2001: In a Sentimental ‘Mood’
In a Sentimental ‘Mood’
Written by: Jeffrey Ressner
Published in: Premiere on January, 2001
Two of Hong Kong’s hottest stars team with its most idiosyncratic director for a love story unlike any you’ve ever seen
Laden with strangely nostalgic atmospherics, In the Mood for Love is a love story with no suggestion of lovemaking nor the slightest glimpse of nudity. A viewer would never guess that its stars, sullen Tony Leung and gamine Maggie Cheung (who might be considered, for our purposes, the Asian equivalents of Brad Pitt and Julia Roberts), were at one point told by director Wong Kar-wai that the film they were making was a comedy, and at another, that its subject was to be food. The picture that wound up quietly wowing audiences at the Cannes and Toronto film festivals was notably absent of belly laughs (there are several restaurant scenes, however); and while some love scenes were, in fact, shot, Wong excised them very shortly before the Cannes premiere. He seemed to have worked on this film more like a very insecure sculptor than a “proper” director. “We had four different wrap parties,” Cheung recalls.
What finally unreeled is a visually lush, sadly sentimental story of a star-crossed couple in 1960s Hong Kong, a fable of two apartment building neighbors who find solace in each other’s arms after learning their respective spouses are having an affair. It’s a movie about the spaces between events—a passing glance, a wistful smile. Fingertips sweep, brushing along the edge of a doorway. Cheung’s hips sway as she ascends a stairwell. And, in deliriously sensuous slow motion, wisps of cigarette smoke curl towards the sky.
A Wong film is an adventure for both the audience and the artist. His unique working method has been called an “aleatory process,” in which cast and crew only gradually discover what a given film’s story is about. Although Wong entered the Asian film business as a screenwriter, he rarely pre-scripts his films as a director. “This is the process: Keep the bullshit down as little as possible,” Wong explains, looking a bit like Chow Yun-fat’s kid brother as he adjusts his trademark shades. “I’ve worked with the same team for almost ten years. There’s an understanding between us, so we don’t have to do things people normally do: get a script, then cast, shoot, edit. Most of the time, I have actors in my mind before we start, so I custom-write for them. Since I’m both director and writer, I write their lines at the last minute so there’s no way they can change them.”
The process Wong employs is notably tough on his actors, but the grueling 15-month shoot from which Love eventually emerged was downright Kubrickean. The filmmaker, long revered by cineasts of all stripes (his avant-pop visions, such as Chungking Express, are so rapturous they’ve made Quentin Tarantino cry, and Tarantino eventually engineered Express’s U.S. release), originally cast Cheung and Leung in a modern romance called Summer in Beijing. Hassled by Chinese censors, he next attempted to shoot the actors in a three-part film with different food themes. Eventually, one episode, set against the innocent era in which Wong grew up, turned into his obsession. The centerpiece moved from noodles to canoodling and became a movie unto itself. On the set, frustration reigned as Wong tried to work out his ambiguous story line. “Everybody started from zero,” Leung laughs. “We didn’t have any directions; we just did whatever we wanted, and [Wong] observed our chemistry, which inspired him to develop the story.” Miles of unused footage were shot, including high-voltage scenes of Cheung and Leung dancing closely, arguing loudly, and making passionate love. “I cut [those] out at the last minute,” Wong says. “I wanted it like a Hitchcock movie where things happen outside the frame—where you can guess, but you can’t actually see.” Accepted at Cannes, Wong struggled to finish, shooting about ten scenes a week before the festival and fiddling with subtitles less than a day before its first screening. “I could have been making this film forever because I fell in love with the story,” he says, almost apologetically. “But we had to stop.” Cheung, who didn’t even know the story line until she attended the debut screening, was initially mystified about the missing material. “I can’t erase those images in my mind because we did the scenes,” she says. “Now it’s an interesting element: Did it happen or not?”