Stuck In A Moment: Permanent Bliss And The Imagined City In Wong Kar Wai's In The Mood For Love

Stuck in a Moment: Permanent Bliss and the Imagined City in Wong Kar Wai’s In the Mood for Love.

To watch a film by Wong Kar Wai is to be challenged, to let yourself be guided by a very unconventional director who knows very well the territory of film, but somehow subverts it in every single one of his works. He seems to have found a distinctive, original voice, while at the same time wearinghis influences on his sleeves. From film to film, he’s been prone to defy spectator’s narrative expectations, not necessarily in their basic content level, but in the way he constructs them. You could easily imagine his core stories being written and represented in much more conventional ways (Roger Ebert jokes with the possibility of In the Mood for Love with Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan) but Wong KarWai, a consummate formalist, chooses to let the medium determine the content and not the other way around. Never having formally trained as a filmmaker is the director’s biggest asset, as his choices are never determined by an imposed, sometimes pointless logical sense of time and space, but by a sense of adventure, the need to find the best, visceral way of expressing something, instead of the“right” one. It is precisely “time and space”, or a tragic loss of it, forever ingrained in memory, what permeates and looms over his masterful, evocative, prescient and beautiful In the Mood for Love (2000).

Originally released in 2000, In the Mood for Love could be at first glance seen as a departure from the director’s earlier films, such as Chungking Express (1994), Fallen Angels (1995) andHappy Together (1997). These three films, masterpieces in their own right, concern life in big cities (Hong Kong and Argentina, respectively), disconnection in modern daily life, routine and boredom. More so, they are stylistically frenetic, making use of contemporary filmmaking techniques such as handheld, under-cranking the frame rate (also known as step printing) to get a jumpy, urban, hallucinarylook, use of pop songs, etc., that make them all clearly the work of a single artist… an auteur if you will. That’s why In the Mood for Love, with its lush, borderline on precious cinematography, contemplative mood, vibrant but somber color palette, period detail and slow pace may seem initially like a completely different work. However, under this façade of conventionality, or at least formalrestraint, lies a film as risky, fresh, playful and alive as any other from his oeuvre. In the words of the filmmaker himself:

“We are always in a routine. Most of my films deal with people who are stuck in certain routines and habits that don't make them happy. They want to change, but they need something to push them. I think it's mostly love that causes them to break their routines and moveon. That's why we always want to repeat shots, to show the routines and the changes as they happen.” (Kar Wai, Wong. www.salon.com interview by Scott Tobias, Feb. 28, 2001)

From a can of pineapples signifying the perishability of everything, including love, to a contract killer whose life seems to be as uneventful as any, Wong Kar Wai injects meaning into the quotidian, and mundaneness into thetranscendent. In In the Mood for Love, two couples move into different rooms into an apartment complex. Through a series of carefully planted and subtle hints, carried throughout the film by visual and musical Leif motifs, we come to understand that two of its components, always off-screen, have been having an affair. Contrary to popular convention, which would lead us to belief this to be thestory of the betrayers and how they will face the consequences, Kar Wai stays with the betrayed, creating mirror images of their counterparts as they partake in a relationship that more and more might resemble an affair if they’re moral standings as the victims were not so clear-cut for them. It is through this self-imposed sense of control that the director subtly explores his Hong Kong’s...