dumped by her boyfriend (Charlie Yeung).
Set in 1995 Hongkong prior to the colony’s 1997 Handover to China, Fallen Angels explores the characters' loneliness, their sense of alienation and yearning for connection in an anxiety-ridden city that appears to be stuck in a perpetual search for its cultural and existential identity.
Fallen Angel’s closely held wide-angle photography, the frequent use of Dutch angles and other often unconventional camera movement and framing approaches pull the audience into the characters’ emotional worlds, at the same time allowing almost every visual element in any given scene to play a decisive and impactful role while smoothly blending into the overall visual context.
Color choices are deliberate: a brackish yellow-green dominates the cramped, oppressive story world. Fallen Angels was shot at night, either in restrictive interior spaces or outdoors, racing through narrow tunnels and in streets that feel about to be swallowed up by high-rise buildings and the city’s ubiquitous overhead neon signage that keeps the darkness at bay.
Red and Orange in Fallen Angels – Driving Emotional Impact
The color red plays an important role: in the first story that centers on Wong Chi-ming and the Partner, red teases the audience in an ambiguous way by playing with conventional associations of temptation and sensuality. The two characters never meet but are closely attached to each other, professionally and, for the woman at least, emotionally. She gets him hit jobs, cleans his apartment, sifts through his garbage for clues about what kind of man he is, then masturbates on his bed while diving into sexual fantasies about him.
In these scenes, red comes into play via seemingly secondary, decorative objects – blankets, buckets, her lipstick and mirror, a casually placed ashtray. The yellow-brackish cyan/green background palette in these scenes is less saturated and with lower contrast, whereas a slightly more saturated red stands out, emotionally separating the protagonists from a grim reality that neither seem able to escape.
This demonstrates the creative and purposeful use of red on the director’s part who understands that the human mind tends to pair green and red as complementary colors, allowing the latter a definitive degree of visceral prominence, even if only attached to seemingly unimportant objects in any given scene.
As this opening part of Fallen Angels demonstrates, a film colorist’s understanding as to how humans “see” colors can develop sensitive skills of choosing emotion-appropriate hues that help tell the story impactfully and, importantly, to support and realize the director’s vision.
The emotional connotation of these red elements conjures a feel of seductive yet unattainable sensuality and temptation, and even the faint promise of love.
Such associations maintain audience expectations and add tension. Lurking beneath the surface of the story and the color design is a palpable, implacable sense of danger and violence.
[21 - Fallen Angels, Wong Karwai, HK 1995: the Partner’s opening scenes]
The same saturated red appears in Wong Chi-ming’s cross-cut scenes, during tension-building moments on his way to carrying out a hit. As in the Partner’s scenes, red elements direct the eye, mind and emotions of the viewer while connecting the two protagonists’ sensual, almost erotic vibes.
[22 - Fallen Angels, Wong Karwai, HK 1995: Wong Chi-Ming cross-cut scenes]
Then, as the audience is thrown into the violence when Wong Chi-ming carries out an ordered assassination, less saturated orange hues replace the red, immediately expelling those previously teased romantic illusions – at least temporarily, as if to remind the viewer of life’s nasty and brutish reality.
[23/24 - Fallen Angels, Wong Karwai, HK 1995: the Partner’s and Wong Chi-Ming’s scenes, respectively and apart from each other, immediately before and during assassination scenes]
Orange is a double-edged color / sword, as we have already observed in Chungking Express. In various Chinese cultural contexts, orange links with feelings of romance, even peace and harmony (note that Chinese Buddhist monks wear orange robes).
The color also carries insinuations of decline and demise, representing dominating hues of the fall season, and in ancient martial arts literature orange may also be associated with toxic traps, engineered either by malicious female schemers or dangerous male warriors.
In Western culture and film, from the typical – often overused and clichéd – use of a soothing, romantic sunset to a harbinger of imminent danger and death (see The Godfather trilogy as an often quoted example), orange carries an ambiguity that dexterously adapts itself to the prevailing story context. Blue is the color placed opposite orange on the color wheel and in combination those two tend to make each other stand out.
Not so in Fallen Angels: in these scenes, the ambiguity of orange is heightened in juxtaposition with a de-saturated green that seems to fade into invisibility. An unsettling foreshadowing sense is palpable, one that assumes a sharp and unmistakable clarity as soon as the hitman points his gun and pulls the trigger.
All Images sourced via Shotdeck.com (subscription), unless otherwise indicated.
This 4-part Essay formed author Holger E. Metzger’s Thesis for Dado Valentic’s Color Grading Master Program, the world's leading professional film color grading program.
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