In the Mood For Love – Criterion

Director: Wong Kar Wai
Screenplay: Wong Kar Wai
Starring: Maggie Cheung, Tony Leung
Country: Hong Kong
Running Time: 98 mins
Year: 2000
BBFC Certificate: 12

In the Mood for Love is a film defined by absence, denial and loss. The most active characters in its story are left off screen. The protagonists, bound by fading social conventions, refuse to act on their desires. And yet this small, sad tale is presented with all the magic that cinema can offer. The result is overpoweringly romantic, a work of spectacular intimacy like no other.

The story begins in Hong Kong in 1962. On the same day, two married couples move into the spare rooms of adjacent apartments in a cramped, rundown building. We only ever meet the husband of one couple, Chow Mo-wan, played by Tony Leung, and the wife of the other, Su Li-shen, played by Maggie Cheung. Their spouses often work away, leaving Chow and Su, both naturally quiet, reticent characters, to deal with their loud, gregarious landlords. What starts as polite acknowledgement between the pair becomes a tentative friendship when they realise that their spouses share more than a strong work ethic – they are having an affair. As the betrayed parties, they spend an increasing amount of time together, working through what must have happened and eventually collaborating on a samurai story that Chow, a journalist, manages to sell as a serial. But even as love is clearly blossoming, neither can step outside their essential natures, nor their deep need not to behave like their adulterous other halves. Chances are missed. Timing isn’t right. It’s almost too much to bear.

A film about such introverted characters could be frustrating or even dull. Yet to play his introverts, Wong Kar Wai elected to cast two of the world’s most charismatic movie stars, and then costume them and shoot them with extraordinary style and grace. Chow and Su are better dressed than the other people in their lives, a reflection of their proper, formal characters. Su is only seen in restrictive, high necked dresses that cause one neighbour to wonder aloud, “does she always dress like that?” For the first five minutes, the film around them is busy and cluttered, but then Su pops out for noodles and everything changes. In what becomes a recurring motif, Wong presents Maggie Cheung in slow motion, accompanied by a slow, mournful waltz. Though her expression is blank, the pace and the lighting and the music demand that you wallow in her loneliness. Later, she is joined in these sequences by Tony Leung and they are beautifully, achingly alone together.

Perhaps the greatest trick In the Mood for Love pulls off, however, is that all this style never seems affected or artificial, the result of Wong’s famously improvisational shooting style. The film was produced over two years, off and on, with Leung and Cheung reporting to set in full hair and make-up without any clear sense of what they were going to be doing. Wong essentially workshopped the story and characters with the actors in front of a full crew and rolling camera. Hours and hours of footage, whole plots and characters, were recorded and discarded. Cheung in particular has admitted finding the process baffling and wasteful. And yet, as she now freely admits, it produced moments that seem caught rather than planned. We are presented with the edited fragments of what was clearly a larger whole, so that even with the beauty of the music and the costumes and the lighting and the movement, it is as if we are glimpsing episodes from real lives. Which, of course, only makes it all the more heartbreaking when those lives don’t intersect how we might hope.

Film:

The Disc

For a director so famous for his visuals, Wong Kar Wai has not always been well-served by home releases of his work. Different cuts of different prints with indifferent scans have been released by multiple companies for most of his films. In the Mood for Love has been treated better than most, but there are still inconsistencies. The disc Criterion are now releasing is the same as the one found in their recent Wong Kar Wai box set. It is director-approved and looks and sounds amazing but is still not totally without controversy. Anyone who knows the film from its first round of DVD releases will notice the film has taken on a new, greenish tint that cools the overall feel.

The extras are excellent. Wong is happy to discuss his work in detail, appearing in both a 16-minute solo interview and as one of several interviewees during a 50 minute ‘making of’ documentary. The latter is remarkable for the number of scenes it shows from the production that are wildly different from the final film. There are cooking sequences that seem almost slapstick in tone, and shots where Cheung’s confidence and body language are totally at odds with the version of Su we ultimately get to see. Away from the documentary, there are four lengthy deleted scenes that are more easily recognisable from In the Mood for Love, and Wong supplies commentary for three of them. Cheung and Leung are fun together in a 40 minute Press conference from the 2000 Toronto International Film Festival. Cheung does most of the talking and does a great job of expressing her admiration for the film and her director, while maintaining her exasperation at his methods. Wong scholar Tony Rayns contributes a valuable 8 minute breakdown of the film’s disparate musical sources (including the surprising history of that waltz). Finally a Wong short film (Hua yang de nian hua), music video (featuring Leung) and trailer are included. The box includes a booklet with a new essay by novelist Charles Y, but that wasn’t made available for review.

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