Year: 1999
Director: Wong Kar-Wai
The fourth watch from the Sight and Sound 2022 poll is at number 5. I am a bit of a Wong Kar-Wai fan – Chungking Express and 2046 are both very fine films, while In the Mood for Love is one of my very favourite films.
Set in Hong Kong in the early sixties it is first and foremost a stunning exercise in visual style. Outrageously beautiful HK film stars Tony Leung and Maggie Chung play a pair of neighbours in a crowded apartment block. Both are married to often-away spouses we never see(in one of the film’s many bravura touches), and whom each suspects the other’s better half of being unfaithful. Chung works in an shipping business, Leung as a journalist. Leung asks her to help him with a martial arts serial and gradually their loneliness and familiarity grows into a mutual attraction.
Like Chungking Express, this film takes place almost exclusively indoors or at night. Kar-Wai is a poet of the pool of light cast by a streetlamp, the overhead lighting of a late-night restaurant or the jumbled claustrophobia of a bedsit. Maggie Cheung’s staggering array of patterned silk dresses are worth the price of admission alone: the super-saturated colour palette pops off the screen. Leung likewise is probably the best suit wearer since Cary Grant.
Every shot is perfectly composed, and it’s a completely engrossing visual world. What it’s about is less clearly defined. Portions of the film are revealed in flash forwards from two or three years after the main sequence of events – and the passage of time is a key theme, as is attraction, and all the reasons why we don’t act on our feelings, as well as why we do. Tiny actions and moments in which the two characters circle each other, sometimes moving closer, sometimes drifting apart, build up to a profound commentary on how the choices not taken, the moments not seized, are as big a part of life as those that are.
This film is a technical marvel – the central corridor of Mrs Suen’s apartment, which separates the rooms of the two protagonists, is as expertly choreographed as any bullet-time sequence. The story – with its will they/won’t they dynamic – is expertly constructed and on first viewing will engross you.
But ultimately Wong Kar-Wai’s film resists a quick and definitive analysis. Like any great work of art the viewer is an active participant in the construction of its meaning. What does the jump-cut ending in Cambodia contribute to the film? Do we really think that Cheung’s character would follow him to Singapore, visit his apartment when he is out, and then leave without saying a word?
In its depiction of individual desire pushing against social restraint it recalls Brief Encounter, in its manipulation of the passage of time La Jetee, but ultimately it creates a seductive and melancholic world all of its own.
Might appeal to people who enjoyed:
Tokyo Story, the aforementioned Brief Encounter.
It’s a film that feeds all the senses: as well as the colours, there’s the sense of the humidity, the smells and tastes of food (Kar-Wai loves a good noodle bar scene) and the constant background noise of one of the most densely populated places on earth. All the more extra-ordinary that both characters just float through this noisy, smelly, vibrant world on a cloud of wishes, regrets and what might have beens.
Spent the best part of 30 years living in HK on and off and ITMFL always
transports me back there.
Together with NY, probably the world’s most photogenic/moviegenic city.
So sad to see what’s happened there in the last five or six years.
Only been once in the early nineties, also the best airport approach bar none, to the old Kai Tak airport. Hard bank turn just before landing onto the runway approach.
A golden Labrador perchance?
A great film. I haven’t watched this for years and I should revisit it.
My brother bought me this on DVD and I’d never heard of it. In The Mood for Love? What the dickens is this? But I was transfixed by it. It’s one of those films which I’m quite happy to leave as being beyond analysis. I don’t really know what it’s about and I don’t think I have anything to say about it: but it has that peculiar magic that just pulls you in.
I tried 2046 but I didn’t last long. Should I try again? I can’t remember anything about it, just that it wasn’t grabbing me.
I also watched My Blueberry Nights, which I think was the director’s first English-speaking film. It just seemed a bit off, as if an inferior director was trying to copy Wong Kar Wai’s style without understanding it. The romance seemed trite, in massive contrast to In The Mood for Love in which the romance was a dark, enveloping force.
So after those, I chalked In The Mood for Love up as a fluke, and I haven’t tried any other of his films!
I watched this just a few weeks ago for the first time in a few years and was reminded of what a wonderful immersive experience the whole thing is. Watch it on big screen and it feels like you’re moving through Hong Kong with the characters. The plot, as it is, feels more like just another stylistic device rather than something to keep moving the whole thing along.
I’ve got the Criterion box of his films and and I’m slowly watching them all.