by Nick Taylor
We at TFE are wishing a Happy 25th Birthday to Wong Kar-Wai’s melancholic romantic drama In the Mood for Love, which debuted on this day at Cannes. It went home with the Best Actor award and the Technical Grand Prize for its cinematography and editing, and if you ask around there’s a good chance folks would say it still got short-shrifted by Luc Besson’s jury. Its stamp on the cinema firmament, an apex of the sumptuous mood and style Wong made his name on, is beyond reproach. If you haven’t seen it, you’ve almost certainly felt its reverberations in art house cinema writ large, on individual directors like Barry Jenkins, aesthetic blogs or photoshoots, and an entire chapter of Everything Everywhere All At Once. More importantly, if you haven’t seen it then go watch it! Right now! You’re back? Then let’s discuss this masterpiece . . . .
In the Mood for Love follows two Shanghai expatriate couples living in British Hong Kong in 1962. More specifically, our protagonists are Mr. Chow (Tony Leung Chiu-Wai) and Su/Mrs. Chan (Maggie Cheung), who live in adjacent rooms in the same apartment complex. He works as a journalist, she as a secretary for a shipping company. Captured by Christopher Doyle and Ping Bin Lee’s camera amidst smoke-filmed rooms and noisy bistros, Mr. Chow and Mrs. Chan emanate the aura of poised, lonely people you’d typically find in an Edward Hopper painting. They gradually circle closer and closer to each other, until they finally begin seeing each other regularly for one specific purpose. Part of their intrigue spans from a growing rift with their own spouses; as it turns out, the unseen Mrs. Chow and Mr. Chan are having an affair.
Mr. Chow and Mrs. Chan, thus, are drawn together out of a mix of territorial curiosity, restless dissatisfaction at their betrayal, and the kind of passerby chemistry one can only metastisize under the eye of Wong Kar-Wai. They spend a lot of time enacting what they imagine their spouses are doing together, how they might have met, drawing out recriminations Mr. Chow and Mrs. Chan are fundamentally too reserved to ever enact. “Dates” which rhythmically flow as one sequence often comprise several evenings spent together, delineated only by changes in wardrobe. In almost no time, the lines between Mr. Chow and Mrs. Chan playacting as their disloyal spouses blurs into a mutual attraction which neither partner is quite comfortable leaping on. Part of it is just good manners - how dare they start an affair borne from bitching about being cheated on! - but they’re also genuinely trepidatious, even as they radiate an almost molecular hunger for each other.
Few films have conjured such a potent aura of romantic longing. One could argue Wong’s fifteen month shooting schedule - elongated not just for rewrites and location scouting but to re-film entire scenes in different settings so the director could capture exactly the right feeling of this story and of 1960’s Hong Kong - reflects the film’s own portrayal of an ephemeral experience its makers are desperately trying to grasp onto. In the Mood for Love’s anguish isn’t as serrated as Happy Together’s a few years earlier, but the pretend confrontations and mental blocks Mr. Chow and Mrs. Chan place around actually developing their relationship are so painful to witness. Wong depicts their complexity with such presence and texture that neither character is reduced to a simple art object, even as their actors are gloriously synced to his atmospherics.
Tony Leung Chiu-Wai, again cast as the contemplative, quietly charismatic center of Wong’s cinema, plays this familiar role with real depth. If I have less to say about his specific achievements than his co-star’s, rest assured that his masculine cool is very, very captivating, and his ability to provide a sturdy, human center for Wong’s stylized love songs is a real feat. His Best Actor win at Cannes is very deserving on its own merits - my only complaint is Maggie Cheung didn’t earn a corresponding Actress prize for her delicate, deeply-felt turn. (No, this is not shade to Björk, we’ll get to her soon). Cheung is so stirring, so elegant with her physicality and immediate in her moods and contemplations. At all times, she positions herself beautifully before Wong’s camera, yet she communicates the habits, arousals, and disappointments of a real woman.
Still, even if one might want to swap out one prize for another, I think we can all agree the Technical Grand Prize is beyond reproach. Christopher Doyle and Ping Bin Lee, dissimilar artists who never once worked on In the Mood for Love at the same time, both use their sensibilities to serve Wong’s vision. Jack-of-all-trades William Chang sometimes cuts with supple, sinuous ease, while spiking the film’s tempo at other times with blunt scene transitions. He’s perhaps even more indelible as the costume and production designer, constructing a great facsimile of ‘60s British Hong Kong and finding the right balance of cramped intimacy in the apartments, hotels, noodle shops, and businesses these characters haunt. Mrs. Chan’s cheongsams are ravishing in their variations, aiding Cheung in streamlining her body language. Much like Caroline Eselin would use the costumes of If Beale Street Could Talk, these outfits can help signal the length or abruptness of an encounter, and their repetitions compound the sense of memories becoming compounded on each other. Raise a glass, too, for Michael Galasso’s perfect score, arguably the most purely pleasurable feat of an unbelievably gorgeous, heartsore film.
All of these artists provide indelible contributions, yet it’s Wong whose stewardship is undoubtedly crucial to making these elements cohere. I could perhaps cut off the very last coda in Cambodia, but it’s literally my one major complaint about a film otherwise rich in high style and poignant feeling. In the Mood for Love has become such an ingrained cultural object, so widely proliferated since its release, it could be easy to take its achievements for granted. It’s not a film I’m inclined to pop in regularly, but it’s always in the back of my mind, playing its beautiful melody.
