In the Mood for Love
Wong Kar-Wai, Hong Kong/France, 2000, 97 mins; Tartan video & DVD
Review by Gerald Houghton (2000)
Hong Kong. 1962. Mrs Chan (Maggie Cheung) rents a room for her and her husband. On the day of the move, another couple, journalist Chow Mo-Wan (Tony Leung) and his wife, take up a room in the adjoining apartment. With their respective spouses often away on business, it is not long before the neighbours begin to suspect the absent partners of an affair, thus igniting an almost unspoken passion of their own.
Wong Kar-Wai's best picture to date is both rarefied and surprisingly accessible. Languorous and lacking in sensation, it relies instead on a studied synthesis of music (popular song and Michael Galasso's sombre, Nymanish score) and image reminiscent of Britain's own Terence Davis. Best known for those exuberant, idiosyncratic visual and narrative grab-bags, Chungking Express and Fallen Angels, In The Mood For Love finds Kar-Wai owing more to his last, that torpid Argentinean-housed gay love story Happy Together. The exquisite cinematography (by Mark Lee and Kar-Wai regular Chris Doyle) is less frenetic than of old, placing a heavy emphasis on judiciously administered slo-motion and the luminously vivid play of light. And one should never underestimate the importance of Chan Kei-Hap's limpid editing in focusing the mood of the piece either. The film is in love with the inertial swirl of Leung's ubiquitous cigarette smoke, the curve of Cheung's back as she climbs the stairs. In The Mood For Love is a film that can do more with the detritus of city life - the backs of its actors even - than most manage with a wallet-straining SFX budget.
The result is a film that feels like memory. Someone is looking back on these events, remembering the fall of rain on the streets, the saturated red curtain that fills the hall outside Leung's new apartment. Nothing much happens between the two - the occasional touch of hands adds the only on-screen frisson, Kar-Wai apparently having cut a more explicit sequence - but there is a subtle honesty to the central performances that goes far beyond the mere call of duty. There is a strange desperation in their plight, and a literate and lyrical method to its telling.
The film only stumbles once, towards the end, when, overtaken by historical events, it is required to move at a pace that doesn't suit. It over-crams, fragmenting the atmosphere and slightly overstaying its welcome before reassembling for a beautifully judged climax at the Angkor Wat temple in Cambodia, circa 1966. Here the camera floats through the ruins like the wind, like Leung's cigarette smoke, carrying its secrets back to the past. It’s a suitably virtuosi coda to an extraordinary piece of purist cinema.