1. IN THE MOOD FOR LOVE. (2000)
Directed by Wong Kar-Wai
So, after a lot of work, and a lot of words, I can reveal that the best film of the zeroes is Wong Kar-Wai’s romantic drama, IN THE MOOD FOR LOVE. It hasn’t been an easy list to create, but it’s been an absolute pleasure to revisit these movies, mostly just by writing about them. Tonight, though, I allowed myself a treat and rewatched IN THE MOOD FOR LOVE, the fifth time I’ve seen it; and it proved itself, once more, to be a film of infinite class, great elegance and the best pair of leading performances of the decade.
Set, for the most part, in Hong Kong in 1962, IN THE MOOD FOR LOVE focuses on two characters; Mrs Chan (Maggie Cheung) and Mr Chow (Tony Leung). Within days of each other, they respond to an advert for lodgers in the same flat, however, Mr Chow, arriving later than Mrs Chan, is directed to the apartment next door. Both move in, with their respective spouses. Throughout the entirety of the film, Wong never shows us who the spouses are; we hear their voices, and see the backs of their heads towards the start of the film, before they both disappear, or remain only as figurative shadows in the lives of our lead characters.
It becomes evident to us, relatively early on in the film, that Mrs Chow and Mr Chan are engaged in an affair with each other. While many directors would be interested in examining the tension between the characters when this is discovered, it is at this point that the spouses disappear from the screen. Instead, rather than drawing out the story, we discover pretty quickly that our two leads have, also, pretty much uncovered their spouses’ infidelities. Wong places this in a clever context; Mrs Chan works for a shipping company, and her boss is engaged in an affair behind his wife’s back, an affair that she is helping him to enjoy successfully. It’s an immediate point of conflict, but more than that, it’s an immediate point of context. This is a world in which marital infidelity is commonplace, yet one in which society still frowns upon friendship between married men and women.
Leung and Cheung are two of the world’s finest actors, and they have extraordinary chemistry together, which Wong utilises to haunting effect. Their characters form a friendship, after confirming with each other, beyond all doubt, that the affair is going on. At first it seems as if their friendship is only there to remind themselves of their pain, to torture themselves somewhat. Shot across restaurant booths, in the back of taxi cabs, in doorframes, Wong stages the couple in such a way that the chemistry throbs with massive intensity. Faced with that, and our sympathy for their situation, we desperately want for them to make the step beyond friendship.
In the aftermath of their first ‘date’, Leung asks Cheung “I wonder how it began”, and thus starts one of the film’s key narrative twists; the two characters improvise the seduction between their spouses, and then rehearse the confrontations they desire together. The film has such a dreamlike mood, and Wong usually frames these moments with only one face visible that in the first moments of these scenes we’re unsure how much time has passed, or even whose head it is that we can see the back of. It’s a gorgeous trick, and plays into one of the hallmarks of Wong’s work, the repetition. We see it here, in numerous forms. The film is carried along by its soundtrack, and two or three pieces of music are repeated throughout the film, including a pair of songs, in Spanish, by the great Nat King Cole.
The other piece is called ‘Yujemi’s Theme’, composed and recorded by Shigeru Umebayashi. This is the piece of music that accompanies most of the film’s most effective scenes – wordless montages, usually long and languorous takes of the two characters, both separate and together. One in particular is utterly sublime. It allows you, and thus the two characters, to fantasise about how their relationship, and life together, could be. They look, for all the world, like a married couple. The montage disappears suddenly, replaced by a bright light and the screaming of their respective landladies as they accompany their drunken husbands home for a lengthy game of mah jong.
Wong deserves nothing but the finest plaudits for this, which is the equal, at the very least, of his best work (from the previous decade: CHUNGKING EXPRESS and DAYS OF BEING WILD). In the beginning of the film he evokes city life, and the loneliness that is inherent in it better than any film I’ve ever seen. There are countless shots of one of our characters dwarfed by their surroundings, frequently shot in doorways, or alone in a frame of film containing lots of space. Even in the crowded city, it’s possible to be alone, and Wong never allows us to forget this. In the opening scenes, we never see Cheung and Leung’s faces in the same frame of film for more than the most fleeting instant, repeatedly in these early scenes we see them cross paths on their way, either to or from, the noodle stall below their apartments. They pass wordlessly, almost without acknowledgement. Frequently, they pass on a narrow staircase, or while one is huddled under an awning away from the rain. Later on, they occupy the same spaces, together; the spaces that each expected to occupy with their spouse when they moved in, no doubt.
Those of you unfamiliar with the work of Wong Kar-Wai, just won’t believe how stylish a film this is. Those of you who know other works, but not this, won’t believe the manner of the style utilised. In his previous work, also collaborations with the Irish cinematographer Christopher Doyle, his films had been all about the kinesis of modern-life, hallucinogenically photographed, with lights and colour merging for some peculiar, yet resoundingly beautiful images. IN THE MOOD FOR LOVE, though, is something else. Here, Wong’s camera lingers on everything.
He’s said since the film’s release that what he was trying to capture was the sense of a moment just passed. He does that with alacrity, this is our generation’s best film about love, from each of the angles, aside from the glorious moment of reciprocation. There’s the obvious pain of one love coming to an end, or being tested to its very limit, and also the pain of a love that you can’t quite make work. Leung remarks to Cheung that he just wanted to know how it started, but now he understands “Feelings can creep up, just like that. I thought I was in control”. What Wong has always done superbly well is capture a moment, or the feel of a place. It works best (aside from here) in CHUNGKING EXPRESS, which conveys modern city life in effortlessly cool strokes. With IN THE MOOD FOR LOVE, he bests even that, capturing not only the essence of what much of city living entails, but also the sucker punch that is unfulfilled love.
Part of the film’s appeal is that it is one of the most beautiful films of all time. It’s fairly clearly the most devastatingly gorgeous film of the decade. A great deal of the look of the film comes from the art-direction, and then down to the costuming and set design. Maggie Cheung, one of the most beautiful women on the planet is immutably sexy, bedecked throughout in some of the most staggeringly stylish dresses ever shot on screen. She must wear nearly 100 different designs, each of which makes her look almost impossibly appealing. Leung, himself, is a hugely attractive man, and is also immaculately costumed and styled throughout. They’re an enormously appealing couple, something that other directors (notably Zhang Yimou with HERO) noticed, and took advantage of.
It’s entirely possible that IN THE MOOD FOR LOVE is the middle part of an incredibly loose trilogy – Maggie Cheung’s character here, Su Li-Zhen, may well be the same character that she played in DAYS OF BEING WILD, while there are several echoes of this film in 2046 (the room number of Leung’s second apartment in the film). There are several obvious comparisons to the film, probably in Britain the one that sticks out is David Lean’s BRIEF ENCOUNTER. Now, Lean’s film is firmly ensconced in my all-time top ten, and this is a film absolutely worthy of comparison to it. BRIEF ENCOUNTER is one of those films whose classic status is inarguable. Like here, Lean uses pre-conceptions of an audience to stage something almost unbearably poignant about the cost of romantic love. Yet, in spite of (traditionally) unsatisfactory endings (to the love stories, if not the films), both films are ineffably romantic.
What makes IN THE MOOD FOR LOVE even more remarkable as an achievement is that the shoot was so chaotic. After the film’s UK premiere, Wong and Maggie Cheung revealed that the film had shot for fifteen months, in three different countries, and the story was only finished in the final month of shooting. Wong’s initial intention had been to create an intimate chamber piece. It’s testament to the skill of all involved that in spite of the chaos, what the film ended up as is a seemingly effortless love story, a paean to cinematic intimacy. The actors deserve extra credit for their performances on such an uncertain shoot, but Wong, a directorial magician, is the maestro who earns the most kudos here. It’s unlike anything he’d ever made before, or has gone on to make since. He branches out beyond his usual style, but makes a film that sums up his entire career. It’s a bold, brilliant, heart-breaking film, and I love every single, heart-breaking moment of it.
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