Wong Kar Wai’s 2000 masterwork has influenced filmmakers ranging from Barry Jenkins to Sofia Coppola—and innumerable teens on TikTok.
color-field painting was to the fifties, “In the Mood for Love” may be to the early two-thousands: an art work emblematic of the era that encodes a universal, ambivalent feeling. The film is a ninety-minute mood piece in which a barely spoken plot is less important than the weaving together of fashion, music, color, light, and form—a feat cinema can achieve better than any other medium.
Over countless rewatches in the decades since, I came to realize that my younger self hadn’t grasped the full picture. What makes the film enduring is not so much the romance as the shadow that lies behind it.Perhaps the aesthetic of “In the Mood for Love” is so immersive because it is so personal. In 1963, with thelooming, Wong’s family left his native Shanghai for Hong Kong.
The camera often pans to the obdurate face of an office clock, showing time frozen but also inexorably passing—the burning fuse of Chow and Su’s relationship. Each figure is enclosed in their own box of space. The effect is deliberately voyeuristic. “We always want to keep the audience as one of the neighbors,” Wong said.
These scenes cast the would-be couple in a new light, not as victims of circumstance but as players in their own game. The film’s impossible sumptuousness is meant to be just that—impossible. Wishing that the two of them ended up together means missing the poetry of the dance.
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