Fa yeung nin wa
Wong Kar-Wai (2000)
I can’t write much under my own steam about this famous film, which is beautiful to watch and hard to understand. In an interview with Tony Rayns for Sight and Sound (August 2000), the writer-director Wong Kar-Wai explained that the love story of two neighbours in a Hong Kong apartment building was:
‘… about the end of a period. 1966 marks a turning point in Hong Kong’s history. The Cultural Revolution in the mainland had lots of knock-on effects and forced Hong Kong people to think hard about their future.’
The S&S interview was used as the BFI programme note. As usual, I waited until I’d seen the film before reading the note – the idea being to form some thoughts of my own first. I wish I’d broken my usual rule on this occasion. The larger political context was lost on me – so, I’m sure, were things that the programme note didn’t cover.
In the Mood for Love begins in 1962, on the day the two principals, Chow Mo-Wan (Tony Leung) and Su Li-zhen (Maggie Cheung), move into adjacent flats. The 1962 scenes comprise most of the movie. Shorter sections are set in Singapore, one year later, and Hong Kong again, in 1966. There’s a coda in Cambodia, where Chow visits the Angkor Wat temple complex. Chow is a journalist, who wants to write a martial arts serial for a newspaper. Su is the secretary of a senior executive in a shipping company. She and Chow are married to other people, who are often working abroad. Both Su and Chow come to suspect their spouses of having an affair with each other, and start to imagine how this affair came about. Su also helps Chow to write his martial arts serial. Their own relationship, which begins in quotidian interactions, grows closer but remains mostly platonic. They have sex just once (and this isn’t shown on screen). To avoid suspicion, however, Chow moves out of the apartment building and rents a room in a hotel. The later parts of the film – both in Singapore, where Chow goes to work, and the later Hong Kong episode – describe how Su and Chow fail, tantalisingly, to renew contact.
The two lead actors are impressive. Tony Leung gives Chow a quiet, interesting melancholy: the interest is partly the result of the melancholy being unexplained. Maggie Cheung is lovely and the timbre of her voice particularly distinctive in the opening sequences that describe the noisy bustle of the new tenants’ moving in – when the harsh yatter of their landlady (Rebecca Pan) is very much in evidence. Throughout the 1962 scenes, the domestic routines of the place – the meals of noodles, the games of mahjong – are nicely detailed. There are many striking things in the film: the vivid colouring of Su’s high-collared dresses; the spatial contrast between the variously claustrophobic interiors of the Hong Kong and Singapore scenes, and the vast emptiness of the Cambodian setting; the motif of an unseen interlocutor, when Su and Chow have conversations with their spouses. I’m very glad I saw the well-named In the Mood for Love but I’d like to see it again chiefly because I didn’t get it this first time. The morally conservative attitudes of their Hong Kong neighbours, of which Chow and Su are acutely aware, surely aren’t enough to explain why their relationship isn’t fully realised. When he visits Angkor Wat, Chow, according to time-honoured tradition, whispers a secret into a hollow tree. This is a fine image. It’s also an apt ending to a film that keeps its own counsel.
15 December 2015
