---
title: In The Mood for Love
type: Movie
date: 2022-07-22
rating: 9
director: Wong Kar-wai
genre:
  - Drama
year: 2000
status: Finished
image: in-the-mood-for-love.jpg
tags:
  - javascript
  - movie
colorSortKey: [0, 62, 5]
---
 This for so long had been a bit of an "amateur film buff bingo" film for me; I have been recommended it so many times, by so many people with disparate tastes, for so many reasons, that it took on a bit of a life of its own. So I came in with some preconceptions — mostly of its ostensible merits.

And boy did it live up to them!

The plot is sweet and melancholy and largely immaterial to my analysis of this film's merit — it can be summed up in a sentence, as can perhaps the movie itself. (I thought it was a particularly inspired choice to never _show_ the two philanderers, and to only hear their voices.)

What is stunning to me (someone who's pretty poorly versed in HK cinema in general and Wong Kar-wai in particular) was the visual language. It's probably a cliche to call this a ninety-minute tone poem, but that's exactly what it was — deep, saturated hues, gratuitous shots of cigarette billows and skewed nested frames. There are so few staged shots: everything is obscured, obscured through doorframes and bars and desks and curtains. It was gorgeous.

And the acting was sublime. There are, in reality, two actors: Maggie Cheung and Tony Leung. Their performances were classical: reaction over emotion, quiet and subdued and again, I am repeating myself, sublime.

The ending intertitle reads:

> He remembers those vanished years. As though looking through a dusty window pane, the past is something he could see, but not touch. And everything he sees is blurred and indistinct.

I think the cut from the dusty, smoke-filled shots of Hong Kong to Angkor Wat — more conventionally shot and lit, with Tony Leung looking briefly like he's in an American film with Western sensibilities — is what will stick with me most in this film. This is clearly a story told not in the present day but as someone remembering the past, perhaps fondly and bittersweetly. Who does not have a story — told briefly, in vivid splashes of color and sepia and obscured by time — that they tell themselves like this, or to whom the memory is forced upon them when they catch a glimpse of something they had once forgotten?

(The highest praise you can afford a film is the ardent desire to see more of the auteur's work; I can't wait to watch 2046.)