In the Mood for Love

recommended

by Sam Adams

"That time has passed," reads an inscription near the end of In the Mood for Love. "Nothing that belongs to it exists anymore." With their pinball machine colors and chaotic visual energy, the films of Wong Kar-Wai are aggressively modern, but Mood is purely nostalgic. Or rather, it’s a movie about nostalgia, and its ugly twin, regret. Set in the Hong Kong of the early 1960s, the film has a simple, even schematic premise: Two neighbors, Chow Mo-wan (Tony Leung) and Su Li-zhen (Maggie Cheung) discover that their spouses are having an affair. While their shared knowledge brings them into a strange kind of intimacy, it also ensures that the basis of their relationship is sorrow, not passion. The two share their pain and eventually become lovers, but this is not a world where people connect. The film ends on a note of wistful longing. Think of it as a 98-minute sigh.

Toned down from such flamboyant films as Chungking Express, Wong’s style here is controlled but expressive — in fact, the control is the point. Simply by framing characters offscreen — we never see either Mo-wan’s wife of Li-zhen’s husband — or by imprisoning figures within vertical lines, Wong makes the lack of camera movement ostentatious. When we’re treated to his first elaborate camera move, a side-to-side tracking shot that catches both characters’ reflections in a multi-paned mirror, it’s as if the sky has opened.

Taking his cues from Godard (a director whose own sentimentality is rarely remarked upon), Wong makes his points through the cinematic form itself, but he does it so expressively you don’t feel you’re being lectured to or experimented upon. Working as he typically does without a script, Wong has achieved a movie whose feel is not haphazard but microscopic, as if you’re being treated to a thousand views of the same moment, or a thousand moments compressed into one.

It may dawn on you while watching In the Mood for Love to consider its title, drawn from a song that never appears in the film. You’d naturally assume "love" to be the key word, as it nearly always is. But the title’s other noun is equally important; the film could just as easily be called Of the Love for Mood. Wong switches film stocks as the not-yet-lovers’ hands brush past each other, elongating the moment both to savor it and to heighten the sense of impossibility.

If this makes Mood sound like an intellectual exercise, then a) It shouldn’t, and b) What’s wrong with a little exercise? There’s plenty of passion in the film, only it’s suffused, repressed, dissipated; we feel its aftereffects, not its presence. The passion is in the way the red curtains which line the hall billow as one character walks down it. Wong doesn’t confine all his points to formal constructions, either; the disconnection that’s expressed by our never seeing the characters’ spouses onscreen is just as clearly felt in the way Li-zhen, who’s a secretary, runs interference with her boss for both his wife and his mistress, juggling appointments so he can keep them both content without needing to make up his mind.

It may be most useful to a film like Mood that both Leung and Cheung are heart-stoppingly beautiful — especially Cheung in her form-fitting high-necked dresses, which appropriately enough suggest both sex and the suppression thereof. That’s not to say that both actors don’t turn in fine performances, but that so much emotion is expressed by the camera that their acting seems almost secondary. I’m sure that a bad performance by either would have been far more noticeable, and it’s to their credit that each works with an implicit understanding of the kind of movie they’re making. Movements are reduced to gestures, words to breath; what’s not done or said is more important than anything that is. Of course, it’s difficult to describe a movie so defined by negatives, by absences. What fills the space is simply the flood of emotion that comes washing off the screen.

Wong is often pegged as a new-generation filmmaker, a movie referentialist in the vein of the Coens or De Palma. But Mood suggests he’s moved beyond using film to talk about film. This film doesn’t give you the giddy rush so many of his others do; its cool simplicity is so awe-inspiring there’s no need to draw attention to all the neat-looking shots. What it reflects instead is how film, perhaps better than any other medium, can play back the process of recollection, overlaying moments on top of each other, fixating on images while leaving out plot, fast-forwarding through years then slowing down to a crawl. The suggestion, inevitably repeated, that his movies are only for film buffs is an appallingly narrow-minded one, moreso for what it says about the supposed audience than about the filmmaker himself. With In the Mood for Love, Wong Kar-Wai’s cinematic vocabulary has become so sophisticated, it’s turned back into simplicity.

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