‘In the Mood for Love’: Revisiting Wong Kar-Wai’s Materpiece 20 Years Later
Since its debut at the Cannes Film Festival in May 2000, Wong Kar-Wai’s seventh film, In the Mood for Love has become one of the most beloved and well-regarded films of international cinema, even coming in at #2 on the BBC’s list of 100 Best Films of the 21st Century (just behind Mulholland Drive). Wong Kar-Wai is arguably the most popular and critically-acclaimed Hong Kong director to break through to Western audiences, as his films — while stylistically bold — are generally accessible. His film Chungking Express (1994) was championed by Quentin Tarantino, who helped draw attention to Wong’s work in the USA, and has gone on to become a favourite among many thanks to its visual flair and pop soundtrack. In the Mood for Love is slower and less of a giddy delight than Chungking, but is generally considered his best work and still captures audiences around the world today.
The story centres around the growing connection that forms between a married man (Tony Leung) and woman (Maggie Cheung) in a Hong Kong apartment building after they both come to the realisation that their spouses are having an affair with each other. The film dwells almost entirely in the confined space of the apartment building, basking in an atmosphere of romance and longing that looms over every frame. It’s almost as though the setting is influencing our characters, and the result is something like if the Overlook Hotel made you horny for your neighbours instead of wanting to kill your family.
I want to focus on my personal experience with the film, as I believe that’s the best way to talk about it. When I saw this a year ago, it left me feeling slightly cold — I missed the effervescent, dizzying filmmaking of Chungking Express and its companion piece, Fallen Angels (1995). It may not have hit me at first glance, but after revisiting it, I’m now in love with this film. It’s the love that creeps up on you, that simmers inside you unawares, that one day you finally notice because you are a frog in a pot and in that pot is love and the love is boiling you. It’s the repeated gestures — the passing exchanges in the hallways, the polite nods, the rushed smiles — that form the seed for these feelings that will gradually grow. There is no meet cute, only meet mundane, then meet mundane, then meet mundane, then meet mundane, then before you can realise it, you are head over heels. In the Mood for Love seems engineered to give you this experience along with its characters, or at least allow it to dawn on you slowly just how insanely in love with this film you are. It took me two viewings, but I finally got there.
Wong builds this bed of feeling through repetition within the form of the film itself; the same pleasantries, the same shots and angles, the same motif of the slow-motion/music combination (the track in question, by Shigeru Umebayashi, is lifted from the Seijun Suzuki film Yumeji — how’s that for a sonic pairing! — and its recurring use results in it becoming something of an earworm; a Wong Kar-Wai staple, but one with added thematic relevance here, the repetition building familiarity, seducing us and getting under our skin). But once the rhythm of these repeated moments is established, we can sense more clearly the encroaching romance within them, but it’s uncertain whether that romance is on the horizon or on our doorstep. Our two lovers must be brought closer in some way before anyone can know for sure.
The conceit of not showing the cheating partners is genius; they are like the grown-ups in Peanuts, except the obstructing force is adultery instead of adulthood. There is absolutely no drama of any kind between the married couples, barely any interaction at all in fact. “Mr Chan” and “Mrs Chow” may as well be concepts, invisible obstacles. When we do discover more about them, it is through the prism of their respective spouses who are left behind, through the device of their play-acting of how they imagine their disloyal partners to have carried out the affair. Essentially, it is the absence of their partners that must be felt more than anything, for that is what drives our protagonists together.
Of course there is the rain, the cigarettes, the dim lights, that help kindle this budding attraction. But food and the place in which it is consumed, at least in my opinion, have true magical properties here; a subtle, special power that acts to crystallise these intimate moments and ingrain them into our memory, and their memory. My first date was at a Chinese restaurant, “Bing’s”, which shortly after was consumed by fire and never re-opened. Though that physical space may be lost forever (and the noodles therein), it lives on forever in my gilded, soft-focus recollection of that night, and the other nights I spent there. The noodle shop in this film is also a sacred space, then — a haven for nourishment not only of the stomach but of the soul, and of the desire within us for that all-important connection. What I’m saying is the dumplings in this look delicious.
The film is very pretty and possibly a little too knowing and over-composed. There is nothing very natural about the way the relationship unfolds — it’s not at all forced, but it’s portrayed with a teensy-weensy hint of pretension, and I mean that in the nicest way possible. For a film about the subtlest little moments having the biggest impact, it certainly telegraphs them at you. I don’t really mind that but I can see how the film’s clear desire to impress might be grating to some. Now, an important thing about me when it comes to movies is that I am a sucker for epilogues. It’s the final fifteen minutes of this film (particularly the final five) that absolutely wrecked me and and made me realise what a powerful film this is. Within these final scenes is an overwhelming melancholic beauty that I somehow missed the first time around. It’s where the film finally shuts up, doing away with even having any actual humans on screen, and seems to just gaze at where it has come to and say, “Oh.”
There are many reasons why these final moments hit me so hard: their quietness, their simplicity, their elegant conveyance of something universal, something tragic, heartbreaking and yet strangely comforting if only for the knowledge that what we are experiencing is something so deeply and truly human. But most of all, it is because of everything that has come before. It is the culmination of all those instances, the memory of the rain drizzling outside the noodle shop, the smoke rising through the air, the way her dress crinkled at the shoulders and the waist and one day matched the crimson curtain along the corridor, and how all these things are lost and now amount to nothing but exactly that, a memory, but somewhere in the world these memories can be kept safe.
There is a long and lasting future for everything, even if it exists only in our dreams.
Review by Shea Gallagher
