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In the Mood for Love (Hua yang nian hua) [DVD]

Screenplay : Wong Kar-Wai

MPAA Rating : PG

Year of Release : 2000

Stars : Maggie Cheung Man-yuk (Su Li-zhen), Tony Leung Chiu-wai (Chow Mo-wan), Siu Ping-lam (Ah Ping), Rebecca Pan (Mrs. Suen), Lai Chin (Mr. Ho), Chin Tsi-ang (Amah)

Wong Kar-Wai's In the Mood for Love (Hua yang nian hua) is an elegant, poetic exploration of romantic yearning, repressed emotions, and the age-old conflict between tradition-bound behavior and emotional longings.

Set in Hong Kong in the early 1960s, In the Mood for Love tells a densely layered textured, but seemingly simple, story of two neighbors who form an emotional bond when they learn that their respective spouses are having an affair. Discarding his previous aesthetic tendencies toward hyperkinetic editing, use of different film stocks, and telling multiple, sometimes disconnected, narratives, Wong instead adopts a style of simple visual elegance—graceful camera movements, low angles, slow motion, and an astounding use of hyperealized colors and exquisite compositions—to tell his story, which is both intricately bound to its historical place and time, but also universal in the emotions it evokes.

Maggie Cheung Man-yuk stars as Su Li-zhen, and Tony Leung Chiu-wai stars as Chow Mo-wan, the two neighbors who sublet rooms in an apartment building and happen to move in on the same day. Early on, it is important to understand the sense of community the film builds; the setting in Hong Kong in 1962 with characters that are primarily émigrés from Shanghai is crucial to how the film works. This was a time and place in which front doors were constantly open, neighbors ate dinner together, and it wasn't uncommon for a young married couple to rent one room in a larger apartment shared by another family.

The early passages of the film are built out of small fragments that begin to coalesce into the painful realization that Su Li-zhen's husband and Chow Mo-wan's wife are having an affair. We never see the cheating spouses; they exist entirely as off-screen voices, with a few brief glimpses of the backs of their heads and shoulders. They are not so much characters as they are catalysts. We understand Su Li-zhen and Chow Mo-wan's respective emotional devastation purely by their responses, which puts an immense load on Cheung and Leung's shoulders. Both being accomplished, subtle actors, they convey the film's emotional resonance beautifully, drawing us into their pain, confusion, loneliness, and, ultimately, attraction to each other.

Wong Kar-Wai builds the emotional power in this chamber piece out of not only his two lead actors, but also by carefully controlling the mise-en-scène and cinematography, turning In the Mood for Love into an intricately orchestrated visual meditation on the primary themes of love and loss. Working closely with production designer William Chang Suk-piang and cinematographer Christopher Doyle (who replaced Mark Li Ping-bin after production had already began), Wong makes brilliant use of intensely saturated primary colors and dark shadows, costumes, and props to maintain focus on the emotional core of the story. There is a constant tension in the film between culturally dictated decorum and the irrepressible urgings of the human heart, which is embodied quite beautifully in Su Li-zhen's costumes, which consist entirely of cheon sam, high-necked, form-fitting dresses that are a cross-cultural product of both Asian and Western influences, traditional, yet undeniably erotic.

Something so simple as a metal bucket that Su Li-zhen takes with her to the corner noodle stand for dinner each night slowly develops into a heartbreaking symbol of her loneliness and isolation, even though she is constantly surrounded by people. At the same time, Wong also makes powerful use of physical isolation within the frame, allowing his slowly tracking camera to discover Chow Mo-wan alone against a wall, smoking a cigarette, but secretly waiting for Su Li-zhen. The characters are also often trapped within frames—windows, doorways, and so forth—that make visual the sense of entrapment they feel in their lives. The film is replete with subtle camera movements that keep the characters slightly off-center, and pensive shots of long, empty corridors. When Wong uses a swish pan several times during a crucial conversation, it is shocking in the way it deviates from the previously established slow and contemplative tone, and it underscores the urgency of what is being discussed at that moment in a powerful and unexpected way.

For all its visual power, In the Mood for Love is also a striking example of how both diegetic and nondiegetic music can be used to underscore the film's meaning. Wong borrows a beautifully haunting waltz from Japanese director Seijun's Suzuki's 1991 film Yumeji and uses it as an aural motif whenever Su Li-zhen and Chow Mo-wan's paths cross; after they realize what is happening between their spouses, it marks the moments in which their intimacy grows. He also has a wide array of period music, from Chinese operettas to imported Western tunes by the likes of Nat King Cole, playing constantly in the background, reminding us of the cross-cultural winds flowing throughout Hong Kong during this crucial period.

Yet, for all its visual and aural depth and complexity, what ultimately grabs you in In the Mood for Love is its intimacy and its emotional honesty. Su Li-zhen and Chow Mo-wan go through a range of emotions and responses, beginning with tentative conversations that allude to what they both know, but find hard to admit, to near-masochistic recreations of how their spouses likely met, to quiet evenings spent together in which they pledge "not to be like them," but find it impossible to fully repress the nagging in their hearts.

The last third of the film opens up in terms of both time and space, leaping forward several years at a time and taking us to different location, including Angkor-Wat, the crumbling 12th-century shrine in Cambodia, where Chow Mo-wan whispers his broken heart into a crevice and plugs it with dirt, as he knows ancient people once did. And, like Chow Mo-wan, those ancient people knew the pains of heartbreak and loss and the never-ending questions about what might have been had circumstances been different. Wong Kar-Wai captures all of that here, in what is certainly his best film.

Copyright © 2002 James Kendrick