Watched: 11th May 2024
Rating: 5/5 stars
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Quite simply a glorious film. To my embarrassment, I can’t compare this to any of Wong Kar-wai’s other works, since I have not yet seen any (there are just too many films too much and not enough nights of the week), but if they are even half as good as In the Mood for Love, they will be excellent experiences. What I most love about this film is its sense of restraint – it has the trappings of a melodrama, and could very easily have gone down this route and still been a very good film, but it resists temptation and presents something that, while fictional, still feels like something that could happen in reality. Watching scenes of Mrs Chan and Mr Chow rehearsing their spouses’ affair together both reinforces and subverts this foundation. Their responses, both trapped in loveless marriages, seem natural, perhaps even inevitable, yet the boundaries between the real and the illusory become blurred. We see some scenes out of chronological order, questioning if we imagined that smell, that sound, the presence that we see rounding the corner out of the side of our eye. In the Mood for Love knows it is telling a story, and has fun with this, but it never sacrifices real human experiences for cinematic techniques. Rather, it combines the best of both, delivering a film that is visually and artistically arresting but whose story is always the heart of it.
I can’t discuss the film, though, without commenting on Tony Leung and Maggie Cheung. Rarely have two performances ever been so effortlessly in sync – the mutual longing, the slow dance back and forth on the edge. One false step and they will careen together into the abyss which they both fear and long for, but they are too well-trained in themselves to do that. Or are they? The saddest part is that, after so long of their own restraint holding them apart, in the end it is circumstances that do so, and all they can do is accept, mourn, and move on. It’s a beautiful film, in many ways a tragedy, but one that leaves our hearts a little wiser, a little bit more enriched through the sheer pleasure of experiencing it.
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Originally posted on Letterboxd on 24th May 2024: https://boxd.it/6sdDZD
Take a Luke 