11/18/2023 0 Comments Romantic moods englishChow returns to the building where they met but doesn’t inquire deeply enough to learn that Su has moved back in. Su declines to flee with Chow to Singapore, then appears there, steals into his apartment (a Wong Kar Wai trope), and calls him at his office, only to hang up without a word. In the course of the film, Chow and Su chase and miss each other so frequently that the pursuit becomes an existential joke. If only Chow and Su could meet outside their deceitful partners and watchful neighbors! But we have a tendency to cause our own problems in love, sometimes by accident and sometimes out of a subconscious desire for the problem itself. It is the belief of a teen-ager that love is wholly grand and tragic, that the barrier to happiness is the circumstance keeping fated lovers apart. With experience, an edge of irony crept into my interpretation. I returned to it in the giddy swing of crushes and then in the hungover aftermath of breakups-it serves equally well for both-including an almost-relationship that bore some resemblance to Wong’s story. But my reading of the film’s details changed as I got older. Wong’s magic touch is making everything onscreen feel new, as if it is happening for the first time, no matter when it is set.Īt first, I would rewatch “In the Mood for Love” just to luxuriate in its ambience: the vibe is compelling enough. One source for “In the Mood for Love” is the Chinese masterpiece “Spring in a Small Town”-an austere 1948 film by Fei Mu, little known in the West-which also circles around straying lovers trapped in their circumstances, with a looping narrative and intimate cinematography. (The apartment complex from “In the Mood for Love,” in particular, owes a debt to the architectural claustrophobia of “ Rear Window.”) That is not to say he ignored predecessors from closer to home. ![]() Wong punctured the dominant historical nostalgia with Hitchcockian psychological suspense and a Godard-esque embrace of youth culture and improvisation. He also cleared a path for more casual, intimate, and atmospheric directors after him, including Jia Zhangke, whose protagonists are similarly lost in the churn of China’s transformation. Wong’s movies offered a departure from the self-serious grandeur of such Chinese directors as Zhang Yimou and Chen Kaige, who had begun to carve out international reputations with their epic dramas. Stills from Wong’s “Days of Being Wild,” 1990. I didn’t know what an “art film” was, but I aspired to the greater depth of feeling it seemed to promise. Drawn in by its evocative title and cover on the foreign-films shelf, I snuck it into a pile of family rentals and watched it at home alone one night, entranced. ![]() But I first encountered “In the Mood for Love” as a teen-ager in the least glamorous of circumstances: a glaringly lit Blockbuster in suburban Connecticut in 2002, not long after it was released in the United States. The clarity of vision leaves an indelible mark on the viewer, and the film’s suitability for selfies makes sense one wants to inhabit it, to take the places of its beautiful protagonists. The combination is both unprecedented and somehow familiar upon watching, like a forgotten memory. ![]() Wong created a cocktail of French New Wave filmmaking, American hardboiled mystery, Chinese modernist literature, and the geopolitics of his own Hong Kong-via-Shanghai upbringing, then channelled those disparate influences into the mundane, domestic story of two not-quite-lovers. “In the Mood for Love” is the kind of singular art work that stands in as a shorthand for one’s personal taste.
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