This is the kind of review that tells you more than you may wish to know about the movie. So, if you want to see In the Mood for Love without preconceptions, read no further. No offence taken. You will, naturally, save this review to read after you’ve seen it.
For those still on board, In the Mood for Love is the new film by Hong Kong auteur Wong Kar-wei, who won a Cannes director’s prize for his previous film, the “gay road movie” Happy Together. As with that film, the title is ironic. The movie concerns a man and a woman (Tony Leung Chui-wai and Maggie Cheung Man-yuk) in early-Sixties Hong Kong who move into neighbouring apartments. Discovering their respective spouses are having an affair, they begin a strange relationship of their own.
Sensuously shot by Australian-born Christopher Doyle, a regular Wong collaborator, and art-directed to within an inch of its life by William Chang Suk-ping, In the Mood for Love is so breathtakingly beautiful that after a while you begin to think it’s about cinematography more than anything else. Languidly lovelorn, ellipitically poetic, it leaves out more than it keeps in, which makes it both fascinating and frustrating. As he did with Happy Together, Wong made the film without a script, improvising as he went, leaving his actors (and himself) in the dark as to the story’s trajectory. He also shot about 70 hours’ worth of film, then shaped the 90-minute narrative from it like a minimalist sculptor.
Apparently, the concept of the film (man takes revenge on wife’s lover but falls in love instead) has been all but abandoned, though its ghost lingers. Do the pair ever have sex? We wait and wait to find out; the tension would be unbearable if they weren’t so obliquely detached about it all. Cheung has commented that she’s still not sure exactly what the characters did or didn’t do; if a scene was shot but omitted, did they do it or not? Wong says he’s interested in what happens “outside the frame” – or does the final edit determine what happened?
In the Mood for Love is a striking, hauntingly memorable film, one saturated by a personal, obsessive vision, devoted to ambience over narrative, feeling over thrust. You may well find it mesmerising, but you’ll have to be in the mood.