On <em>In the Mood for Love</em>

Thursday evening I saw Wong Kar-Wai’s romantic drama In the Mood for Love. It’s a film about a fragile and adulterous relationship between a man and a woman, but – more importantly – it’s a period film about the incessant and irreversible passage of time.

The film’s basic plot portrays the relationship between a man and a women who move into next-door apartments on the same day and live strangely symmetrical lives, simultaneously discovering the infidelity of their spouses (whose faces are never revealed). They meet to comfort each other and even act out dialogues between their spouses and their spouses’ secret lovers or rehearse confrontations they plan to have with their spouses. But though they swear to remain faithful to their marriages, their relationship intensifies as they progress from friendship to artistic partnership and perhaps beyond.

In the Mood for Love is set during between 1962 and 1966, and the plot can be hard to follow in that shots frequently cut directly into others taking place days later. In this way the film’s progression resembles the way we recall past events, following a path of minor and major events along a choppy chronology. At one point a scene is even followed by one that takes place some hours earlier. Like one’s memory too, the film occasionally concentrates on particular moments, highliting them with slow-motion and background music so that the character’s movements seem intricately orchestrated. These moments range from the romantic but relatively mundane, like the two main characters passing each other on a flight of stairs or meeting at a restaurant, to the more dramatic, like the female lead running through a hospital to visit her male counterpart. The frequent placement of out-of-focus objects in the foreground gives much of the film a murky, half-remembered quality. Wong Kar-Wai also repeatedly uses repition repetitively to evoke the recursive nature of memory and the patterns of everyday life; we see, for example, the same shot of a ticking office clock several times, and the main characters always dine at the same restaurant.

The female lead wears colourfol dresses that remind me of an interesting historical fact I once heard on television: that many Hawaiian shirts were once made of a synthetic fabric that had a reputation for bursting into flames with little warning when exposed to something like a lit cigarette. I could imagine all those colorful dresses bursting into flames and becoming ashes in a matter of seconds. I think this is just the sort of thought the director wanted to cultivate in his audience. The film’s overwhelming emotion is that of nostalgia, its ultimate revelation that the world of today will be irretrievably gone tomorrow.

The last scene really drives the film’s themes home. While most of the action takes place in the crowded cities of Hong Kong and Singapore, the final scene features the male lead burying the remnants of his past at an ancient temple in the Cambodian countryside entering a beautiful but totally alien world alone. That is how we move into the future.