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Perhaps through coming to it late, Wong Kar-Wai’s sinuously sensual study of romantic disconnection looks to me like a warm-up for the rather more tangled, less reassuringly sentimental, narrative callisthenics of 2046, still my favourite Wong film, which forcefully combines the two distinct moods of his oeuvre – romanticism and disaffection.
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In the Mood for Love trembles with regret and longing, and remains more a mood piece than a realised story, built around the relatively rare narrative gambit of failing to gain what is in reach. It’s keyed to a note of remembered grace, in a dying fall. It’s not a film that should be embraced too quickly, as it’s easy to do for its hyper-chic pictorial grace, which makes it a kind of coffee-table book for lovelorn cinephiles; nor one to be dismissed lightly, because there is a great deal of evoked pain under its beautifully maintained exterior – much like that of Maggie Cheung’s Mrs Chan. Within the traps of space and duty, the characters meander, prodded and poked by their own regrets, failings, wounds, and wants.
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The portrait of 1960s Hong Kong is exotic and evocative in the best meaning of the words, a world of labyrinthine streets and shoebox apartments in which people grow like orchids on rock faces, beautiful but disturbingly fragile. Where Wong’s earlier works like Fallen Angels threw themselves around in manic desire to communicate an emotional feeling not very clear, In the Mood is rigorous in articulating a mood, and has the studious, frustrated grace of an attempt by an artist to remember a long-distant, vaguely perceived but sharply imprinted, scene glimpsed in childhood.
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The visual compositions, where aspects of costuming and décor combine in sheer swathes of clashing textures, resembles nothing less than a mobile Matisse. Wong uses surfaces, patterns, framings, and objects to subdivide his frames, within which the characters often stand divided off from each-other or kept to one edge of the composition with a balancing presence missing.
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Cheung is photographed like Wong shoots all his leading ladies, as if dipped in a layer of chocolate he wants to bite off – and she’s quiet dynamite with her tautly controlled façade hiding a vortex of feeling. Tony Leung gained the Cannes Best Actor award for uncommonly gentle protagonist, the gentle soul editor who’s like a bit-actor in his own life. But it’s pale compared to Leung’s colder, deeper, slyer persona in 2046.
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The finale, set in Cambodia not long before war destroys the region, establishes the political and emotional severing point for this period in history, and Wong’s camera drifts through a ruined temple, drinking in a whole world of lost fancies. As in Hsiao-hsien Hou’s Three Times, the lake of peace of the early ’60s feels like an unrecoverable eden.
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