Plot Intro
Hong Kong, the early 1960s. In a busy block of flats, a woman, Su (Maggie Cheung), and a man, Chow (Tony Leung) move next door to each other. Both of them have spouses that are perennially absent due to work commitments, so Su and Chow strike up a friendship. As they grow closer, they begin to suspect their spouses of having affairs, and that only drives them closer still…
In the Mood For Love is, according to Wikipedia, often named as one of the best films every made, and it’s certainly one of the most successful. It garnered huge amounts of award nominations (including a nomination for the Palm D’Or at Cannes, though conspicuously absent from the Academy Award nominations), Tony Leung, one of the most popular Hong Kong actors ever, won Best Actor for this film at Cannes, Maggie Cheung’s qipao outfits became hugely recognisable, and the reviews were, and remain, astronomically positive. It’s pretty disgraceful that I’d never really heard of it before but it was an easy choice for our World Cinema features.
And yes, this is a pretty lovely film, made all the more fascinating by director Wong Kar-Wai’s stylist choices. Despite his still and steady camera, his characters are almost always shrouded in shadow, off camera, half-seen or have their backs to the audience, and the scenes are quick and snappy and often with a sense of incompleteness, showing many characters and extras squeezed into the small, cramped quarters of 1960s Hong Kong apartments. This creates a strong sense of claustrophobia and lack of privacy which, at times, is pretty suffocating. Indeed, our two main characters appear to be the only people in Hong Kong who just want to be left alone (Su is frequently seen to be turning down invitations to dine with others and even when she accepts, she stands pensively to the side). It is no wonder that these two lonely yet permanently pestered individuals take solace in the peace of each others’ company.
I also thoroughly enjoyed the performances the two gave, and its easy to see why they are such popular performers. Cheung faces her friendly but slightly overbearing neighbours with a brave but forced face, and her body language is that of a fashionable woman with no life to boast of, and her mundane marches to a local stall to buy her noodles for dinner are quite sad to watch. Like Celia Johnson and Trevor Howard in Brief Encounter (a film which has an extremely similar storyline), our would-be lovers here never go to bed with each other, or even kiss. But they display a yearning for each other that transcends physical displays of love, comparable to Timothee Chalamet and Armie Hammer in the first hour of Call Me By Your Name (before they start bonking each other). I should also point out here that, as far as I could see, it is never really confirmed whether the main characters’ spouses are actually having affairs - our hero and heroine simply deduce this based on some pretty circumstantial evidence. I get a sense that we could see these people as deluded and falling apart due to their apparent displacement from the world around them.
I wouldn’t describe the film as perfect, however. Wong’s stylistic choices sometimes go too far, particularly in the final half hour. There’s a scene in which Chow waits for Su in a hotel room to see if she will join him and subsequently run away to Singapore. The frenetic camera work during this segment left it unclear to me whether she had gone to the hotel room or not, or why/why not. A quick read of the Wikipedia synopsis made things clear but I felt that the action became obscured by Wong’s desire to be clever. The final few minutes of the film also jump forward in time quickly and, again, it wasn’t entirely clear what was happening, which was frustrating after a rather captivating first hour in which the lovers gradually and oh so desperately get closer and closer.
In the Mood for Love is, objectively, a beautiful film that manages to capture the essence and feeling of love without resorting to melodrama or sexualisation, which is pretty difficult to do. It has a stylist tone that creates a very different world almost immediately, but this can be overbearing at times. Nonetheless, it deserved its various accolades and, after about 24 hours of reflection, I did like it.
Highlight
There’s a scene in which Su is confronting a man with his back to the camera (we think it is her husband) on his alleged affair. He at first denies it, then admits, and her reaction is understated. The camera quickly cuts to reveal that the man is, in fact, Chow and the two of them are simply rehearsing Su’s confrontation. It gets the one laugh of the whole film.
Lowlight
The last half hour is confused, and I felt Wong let his style choices get the better of him.
Mark
7/10
This is a slow unfurling of a film, executed with such poise and elegance that it is at times heartachingly beautiful. What happens? We don’t actually know.
It’s one of those ‘in-between’ films, capturing the sort-of relationship between two people. There’s heaps of them, films with encounters that don’t quite go anywhere, or tensions keeping people apart. I thought of Before Sunrise, Lost in Translation, Brief Encounter, The Remains of the Day - all films which show people not quite doing, not quite achieving - in essence then, utterly human.
It’s a difficult genre - get it wrong and you run the risk of completely boring your audience. These discussions that go nowhere, have to have something underneath compelling it. In the examples above, that thing is sex. Or rather the want to have sex and love. It’s the same here, and I suppose this genre lends itself perfectly to this - the people desperate for intimacy with each other but (usually) never quite getting there.
It’s achieved superbly well here. Much of the action seems to happen offstage, rather than see Su’s often-absent husband, we only ever see her reaction to him. We feel the smallness of these apartments, the paper thin walls where you can hear the chatter of the neighbours as if its in the room. Both Su and Chow are set up as firstly kindly nice people, and secondly terribly lonely. Their spouses are out and about most of the time and they begin to reach for each other’s company for solace.
It’s worth noting that despite being a tension-filled, deeply romantic film, the lack of even a kiss shows how well you can tell a story without physical touch. If this was Hollywood, I’d imagine there’d be at least one interrupted sex-scene. But here they let the story unfold without any additional steaminess.
As Paul says, it sadly loses focus in the last half hour, just when it should be tightening its grip and it has a wild chase to meet each other (which doesn’t succeed) and then becomes quite confusing. However it doesn’t spoil the first two thirds, which are filled with the unspoken desire communicated by the vibrant colours, the heavy romantic musical motif and the fact that Su and Chow barely look at each other, and somehow through that show how much they want each other.
Repetition seems to be the key. We see Su always on her way to the rice stall (and not eating with her friendly but slightly annoying neighbours), we see Chow at work, the musical motif constantly replays, the journeys they tread are the same - so when we see a moment like Su trapped in Chow’s bedroom, unable to leave because the neighbours are just outside, it’s a jolt - a startling break to the routine, that you hope they will prolong and turn into something. It doesn’t - of course.
And then there’s the question - are the spouses really having an affair? Personally I think yes, but then that’s because in the mire of uncertainty that this film creates, one longs for one fact to grasp with conviction. But who knows, perhaps there’s another film where Chow’s wife and Su’s husband are also standing close together, hands almost touching, just wishing that they could make the move - and never managing it.
Highlight
I think the camera angles take the prize - it’s such a startling way of telling a story and feels fresh and instantly loaded with meaning. We never see certain people, we sometimes only see part of our lead characters, and the sense of being-and-not-being at the same time is captivating.
Lowlight
The last half hour needed to knuckle down and focus rather than open up to become abstractly romantic.
Mark
8/10
8/10
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