Country: Hong Kong/China
Director: Wong Kar-wai
Duration: 1 hour and 38 minutes
Where Can I Get It: Kanopy (free w/library card), Criterion (free w/subscription), HBO Max (free w/subscription)
What It Elicits: Musings on the past, romance slated to end, wistful remembrance
The beginning of In The Mood For Love fixates on the midriff. Shots of waists, backs, and backsides concealing faces in a cacophony of clustered bodies squeezing up stairs, down hallways, and into apartments. Desire through comely shapes moving in proximate, sensual slow motion. And the clothes! What clothes our soon-to-be lovers wear. Eventually, those shots transform, widening to encompass the countenances of Su and Chow, the camera’s vision paralleling their mutual discovery, their words and their emotions unfurling into a clarity which, in certain moments, goes by the name of “love.” Kong War-kai’s lush movie remains one of halves: the two protagonists each remain one half of a marriage fractured by infidelity. They live in the same apartment building on a floor cut in half by their respective spaces. Their romance remains only half-consummated, only half-fulfilled. Temporally, this holds as well. The first part of the film takes place in 1962 in Hong Kong, then a British possession, and later moves, in almost whirlwind fashion, into a variety of geographies and times, from Singapore back to Hong Kong and, finally, to Cambodia.
The film, which made Wong Kar-wai’s international reputation, delves into a moment in two people’s lives when each seeks solace in the other, its virtue resting in its gentle and forgiving treatment of two individuals capable of existing without the other yet party to the centripetal force attraction-in-context exerts—their respective independence being true of most romantic configurations, though not at all true of most romance-in-film. Like all good love, there is something inevitably greedy (in the best sense) about it. The film’s exploration of attraction (and infidelity) underlines the performance, the mimicry, the aspiration inherent in relationships. The continual refrain: Am I doing this right? Is this how it is meant to be? The performer’s solipsism. “This is only the rehearsal,” says Chow, more than once in the film. In so doing, he signals the film’s true question: A rehearsal for what? Then again, what else does love do but force us into roles? Aspirational selves embodied, imagined through others’ eyes. Life as rehearsal for a play never staged but continually imagined, calling to mind (in a very different context and on a different subject) the prolific German film director Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s rejoinder to a critic of one of his films: “I’ll fix it next time.” Thus, to speak of authenticity in love not only misses the conceptual impossibility of a singular self, but also misses that comprehension (and what is love but the desire to comprehend?) comes through living with contradiction and fracture. Love, like ambivalence and boredom and antipathy, conditions its own behaviors and then (through the retroactive narration of imagination) reconfigures itself continually. In The Mood For Love’s great virtue and great restraint lie in the treatment of an affair that does not define its participants and, in so doing, remains truer to “reality” than most films’ notions of the romantic encounter. Love marks Su and Chow. It changes them. But it does not make them. And it does not continue for reasons mundane: time, place, prior commitments, and the million little obligations of life which impose themselves. For throughout all our lives, we pick up relationships and, eventually, leave some of them. They may provoke wistfulness or fondness or sorrow, to be delved into in certain passing moments through memories reconstructed to serve current purpose, but life moves on and we move on with it, a little altered in the process, ready for the next rehearsal to begin.
Go Down The Rabbit Hole With:
Wong Kar-wai — Days of Being Wild (1990)
Wong Kar-wai — Chungking Express (1994)