2000: Swept away by In the Mood for Love

Swept away ¨C A new film classic

Movie review: ¡°In the Mood for Love¡±

Published in: The Economist on Nov. 18, 2000

MEN and women alike go into a sort of swoon when talking about ¡°In the Mood for Love¡±, the latest film from Wong Kar-Wai, a renowned Hong Kong director. It is possibly the most beautiful contemporary film on offer anywhere and certainly the most romantic one since ¡°Brief Encounter¡± (1945) set post-war hearts fluttering.

Two couples move in to adjoining Hong Kong apartments on the same day sometime early in the 1960s. A series of coincidences persuades one of the husbands and one of the wives that their spouses, continually away on business trips, are having an affair. From this shared knowledge a parallel friendship develops. But they play by the prevailing rules. ¡°We won¡¯t be like them,¡± the betrayed wife says; and indeed they are not.

Despite evidence of a physical and emotional attraction-captured in the superb playing of Maggie Cheung and Tony Leung, in the glances they exchange and in the rapturous camerawork-this is a chaste relationship, setting it far and movingly apart from, say, ¡°Random Hearts¡±, the Harrison Ford and Kristin Scott Thomas film with a superficially similar plot.

Mr Wong¡¯s reputation was built on innovative pictures such as ¡°Ashes of Time¡± and ¡°Chungking Express¡± (both 1994), in which, with his regular cameraman Christopher Doyle, he pioneered a kaleidoscopic form of photography unique in contemporary cinema. Here he makes a U -turn and films as David Lean and George Stevens, two classical directors, did in their prime. This is Mr Doyle in a different register. Every shot is expressive and beautifully framed, every camera movement, fade-out and dissolve gauged for maximum impact.

The actors glide rather than walk into shot. Are they filmed in slow motion? Sometimes you can tell-when raindrops, for example, seem to pepper the ground. At other moments you cannot quite be sure, and the effect is to give the film a dream-like quality, reinforced by Michael Galasso¡¯s throbbing score and the use of Nat King Cole numbers, sung unexpectedly in Spanish, instead of the over-familiar song the title seems to portend.

Shrewdly, Mr Wong never shows us the adulterous pair. We hear only the husband¡¯s voice and half see the back of the wife¡¯s head. It is as if they are irrelevant, and all that really matters is the main love story which their affair sets in train.

In this spellbinding film, even the clothes-Ms Cheung has a costume change in almost every scene-are nostalgic and hypnotic. At the end, the director pulls off a master stroke. The world moves on; everything we have been drawn into becomes part of the ashes of time. Or does it? A final scene, set in Angkor Wat as a kind of epilogue, suggests that love, even if never fully expressed, somehow lasts forever.