In the Mood for Love
花樣年華
2000 · Hong Kong · 98 min · 1.66:1 · Color
Directed by Wong Kar-wai
Introduction
In the Mood for Love is a 2000 Hong Kong film directed by Wong Kar-wai, starring Tony Leung and Maggie Cheung. It is set in Hong Kong in 1962. Chow Mo-wan and Su Li-zhen rent rooms in the same building and each come to realise that their spouses are involved with one another. In the course of their acquaintance they act out their spouses' roles in an attempt to reconstruct how the affair began. Chow later takes work in Singapore and the two do not resume contact. The spouses' affair is never shown and neither spouse is seen face-on at any point in the film. The score returns repeatedly to a theme Shigeru Umebayashi had written for Seijun Suzuki's Yumeji. Maggie Cheung's cheongsam wardrobe was designed by William Chang. Tony Leung received the award for Best Actor at the 53rd Cannes Film Festival for his performance.
Editorial Note
Su Li-zhen and Chow Mo-wan are neighbours whose spouses are conducting an affair with each other. To work out how such a thing begins, they rehearse it, each playing the other's husband or wife, and the rehearsal stops being safe. Wong removed every load-bearing plot point: the adultery is not shown, the feeling is never declared, and the two unfaithful spouses never appear on camera. What is left is the near-misses on a staircase, the corridors, the smoke in slow motion, and Shigeru Umebayashi's waltz coming back and coming back. Maggie Cheung wears twenty-odd cheongsams (accounts differ on the exact number), and in any case the colours say what she is not allowed to say. At Angkor Wat, Chow murmurs something into a hollow in the stone and we hear none of it. Reading the film as praise for restraint is a mistake. These two do nothing, and the rest of their lives goes by.
The Discipline of Withholding
The film began as one of three stories about food, changed direction during production, and took some fifteen months to complete. Parts of it were shot in Bangkok, standing in for Hong Kong in the 1960s, and the closing sequence at Angkor in Cambodia. There was no finished script; Christopher Doyle left partway through and Mark Lee Ping-bing completed the photography.
Besides Tony Leung's acting award, the film took the Grand Prize of the Technical Commission at the same Cannes festival. It placed fifth in the 2022 Sight and Sound critics' poll.
Titles
- Mainland China
- 花样年华
- Hong Kong
- 花樣年華
- Taiwan
- 花樣年華
- English
- In the Mood for Love
- Original
- 花樣年華
Cast
- Maggie Cheungas Su Li-zhen
- Tony Leung Chiu-waias Chow Mo-wan