Hong Kong director Wong Kar-Wai spent two years obsessively shooting and reshooting this tale of two neighbours, Chow (Tony Leung) and Su-Lizhen (Maggie Cheung) who are drawn together by the long absences of their spouses. When they realize why these absences always coincide, they are shocked and hurt. In their imaginations, they entertain scenarios of revenge and tit-for-tat, rehearsing the infidelities so as to understand what can have gone awry, even as they vow never to stoop to such betrayal. And over time, quietly, but unmistakably, they fall in love…
A hypnotic, intoxicating film, In the Mood for Love is radically experimental, but only ever concerned with revealing the human heart. Wong never shows us the spouses. He structures the movie as a cycle of myriad echoes and repetitions. It is a rigorously repressed formal conceit. Yet in the space between the repetitions we sense everything that cannot be said: desire, passion, rapture and rhapsody. The film itself echoes both Wong’s Days of Being Wild and the subsequent 2046: it is the film he cannot stop making; the love affair he cannot forget.
In the Mood for Love came fifth in the 2022 Sight & Sound poll.
Sunday’s screening in our PANTHEON series will feature free refreshments and a short introduction by an expert in the field.
Oct 22: Introduced by Su-Anne Yeo, who researches and teaches in the areas of film studies, media studies, and cultural studies, with a specialization in Asian and Asian diasporic screen cultures at UBC and Emily Carr.
Wong expands the simple anatomy of a thwarted love affair into an elastic meditation on personal unrest, political statelessness and the violence of time’s unrelenting passage.
Guy Lodge, Sight & Sound
Presented by
Wong Kar-wai
Maggie Cheung, Tony Leung
Hong Kong/France
2000
In Cantonese and Shanghainese with English subtitles
Award for Best Actor to Tony Leung, Cannes 2000
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Credits
Producer
Wong Kar-wai
Screenwriter
Wong Kar-wai
Cinematography
Christopher Doyle, Mark Lee Ping-Bing
Editor
William Chang
Original Music
Michael Galasso
Also in This Series
Portrait of a Lady on Fire
Céline Sciamma's queer costume drama -- about a painter covertly studying a young noblewoman who refuses to sit for her portrait -- was voted 30th Greatest Film Ever Made in a 2022 poll, the highest ranking film of the past decade.
I Am Cuba
Infused with a palpable love for the country and a righteous anger at the injustices of the Batista era, I Am Cuba features some of the jaw-dropping camerawork ever filmed. A euphoric celebration of Cuba, the Revolution, and revolutionary cinema.
The Colour of Pomegranates + The House Is Black
This month's Pantheon screening is a double-bill, Sergei Parajanov's extraordinary evocation of the life and work of C18th Armenian poet Sayat Nova, and, The House is Black (22 min), the only film directed by the great Iranian poet Forugh Farrokhzad.
Fantasia
Walt Disney pushed the boundaries of animation and sound recording when he put together a movie concert: eight classical pieces by Bach, Beethoven, Stravinski et al, each animated in a different style. It's playful, sometimes cute, other times inspired.
Image: © Disney, 1940