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In the Mood for Love film image

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.

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

Director

Wong Kar-wai

Cast

Maggie Cheung, Tony Leung

Credits
Country of Origin

Hong Kong/France

Year

2000

Language

In Cantonese with English subtitles

Awards

Award for Best Actor to Tony Leung, Cannes 2000

19+
98 min

Book Tickets

Sunday October 22

11:00 am
Guests/Q&As Hearing Assistance Subtitles
VIFF Centre - Vancity Theatre
Book now Limited availability

Monday October 23

5:30 pm
Hearing Assistance Subtitles
VIFF Centre - Vancity Theatre
Book Now

Tuesday October 24

6:20 pm
Hearing Assistance Subtitles
VIFF Centre - Vancity Theatre
Book now Limited availability

Thursday October 26

1:30 pm
Hearing Assistance Subtitles
VIFF Centre - Vancity Theatre
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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

In the Mood for Love
In the Mood for Love film image

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VIFF Centre - Vancity Theatre
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VIFF Centre - Vancity Theatre