What to watch on Criterion: In the Mood for Love
On "The Swoon"
Last night I saw Wong Kar-wai’s 2000 romantic drama In the Mood for Love for the first time. I’m guessing this movie won’t be new for a lot of you: it ranked at #5 in the most recent Sight and Sound poll, and supposedly the Oscar-winning Everything Everywhere All at Once (which I have not seen) references it. But perhaps for some, it can still be a pleasant discovery.
The love story concerns two next-door neighbors, Mrs. Chan and Mr. Chow, in 1960s Hong Kong. Each of them has a spouse prone to unexplained late nights at the office and long business trips abroad. They often cross paths in their solitude, frequenting the same takeout noodle stall for dinners eaten alone.
Mrs. Chan works as a secretary for a man with a complicated social life. She asks her husband to bring back two handbags from Japan, both for her boss — you know why, she says. She makes phone calls to her boss’s wife to tell her he’ll be working late, then reserves a table at a restaurant where he’ll have dinner with a Miss Yu. Later, her boss gets a tie as a gift from his mistress, and she subtly warns him away from wearing it to dinner with his wife. He thinks it looks enough like his old one. “You notice things if you pay attention,” she replies, and he duly changes his tie. The scenes of her office life reminded me of Mad Men, which must have borrowed a lot of its aesthetic language from this film.
Mr. Chow works as a journalist. His colleague Ping is a gambler who ribs him about the hotness of his next-door neighbor and brags about the prostitutes who are willing to fuck him on credit. Ping warns Mr. Chow that he saw his wife with another man, but his concern is brushed off.
In the end, it’s a tie and a handbag that give away the affair. Mr. Chow and Mrs. Chan realize that they’ve received corresponding gifts from the same shops in Japan and confirm what each has suspected: their spouses are having an affair with each other. In their loneliness and grief they make a game of re-enacting the affair, playing out a scene where he makes the first move, and then one where she does. They try to guess what lines each of them used on each other, and find a hotel room like the one where they might have gone.
While they wait for their spouses to return, a bond forms between them, and they inevitably fall in love. Mr. Chow seems to want to take things further between them, but Mrs. Chan resists — she doesn’t want to sink to her husband’s level. Besides, they have nosy neighbors who observe their comings and goings; the landlady hasn’t caught on to the absent spouses’ deceit but is suspicious about the pair left behind. Despite some aching near-misses, their love is never consummated.
Any convincing romance, whether it’s a movie or a novel or a piece of music, depends on creating for its audience an effect I will call The Swoon: a heightened emotional state that is rapturous and anticipatory, summoning the intensity of erotic possibility while gesturing at something higher and nobler. A conventional romance relies on grand speeches and characters who fall into each others’ arms. With two characters like Mrs. Chan and Mr. Chow, who are restrained in speech and gesture — they never so much as kiss — In the Mood for Love creates The Swoon in other ways.
The first is through visual beauty, with a color palette of deep reds, greens, and ambers. This is one of those movies where the costumes match the decor, and both are gorgeous. Mrs. Chan (Maggie Cheung) looks — how to put it — fucking incredible in every scene, with winged eyeliner and a parade of spectacular qipao dresses. Mr. Chow (Tony Leung) is similarly beautiful to look at, handsome and with a tender expression, dressed in lightly creased white shirts, elegantly handling his cigarettes.
The second is through music. The way it uses Nat King Cole’s Spanish-language recordings of love songs also brings to mind Mad Men, but I’m thinking primarily of the recurring waltz-like theme, with pizzicato strings.
Music with a 3/4 time signature, common in classical and traditional dance music, is mostly absent from American popular music post-1960ish. When it appears, it’s usually trying to achieve an emotional effect that’s explicitly sentimental: romantic, nostalgic, or dreamy (Kermit singing “Rainbow Connection” comes to mind)1. The waltzes that appear in romantic movies usually tend towards maximum sweetness, sometimes off-puttingly so. The one in In the Mood for Love isn’t quite sweet — it has a slyness to it — but makes the scenes between Mr. Chow and Mrs. Chan seem like a long, careful dance.
The movie also finds The Swoon in the more obvious ways: longing looks, furtive touches, synchronized movements, and the sadness of their near-misses as they relinquish the possibilities between them.
In the Mood for Love has a cinematic predecessor in Brief Encounter, David Lean’s 1945 UK masterpiece about a short-lived, unconsummated romance between two married people. It, too, features characters who can’t quite speak openly about what is happening to them, and uses music (Rachmaninoff’s Piano Concerto No. 2) to achieve its Swoon. In the Mood for Love returns over and over to images of clocks to remind us of the brevity of the couple’s time together. Eventually, their spouses must return from Japan.
When I read what others have written about In the Mood for Love, I see that many of them characterize it as voyeuristic, since the characters are sometimes seen through windows or doorways, and often obscured by furniture or other objects. This doesn’t strike me as quite right. First of all, labeling a movie as voyeuristic is such a common critical move that it strikes me these days as lazy criticism — all fictional movies, by their nature, are voyeuristic to some degree. Voyeurism is about the illusion that one can relish the intimacy of someone’s private moment while remaining at a safe remove, spared from its consequences; this camera, by contrast, is right up next to its characters, sharing their tiny rooms with them, showing them in close-up. The viewer is not at a safe remove, but uncomfortably close — just as the characters suffer from the ache of their closeness, unwillingly having everything in common, sharing things they did not intend to share.
An interesting exception: MGMT’s 2007 hit “Electric Feel,” which is in 3/4 but not waltzy at all. The way it uses 3/4 makes its timing feel a bit off-kilter.
I saw this movie for the first time recently too, and I couldn't have possibly loved it more. Everything in the film seemed so perfectly planned--even the curling of the smoke seemed choreographed.