I recently bought a few movies, and the first I watched was Kong Kar-wai’s In The Mood For Love, which I have been meaning to see for a couple of years, but opportunities to see foreign films with English subtitles are rare for me. I mentioned that I saw Chunking Express while in Spokane, I find that it is one of those movies that is hard to forget, you find yourself thinking about the images long after you have seen it. The same is true of In The Mood For Love and like Chunking Express the film is really about a mood or feeling, not much takes place in either film. I like the way he uses his melodic motif with slow motion sequences. Elvis Mitchell of the New York Times captures that feeling when he says in his review:
''In the Mood for Love'' is probably the most breathtakingly gorgeous film of the year, dizzy with a nose-against-the-glass romantic spirit that has been missing from the cinema forever, a spirit found in F. Scott Fitzgerald, the best Roxy Music and minor-key romantic movies like the forgettable 1956 ''Miracle in the Rain,'' where the lovers' suffering is sealed because of the chasteness of the era. Sex scenes couldn't be spelled out, and as in Mr. Wong's film, yearning becomes the epoxy that holds the material together.
But In The Mood For Love is a much more sumptuous production and vision and is obviously a product of nostalgia. Of course it was made six years later than Chunking Express, and that is six years in which the writer/director has had to hone his craft. It is well known that the film went through problems with the budget due to the Asian financial crisis of the late 90s, difficulty in finding the right locations, and the slow method Kar-wai works without using a script. The end product is a stylish, romantic film that is all about longing, heartbreak, and disappointment. I like the fact that their cheating spouses never have an y screen face time-we only hear their voices and see their backs. It tightens the focus on the central characters. It’s obvious that a lot of effort was put into recreating 60s Hong Kong, in fact so much that to find building sold enough some filming was done in Thailand. Maggie Cheung’s Chinese dresses are as beautiful and engaging as she herself is. Tony Leung is “a handsome devil smoking a cigarette.”
This is a Criterion Collection edition so there are lots of great extras. The booklet has a short story that helped inspire the film, “Intersection”, and an essay by film critic Li Cheuk-to. There are interviews and deleted scenes, which show that the movie could have been very different, there’s a scene where Tony Leung and Maggie Cheung dance ala Thurman-Travolta and some sexier tryst scenes, and longer ones-some were set in the 70s. There are also a couple interactive essays on the music and historical significance of the setting.
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