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Make Mood, Not Love With films of style...

 
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Sandy
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PostPosted: Sat Mar 02, 2013 12:42 am    Post subject: Make Mood, Not Love With films of style... Reply with quote

Make Mood, Not Love With films of style and suggestiveness, nobody creates sexual tension quite like Hong Kong director Wong Kar-wai

By RICHARD CORLISS Monday, Apr. 02, 2001

Time Magazine




Read more: http://www.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,2047482,00.html#ixzz2MN0FFFwI

Whispers in doorways. long, longing looks. Desire smothered by propriety. A love that dare not show its face. Wong Kar-wai's enthralling, enigmatic In the Mood for Love is an essay in appetite and inhibition. Its theme is withholding-withholding love, commitment and information to the characters and the viewer. The film lives in the realm of emotional suppression and artistic suggestion. It weaves an erotic web around two of Hong Kong's comeliest stars, Maggie Cheung and Tony Leung Chiu-wai, then lets the audience decide whether they have an affair. "People who watch films think they need to be provided with details," Wong says. "I don't want to give them."

The "story" of In the Mood for Love (which releases in Australia this week) is simple enough. In 1962 two couples, the Chans and the Chows, move into adjacent boarding houses in Hong Kong. Proximity forces Mrs. Chan (Maggie) and Mr. Chow (Tony) together, and gradually they realize that their spouses are having an affair. This abandoned pair are united at first by bereavement-for their compromised marriages and their dented egos-and then by something else. Could it be love? That's what In the Mood's audience is in the mood for. But Wong isn't.

"I hate love stories," he says. "They sell prettiness. I don't do that. There's more to life than love." Yet love, sex and their attendant ache are at the humid heart of his films; that's one reason he is Hong Kong's most distinctive director, and Asia's most imitated. He eroticizes his images with a dreamy sensuality edited at a sprung-rhythm pace: slow-motion gazing at a woman carrying a thermos of noodles, a man dragging on a cigarette. And the subject of every Wong film, from the early As Tears Go By and Days of Being Wild to Chungking Express and Happy Together, is the combustion of yearning and isolation-the need for closeness within the life sentence of solitude.

"I'm tired of making Wong Kar-wai movies," the director half-seriously once said. In the Mood has the bleak glamour and daring craftsmanship of his other work, thanks to Chris Doyle, the cinematographer, and William Chang, who designed both the production and the costumes (including a ravishing cheongsam wardrobe for Cheung) and edited the film. But for his first period piece since the kung-fu Ashes of Time, Wong wanted a style that evoked the colony and its movies in 1962: more classical, less ornate. To capture the density of middle-class life in the Shanghainese sector of Hong Kong, he keeps the camera close to the actors as they edge past each other in narrow corridors and alleyways-so close you can feel their heat and pain.

In its first hour, the film draws the viewer into the characters' frustrated lives. How do people behave when they learn they have been betrayed? And later, when they are considering an affair of their own? On the outside, nothing unusual. They play mah-jongg, go to the corner for take-away food, sit alone in a room. Visually and dramatically, the film doesn't raise its voice; it never reveals the faces of the adulterers and often shows only one of two people in a doorway chat. In 1962, Wong was four years old (he came to Hong Kong from Shanghai the following year). In the Mood could be seen as a child's perspective on grown-up matters-of adults speaking their private language, sotto voce.

But the attentive viewer will see signs of furtive feelings. The strained courtship of Maggie and Tony is a symphony of fumbling gestures. Her hand brushes past his jacket; his hand rests, for a tense moment, on hers. One night she stays in his room, because the landlord has come home and they don't care to stoke a hotpot of gossip. As incarnated so beautifully by two actors who can suggest worlds without words, the pair have all the wariness and guilt of adulterous lovers. But do they have an affair?

The director says they do; he shot love scenes that he later cut. But who needs a big revelation? "It's easy to understand," he insists. "Hong Kong audiences are saying, 'Finally, we understand a Kar-wai movie.' I get a little upset about that. I think I've let them down." Still, some viewers are confused by the way the film veers into opaqueness toward the end. At its Cannes Film Festival premiere, Cheung said she was shocked by how much was left out in the editing. And Leung says, "When I saw it for the first time, even I felt like an outsider. I had lived that character for a year and a half and I couldn't get into that character, live with them both, flow with them."

Wong acknowledges that his actors were often exasperated during the grueling 15-month shoot. "It took four hours just to set up Maggie's hairdo," he says. "So if we shot 12 hours, it meant 16 for her. That's tough, she hated it, and she hated me for it." But the plot doesn't matter as much as the mood in a Wong Kar-wai film, which has to be an active collaboration between its makers and the audience. And for the viewer who can get beyond did-they-or-didn't-they, the film has all the mystery of real life transformed into seductive art.

At the end of Happy Together, the gay man played by Leung sought refuge in a lighthouse at the southern tip of Patagonia. At the end of In the Mood, Leung is in the majestic ruins of Angkor Wat, speaking his secret (of guilt or loss or deceit) into a hole in a temple wall, then sealing the crack so the words will be safe from prying minds. He might be Wong, disclosing and securing the secret of his film.

The last shots are of Angkor Wat's ancient doorways, echoing 800 years of con-fessions, prayers and betrayals. The story of these two sad people is as small as a shrug, as soft as a whisper, as lovely as a Maggie Cheung dress, as old as Adam and Eve, as cold as the ashes at the end of an affair that kindled all too briefly, or never was.

-Reported by STEPHEN SHORT Hong Kong

Read more: http://www.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,2047482,00.html#ixzz2MN07D7iu


Last edited by Sandy on Wed Jun 04, 2014 10:47 pm; edited 1 time in total
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Sandy
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PostPosted: Sat Mar 02, 2013 1:01 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

Director creates the right 'Mood' through style, story

By Melanie McFarland, Seattle Times staff reporter, Movie Review

http://community.seattletimes.nwsource.com/archive/?date=20010216&slug=mood16



Understand that Hong Kong director Wong Kar-wai is obsessed with visuals and style above all else, occasionally at the expense of his scripts. Wong's artistic sensibility made "Chungking Express" and "Fallen Angels" sleeper hits on the art-house scene. Critics overlooked the interwoven stories' jarring execution, seduced by frequent camera partner Christopher Doyle's intoxicating cinematography. But technique failed to save the disastrous "Happy Together," proving the auteur's ability to match stunning production values with a cohesive script is erratic at best.

Sometimes he can get away with his aesthetic accentuation, sometimes not. With "In the Mood for Love," a quiet tale of unrealized yearning with the subdued phrasing of a torch song, he once again succeeds.

"Mood" won the Grand Prix de la Technique at the 2000 Cannes International Film Festival, demonstrating an unconventional combination of cinematography and story at work. It also reunites Wong with "Chungking Express" star Tony Leung (Cannes' best actor award winner), and Maggie Cheung, whose exquisite face conveys a world of emotion without much effort. Even so, the viewer is tempted to get lost in the film's '60s-mod distractions. Amid the stylized sets, props and Cheung's ravishing form in sleek mandarin dresses, "Mood" relies largely on audience inference to keep the story rolling. Silence, space and challenging shots are the source of this romance's horsepower, leaving moviegoers to fill in the blanks where exposition is lacking.

It's a daunting proposition, one that has left a few critics cold. But surrender yourself to Wong's intentions and the effect, like love at its most heady, is narcotic.

"Mood" is a study of comrades in loneliness. Journalist Chow Mo-wan (Leung) moves in next door to the attractive, reclusive Mrs. Chan (Cheung) on the same day, neither with the help of their respective mates. Both are treading water in absentee marriages; Chow's wife abandons him for her work, and Chan's husband is frequently away on business, leaving her with a matriarchal landlady for company. We hear but never see Chan's husband, and Chow's wife is only identifiable by rear views of her flirty flip hair-do. Given their cool connection to the story, it's barely shocking when Chow and Chan realize the wandering spouses are having an affair.

Throughout "Mood," Wong makes voyeurs of the audience. We peek at the action through mirror reflections, eavesdropping from around corners and down hallways as Chow and Chan's romance unfurls. It's a tricky technique, but one that conveys a sense of their impossible predicament.

"Feelings can creep up just like that," Chow explains to his unattainable lady love, and Wong hopes the audience empathizes. It's not hard to see that something noticeable but unspoken is hanging in the air between these two and, to paraphrase an old standard, if it isn't love, it's the best they can do. Locked in the gazes of both neighbors and the audience, Chow and Chan aren't free to consummate their desires. Rather, they role-play the missing parts of one another's marriages in a secret, painfully beautiful dance as a mournful Nat King Cole soundtrack swells in the background.

A small drawback in "Mood" doesn't strike until the end, when the film unduly picks up the pace. Variety assigned the blame to Wong's rush to complete "Mood" in time for Cannes, supposedly filming the closing scenes mere days before the festival opened. Whatever the case may be, one senses the rush. But, as the lovers find in their situation, it barely matters in the larger scheme of things.
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