The man’s fingers gently stroke the door frame, push the button of a doorbell. Later they approach a woman’s hand, and you can see that both are wearing wedding rings. She pulls her fingers back, the next time she leaves them. Then her fingers cross and she leans her head against his shoulder, at least for this brief moment. But they have rehearsed their separation forever beforehand, and they know that the rehearsal will soon become a permanent reality.
Wong Kar-Wai’s twenty-year-old, globally successful and multiple award-winning classic “In The Mood For Love”, which is now being played again in a digitally restored form for the big cinema restart, consists of lots of small moments of this kind the unfulfilled love story between Mr. Chow and Ms. Chan.
We are in Hong Kong in the early 1960s. The two of them get to know each other in the narrow hallway of a boarding house, which they move into at the same time with their spouses. He is a journalist, she is a housewife. They quickly find out that their partners are having an affair. About which they themselves develop a tender but chaste affection for one another over the next few years, which will fly by.
Between their hesitant approaches, the cigarette smoke seems particularly heavy and dense, which Tony Leung (Chow) blows in slow motion to the bright neon tubes on the ceiling. And Maggie Cheung (Chan) clothes shine almost supernaturally. In the whole film she wears more than forty different ones, all of which are beautiful, but no other can match the green with the red flowers.
Bodies dodging into nowhere: The secret of “In The Mood For Love” lies in the empty spaces.
(Photo: Koch Films)
In the first shot, the camera moves along a wall with family photos. Wong’s film also works like a photographic novel, the images of which are reminiscent of a bygone era, a past romance. More precisely, the highly stylized images and the songs by Nat King Cole that are played along with them (“Quizas, quizas, quizas”) are all that remains of both time and romance.
With all the clothes and details, Wong presents us with loud triggers like the famous smell of the Madeleines at Marcel Proust, which make yesterday return in its shattered form. In rain-soaked exits to a soup kitchen or the lively corridor of the boarding house, the camera only catches a brief moment of life before it glides on and the figures disappear again. Much happens in secret, behind walls, beyond door frames. What Wong brings to life, he spreads the veil of what cannot be recovered.
A great film about things that don’t happen
The nostalgia hangs heavily over the film, which one can say is perhaps a little too obviously indulging in the fashion-loving reconstruction of a missing Golden Age (the Cantonese original title means something like “The Beautiful Times”). But with all the stylistic mannerisms, all the rich colors and pleasing accessories, “In The Mood For Love” is a great film about the art of omission.
The time does not run linearly here, but in ellipses and jumps. When Ms. Chan borrows a book from Mr. Chow, she brings it back in the next scene; if she asks him why he called her, she asks him straight away why he didn’t. The incidents and changes in the amorous climate that have occurred in the meantime are left out. Their bodies approach each other, only to immediately move away from each other.
Their relationship therefore consists precisely in what does not happen between them and therefore cannot be remembered in the mode of nostalgia. This is what makes this round of bowed heads, shy looks and bodies dodging into nowhere so touching: the secret of this relationship sits in the cracks of memory, i.e. in the invisible space between the dressed-up scenes – not so much in these themselves.
The twenty-year-old film looks just as much into the past as it does into the uncertain future of Hong Kong. Chow’s hotel room has the number 2046 – the last year before the expiry of the special status of the former British crown colony and the “one country, two systems” agreement reached with China, which is already being severely undermined by the authoritarian mother state. Immediately after “In The Mood For Love”, Wong shot a sequel called “2046”, which is set in the future, a science fiction film that takes up many elements from the previous work.
The shooting of both films took forever, and Wong finished editing the day before the premieres in Cannes. As if he had tried to build a parallel cinematic universe beyond the past and yet to come, in which Mr. Chow and Ms. Chan can meet again and again in the sheer rhythm of the images without having to rely on a happy ending.
Fa yeung nin wa / In The Mood For Love, Hong Kong 2000 – Directed and written by: Wong Kar-Wai. Camera: Christopher Doyle, Pin Bing Lee. With Tony Leung, Maggie Cheung. Koch Films, 89 minutes.