IN THE MOOD FOR LOVE  (2000)  ***1/2

Reviewed 10/2/00

In the Mood for Love is reminiscent of those repressed Victorian British films like Remains of the Day, but of course with Wong Kar-Wai directing, it's much more stylish, albeit enormously restrained for him. As Wong said during his audience Q&A session at the New York Film Festival, his regular Director of Photography, Chris Doyle, must have been bored. Wong and Doyle shoot with many more medium shots and close-ups than usual while maintaining a surprisingly minimalist tone. Wong's style has not looked like this since 1991's Days of Being Wild. He even keeps down the voice-overs.

The story follows next-door neighbors Mrs. Chan (Maggie Cheung) and Mr. Chow (Tony Leung) in 1962 Hong Kong who happen to move into the same overly-crowded building on the same day. Shortly, both notice that their respective spouses are having an affair with each other, most of the time on a business-trip-to-Japan excuse. The times and culture being what they were, Mrs. Chan and Mr. Chow find they have no one else to talk to for fear of extreme social embarrassment, that is, until they find consolation in each other. Mrs. Chan is the more inhibited at first, but she quickly comes to find Chow's presence a comfort in sharing their ordeal. They are thoroughly confused as they deal with their hurt and with convincing themselves that they maintain social standards and their dignity by not having an affair themselves despite their obvious affection for each other. The inability of each to express how the other feels has them teetering on an emotional ledge.

That we barely see their spouses at all contributes to our feeling the repression the characters are going through as we are unable to deposit our feelings of blame on those responsible as much as the characters themselves. Mrs. Chan goes throughout the film changing amongst a myriad of colorful dresses (23 in all), symbolic of the façade she is putting on. Wong emphasizes both the characters’ feelings of closeness and distance by tracking the camera back and forth between a wall separating them as they sit practically back to back in their respective abodes thinking of each other and their spouses. In mid-film, the two decide to work on a martial arts fantasy novel, and the camera rotates back and forth again between their backsides while we observe through a mirror how they throw affectionate glances at each other while the other is not looking.

In the Mood for Love marks Tony Leung's fifth film with Wong (with a sixth along the way) and Maggie Cheung's fourth (Wong having completed a total of seven). Leung has long proven himself the most adept actor in Hong Kong cinema, having taken roles in such diverse genre films as Hard-Boiled (action), The Eagle Shooting Heroes (comedy), Chinese Ghost Story III (fantasy), and Flowers of Shanghai (drama). With his winning the Best Actor award at Cannes this year for In the Mood for Love, it has been a long time coming that Leung should be recognized as one of the world’s best actively-working actors. One shot in particular in Mood displays Leung at his best. Framed through a window, Leung laughs with his drinking colleagues, but then turning around toward the camera, the pain resurfaces and with little change in his facial expression, the light simply fades from his eyes. And among Hong Kong stars, Leung is only matched by Maggie Cheung, who in Mood, arguably does better work.

In the Mood for Love does sometimes overreach in aiming for significance. There are just so many melancholic poses the characters can strike, no matter how beautifully framed and lit, before it begins to verge on appearing inadvertently satirical. Luckily, Wong brings in some needed bittersweet humor just before things get overbearing. There’s nothing so idiosyncratically absurdist as Takeshi Kaneshiro massaging a pig in Fallen Angels, but scenes like Mrs. Chan practicing what she will say to her husband mixes the comedy and the poignancy just right. The end is a jumping through different times and places, which feels all too messy compared to the control that preceded it. Its inelegance though is minor compared to how incredibly poised Wong has managed the rest of his film.