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By John Demetry
Yet the allure of In the Mood for Love is as simple--as basic to human experience--as the romantic longing its title evokes. Wong centers his Last Tango in Hong Kong on two ravishing screen dreams: Maggie Cheung and Tony Leung. As neighbors renting rooms in cramped apartments whose respective (and unseen) spouses are having an affair, these two performers lend their expressive tools: body language, facial expressions, vocal intonations; and star appeal, to Wong's tableaus of loneliness. Shooting without a script, Wong captures his stars' intuitive evocations of their characters' dilemma. That's the film's initial imaginative leap of faith. And it's always been the Wong modus-operandi. Recall that scene in his 1997 Happy Together, the greatest film ever made about a gay relationship, when Leung silently sobs into a tape recorder. It's an exact, modern expression of a person in search of lost time. A moment out of time, regained by Wong's camera. This evocation of Proust's Remembrance of Things Past is intentional as an aesthetic foundation for Wong's commingling of the metaphysical and the romantic. Wong structures In the Mood for Love as a string of moments such as that unforgettable one in Happy Together. He strums that string for a musical riff on repeated motifs, modulated for jazz-impulse explosions (one critic aptly compared the sensation to that of listening to Jimi Hendrix). Those themes constantly refer back to the very process of the film's making. Cheung and Leung's characters are constricted by social reserve (always under the watchful eyes of their neighbors, or confronted by people of looser morals at their work: "I'm not like you," explains Leung to a philandering colleague.) The stars find their entrance into their characters through the shared act of performance.
When they share their awareness of their spouses' infidelity, they finally do connect. They do so through performance, projection, and art. In a series of scenes, Cheung and Leung play the others' spouse, recreating flirtations that may have lead to the affair, considering different scenarios around who started it. "How well do you know your wife?" Cheung challenges Leung; in a phrase, it's also Wong's challenge to his audience. We never see the spouses directly. And we don't need to. Cheung and Leung's characters convey enough empathy - and existential torment - in their recreations of arguments, intimacies, and risky rendezvous. Out of moral obligation, they never consummate their role-playing--or growing love--with sex. Instead, they find an outlet for their sparked passions and imaginations in their collaboration on a martial arts magazine serial. This might be a reference to Wong's own haunting martial arts masterpiece, Ashes of Time. So abstract a meditation on memory--human consciousness-- its genre tropes were all that held it together in pop terms even as those tropes provided the template for some of Wong's most extravagant visual philosophizing. Cheung and Leung learn from Wong's lesson. They use the process of artistic creation to dramatize how their characters' love allows them to discover the best in themselves that they will apply to the rest of their lives, even though lived out separately. Making this the topic of In the Mood for Love cues us to how Wong, beginning with Happy Together, has grown beyond the crime and martial arts genres that characterize his earlier romances (As Time Goes By, Chungking Express, and Fallen Angels). Godard made the same leap in 1966 from the heist film Band of Outsiders to Masculine-Feminine. Although Godard examines the divides between Masculine and Feminine, his imagination reveal how both Jean-Pierre Leaud and Chantal Goya's confusions hilariously and terrifyingly convey our own. Now focused on the dynamics of modern relationships, Wong accomplished that in Happy Together--trumping Godard by using a gay male relationship to show how confusion is interpersonal, not just inter-gender.
Note his use of '60s costumes. Never before have I been so aware of the bodies beneath clothes. Cheung's tight, high-collared dresses constrict movement yet, in slow-motion shots, seem to ride her body's every curve. Her sensual need - and worth - could not be more erotically clear. William Chang's costume designs unify the improvised filming. As the set decorator and the film's editor, as well, Chang constructs a film space through which the actors' movements make delirious spectacle of their unexpressed emotions. The actors dictate cinematographers Christopher Doyle and Mark Lee Ping-bin's shifting compositions, lighting set-ups, and shallow or deep focus perspectives. The positioning of their clothes accentuate patterns of color in the setting. The effect is as intoxicating as Judy Garland's hypnotized performance of Mack the Black amidst director Vincente Minnelli's technicolor intensification of romantic projection in The Pirate. And you just about swoon in your seats with the overlaying of the evocative strings and percussive (heart)beats of Mike Galasso's score or Nat King Cole singing love songs in Spanish. Wong's personal, idiosyncratic film language gives the intimate contours of his character's psyches an expansive texture. Wong's lyrical technique reifies our own imaginations even as it expresses his characters'. His use of slow-motion and step-motion photography along with "dirty window" perspectives aren't just formal play attached to a sappy love story. They're visual equivalence to the characters' memories; it gives the sappy story its genuine anguish. Same goes for the elliptical storytelling, as the repeated use of specific settings leave holes in the story's development. They're holes we must fill for more than just the undeniable pleasure that neo-formalists find in narrative games. By filling them, we use our imaginations to develop understanding. As with the characters, the process transforms us, signifying the existence of the spiritual that connects us all. Critics who fail to appreciate the triptych epilogue of In the Mood for Love have ignored Wong's moral and spiritual intentions. They might still acclaim the film out of a prejudice for exoticism or academic rubber-stamping. Don't forget that such critics failed to appreciate Brian De Palma's similar quest into the outer spaces of human spiritual pursuit, Mission to Mars. These two children of the Godardian revolution have reached the same spiritual heights to which Godard ascended with the 1990 Nouvelle Vague, a film that never received U.S. distribution. The essential meaning of Wong's finale won't be missed by enraptured audiences in the mood for a higher vision of love. In the final Cambodia-set moments, Leung performs an audacious act of faith. Wong celebrates that act with an homage to Alain Resnais' Last Year at Marienbad, a film about how we become trapped in memories of love as the preceding epilogue sequences suggest may be the fates for Wong's unrequited lovers. Revelatory catharsis, an integration of those memories into the present through ritual, prepares Leung for history's inhumanity to come. Wong's art prepares us for our lives that continue after the love affair with his movie has ended. |
Tony Leung is Mr. Chow and Maggie Cheung is Mrs. Chan in In the the Mood for Love
Director Wong Kar-wai and cinematographer Chris Doyle 
© 1997-2002 BEI