Timid Affair: More 'Mood' Than 'Love'

Source: The Washington Post, Feb 23, 2001 pC12.

Author: Stephen Hunter

Wong Kar-wai's "In the Mood for Love" might be described as a Hong Kong inaction film. It's about an extremely internalized love affair, in which two reluctant lovers struggle with varying degrees of success to repress their passion for each other.

Alas, as stylish as it is, it manages to repress the passions of its viewers, too.

Set in Hong Kong in 1962, it begins with the arrival of two new roomers subletting two rooms in two adjacent apartments. That parallelism -- they move in on the same day, their goods are mixed up by the movers, both have spouses otherwise engaged -- is furthered by the following development: Those otherwise engaged and unseen spouses are off somewhere having an affair with each other.

Thus Chow (Tony Leung) and Su (Maggie Cheung) seem obligated to respond in kind. Obligated by whom? Well, by fate, by writer-director Wong, by the fact that each is lonely and in search of comfort and companionship, that each feels betrayed and abandoned.

To increase the stakes, each is exquisitely beautiful. This means a movie law clicks in: We think, because we have been so conditioned from so many movies, that beauty deserves beauty, that it is entitled to beauty. So in a sense, their obligation also is to an audience. They have to sleep together or we will be disappointed.

The truth is, this sounds far more explosive than it plays. The two are extremely fitful, haunted by guilt, wracked by doubt, restricted in expression by culture, watched hawklike by their respective good-intentioned but nosy landlords. The movie's sensuality is not in its bodies but in symbolic manifestations of its film-world: the billowing of red curtains, the endless shots that seem to mythologize Cheung as she walks up the stairs in her sheathlike Suzy Wong dresses, Leung's romantic suffering and smoking.

The affair itself is more like a slow-motion dance than a consummation of the sweaty flesh, consisting of a whole symphony of gestures and longing looks, chance encounters in the rain, almost-knocked-on doors, telephones unanswered, a general sense of groping but not gripping.

I wish I could report that a feverish erotic tension builds, but it really doesn't. In fact at times the film plays like Alain Resnais' notoriously elliptical "Hiroshima, Mon Amour," in which possibilities are suggested but physical and emotional clarity is not certain.

One thing is clear: that as themselves, Chow and Su are too timid for romance. But almost as a therapeutic device, each uses the other to "rehearse" for that final confrontation with the wayward spouse, and in that way they seem able to reach some kind of emotional reality. That appears to be the mechanism that enables more than eyes to meet.

The movie seems to suggest a truth about infidelity with which most therapists would agree: that the relationships are never really twosomes and never really about sex; rather, they are about and involve somehow that missing third person, the cheated upon (in the case of two marrieds committing adultery, there are two ghosts).

So in that sense, "In the Mood for Love" is more a ghost story than a love story, but it's also more a puzzle than a solution. It puts you in the mood for an aspirin and an early night.

In Thrall to a Romantic Spell

Hong Kong's Wong Kar-wai creates a lush atmosphere fraught with possibilities in 'In the Mood for Love.'

Source: Los Angeles Times, Feb 2, 2001 pF-2.

Author: Kenneth Turan

Given that it settled on a title scant days before its world premiere last year at Cannes, "In the Mood for Love" is remarkably well-named. A swooningly cinematic exploration of romantic longing, both restrained and sensual, luxuriating in color, texture and sound, this film raises its fascination with enveloping atmosphere and suppressed emotion to a ravishing, almost hypnotic level.

With Hong Kong stars Tony Leung Chiu-wai and Maggie Cheung playing a couple caught in a vortex of quiet passion, "In the Mood for Love" will likely be the breakthrough work for that city's celebrated writer-director Wong Kar-wai, an international critical favorite whose previous films, including "Days of Being Wild" and "Chungking Express," have had limited exposure in this country.

This time, however, the conventional nature of the material--a love story that is not only set in Hong Kong in 1962, but is PG-chaste enough to have been filmed then and there--makes it easier to appreciate the visual assurance and provocative, intimate directing style that have made all seven of Wong's films major award-winners. (At Cannes, "In the Mood" took the best actor award for Leung and also received the Grand Prix de la Technique for its exceptional look.)

Married but not to each other, Chow Mo-wan (Leung) and Su Li-zhen (Cheung) meet when they rent adjacent rooms in a large apartment building. His wife has the late shift as a hotel receptionist, while her husband, Mr. Chan, works for a Japanese company and is often away on business, which means that no one, including the audience, gets more than a fleeting glimpse of either spouse.

Both these people are quiet, considerate, exquisitely polite and much less boisterous than their landlord's extended family. Earnest and boyish, with carefully slicked-down hair, Mr. Chow works as a journalist, but with his anonymous suit and tie, he could be any kind of businessman. Mrs. Chan, however, would stand out anywhere.

*

Poised and impeccably turned out, with never so much as a hair out of place, Mrs. Chan has the ability to stop your heart just by walking from her room to a neighborhood take-out stand with a combination of grace and loneliness that seems almost tragic. As costumed by William Chang Suk-ping, she dresses in nothing but cheongsams, more than 20 in a wonderful variety of fabrics, giving the traditional high-necked sheath once popular in Shanghai more screen time than it's had since "The World of Suzie Wong." Even her neighbors are impressed. "She dresses up like that," one of them says, "to go out for noodles."

Ever so gradually, as hints mount and their paths cross on the way to lonely take-out dinners, Mr. Chow and Mrs. Chan come to realize that not only are both their spouses having an affair, but they're having it with each other. This naturally brings these two closer, but because they are innately decent people and still care for their partners, how involved they will allow themselves to become turns into a potent, disruptive question with a surprising amount of emotional pull.

Essential in giving their quandary its due is the director's choice of visual styles. Working with two cameramen, his regular director of photography, Christopher Doyle, and Mark Li Ping-bin, who usually films for Taiwanese director Hou Hsiao-Hsien, Wong Kar-wai turns his lens into a visual eavesdropper, peering around corners and looking at things from covert angles, the better to emphasize both the confining, restrictive nature of the characters' lives--"One can't put a foot wrong," Mrs. Chan wails--and the potentially illicit nature of their relationship.

Adding to the superb sense of ambience is the film's alluring use of muted yet vivid color. With sublime production design (William Chang Suk-ping once again, and he also did the editing), "In the Mood" is a dream of complementary pastels, with window blinds, wallpaper, kitchen appliances, shower curtains, even telephones all part of a rapturous color scheme. Also helping is the melancholy, insinuating music, by Michael Galasso and Umebayashi Shigeru, with some haunting Nat King Cole singing in Spanish artfully thrown into the mix.

Though Wong began in films as a screenwriter, as a director he's known not to believe in scripting anything until the very last minute. This method doesn't usually have a high percentage of success, but in this case, because his stars have worked several times both with him and with each other, a surprising amount of intimacy is achieved. The result is a kind of ultimate romantic film, joining an almost Jamesian sadness and discipline to that extraordinary visual sensibility. It's not the kind of thing you see every day.