Neon Romanticism: Wong Kar-wai’s Fallen Angels and the Afterlife of Nineteenth Century Longing
By Hanna Yoon
Film Still from Wang Kar-wai, Fallen Angels, 1995.
Image courtesy of Mubi.
Walking through the feverish nightscapes of director and screenwriter Wong Kar-wai’s Fallen Angels (1995), I couldn’t help but wonder: what happens when nineteenth century Romanticism, with all its melancholy grandeur and candlelit yearning, is reborn not in a cathedral or salon but in a cramped Hong Kong stairwell or the haze of a motorbike ride at 2 a.m.? If Eugène Delacroix found passion in the tempestuous stroke of oil paint, Wong translates it into neon smudges, streaks of blurred motion, and cigarette smoke curling like a phantom lover. Wong’s choices are not arbitrary stylistic indulgences but the cinematic afterlife of nineteenth century painting, where artists wrestled with the same questions he poses: how do you capture a fleeting instant, and how do you give desire a form?
Joseph Mallord William Turner, A Ship against the Mewstone, at the Entrance to Plymouth Sound, c.1814, Watercolour, 15.6 x 23.7 cm.
Image courtesy of the National Gallery of Ireland.
Wong’s infamous ‘smudge-motion’ technique—where moving bodies leave behind a spectral trail—has always struck me as more than a stylistic quirk. Developed with cinematographer Christopher Doyle, this style is a direct visual heir to Romanticism’s obsession with transience. J.M.W Turner’s sea storms, dissolving into pure chromatic haze, are echoed in Wong’s motorbike sequences where speed and light melt bodies into memory. Wong’s Hong Kong, like Turner’s seas, is never still, it churns with desire, loneliness, and velocity. Théodore Géricault’s Raft of the Medusa (1819), where the human form dissolves in painterly chaos, mirrors how Wong’s figures are always half-disappearing—less portraits than apparitions. Romanticism understood that beauty resided in the ephemeral, and Wong amplifies that truth in a medium defined by moving images. Time is never captured but mourned, slipping past even as the camera insists on holding it.
Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres, La Grande Odalisque, 1814, Oil on canvas, 88.9 × 162.6 cm.
Image courtesy of the Musée du Louvre.
The colour design of Fallen Angels situates Wong within French Academicism, though he destabilises its logic. They recall the academic painters of the French Salon who weaponised colour to embody mood and status. Jean-Léon Gérôme polished his marble bodies, and Auguste-Dominique Ingres’ La Grande Odalisque (1814) is bathed in a blue haze that was never quite real. Wong, by contrast, turns that academic precision inside out. His hues do not flatter, they destabilise. A sickly green filter makes a face alien; a yellow glow rots a love scene from the inside. If Ingres idealised the body into a dream of classical repose, Wong utilises colour to show longing corroded by urban alienation. Both trade in fantasy, but Wong’s is fractured and unstable—closer to decay than perfection, questioning whether emotion itself can ever be trusted.
His protagonists, too, are unmistakably Byronic. The hitman wandering through Hong Kong’s alleys can be seen as Lord Byron’s Childe Harold (1818)—rootless, alienated, and intoxicated by freedom and doom. Is Wong suggesting that modern alienation is just a remix of Romantic exile—that our late-capitalist city is simply the ruins of Greece, translated into neon and glass? The hitman’s nocturnal exile echoes not just the Romantic hero but also the figures of Delacroix’s Liberty Leading the People (1830), who are caught between revolutionary fervour and existential fatigue. Wong’s genius is to transpose the Romantic wonderer from windswept ruins to 1990s neon, proving that alienation itself is, and will continue to be, a recurring motif in visual culture.
John Everett Millais, Ophelia, 1852, Oil on canvas, 76.2 x 111.8 cm.
Image courtesy of the Tate Britain, London.
What I found most fascinating about Fallen Angels is the intimacy of Wong’s framing—the fisheye lens that crowds us too close to a body, a cheek, a gesture. This wide-angle claustrophobia of Fallen Angels, where bodies press uncomfortably close to the frame, resonates with the Pre-Raphaelites’ almost suffocating attention to detail. It reminds me of John Everett Millais’ Ophelia (1852), where the maiden drowns in a stream of wildflowers, every petal meticulously rendered, every blade of grass pressing in too close. Wong’s characters are equally swallowed—not by nature but by jukeboxes, noodle stalls, and convenience stores. The effect is the same: a beauty that borders on suffocation, a desire that overwhelms the frame.
Film Still from Wang Kar-wai, Fallen Angels, 1995.
Image courtesy of The Criterion Channel.
And yet, Wong never lets us indulge fully in romance. Just when the neon haze begins to seduce, he fractures it with alienation or absurdity. He stages the very quarrel that defined nineteenth century French art: Romanticism versus Academicism, where the former demanded polish and narrative clarity, the latter celebrated disorder and emotion. The hyper-composed stillness of his scenes—faces lit like portraits; interiors arranged like stage sets—evokes the discipline of Salon painting. But his blurred motion, his temporal ruptures, belong to the Romantic disorder. Fallen Angels becomes, in its own way, a twentieth century Salon painting, where the struggle between ecstasy and control plays out frame by frame—except the marble columns are noodle stalls, the odalisques are lonely girls in leather jackets, and the heroic gestures are quick rides through neon-soaked tunnels.
This is the very reason why Wong’s cinema is more than postmodern moodiness; it is a continuation of art history’s deepest tensions. He does not merely borrow Romantic gestures; he revives them in a medium uniquely suited to their dilemmas. Leaving Fallen Angels, I thought of French poet and essayist Charles Baudelaire, who wrote that ‘romanticism lies neither in subject nor style, but in the way of feeling.’ Wong Kar-wai is Romantic in precisely this sense. He does not just film the city, rather, he films the ache of being alive within it. He makes his viewers realise that neon blur is no less art-historical than oil paint—that longing, whether in 1830 or 1995, is still the most cinematic and painterly act of all.
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