Betrayed In Style: In The Mood For Love

Wong Kar-Wai's seventh film, In The Mood For Love, is probably his most critically acclaimed film winning several distinctions around the world when it was initially released, then several years later as the decade of the 2000s was evaluated and it topped many lists as being one of the best of that decade. It was another film that was set in the 1960s in Hong Kong full of nostalgia for a simpler time of families eating together, playing mah jong long into the night, and the fashion of the beautiful "cheongsams" of Maggie Cheung. Thus, Wong sets the mood of their piece through the production design and the enthusiasm for nostalgia that it creates. Maggie Cheung's character has the same maiden name as that of the character she played in Days of Being Wild, so it suggests a continuation of some of those themes from that film. However, the main theme relates to marriage and fidelity through various real, pseudo, and de facto marriage of the characters in the film. Tony Leung and Maggie Cheung are the main protagonists in the film who are living in the same boarding house with their spouses when they slowly come to the realization that their spouses are having an affair with each other. They are brought together by this realization and try to come to terms with it, while vowing not to be like them. Stephan Teo, in his book on Wong, draws comparison to a number of films that have tread the moral-ethical dimensions of such an affair and mentions that Wong had mentioned Hitchcock's Vertigo as inspiration in creating suspense as to whether or not Leung and Cheung will sleep together.  Wong achieves this through composition and "mise en scene": people not seen in the film (like the spouse of each protagonist), seeing the backs of characters are indistinguishable, disappearing around corners and hurrying down stairs. Although, Teo suggests that in reality the most obvious inspiration might be Spring in a Small City (directed most recently by Tian Zhuangzhuang in 2002), a seminal work that sets the aesthetic and moral standard of the romance that resembles Wong's in terms of plot and style. There are other literary inspirations suggested as well. For example, Wong quotes several passages from Liu Yichang's novel Intersections, about characters who come together by chance but remain strangers due to destiny, in the film. The preoccupation with gossip might have been inspired Manuael Puig's first novel Betrayed By Rita Hayworth, about a young man at the center of a world of scandal, betrayal, and gossip. Significantly, there is also a layer of role playing between the two protagonists. They role play at how the affair started and later on how they might confront the spouses about the affair, so in essence the two characters are playing two roles since they are also emulating the spouse of the other creating a complexity that sets this film apart from the many other that have tread this ground before. Again, the hallmarks of Wongs film can seen in the score, which has several mood setting pieces including the signature motif of "Yumenji's Theme,"(from the soundtrack of Seijun Suzuki's film Yumenji) which is a waltz that is often played when Leung and Cheung meet. As usual the cinematography is extraordinary as Christopher Doyle shared Director of Photography with Mark Lee Ping Bin because of length of time needed by Wong to finish the film. The end product results in one of his best films.

 

Comments

[Edward]

I posted a comment a few weeks ago about a film I'd seen only half of, and at the time thought it might be a Wong Kar Wai film. I never found out the name and the plot didn't ring any bells with you, but it turns out that it was the 2002 remake of "Spring in a Small Town" referenced above! I had seen In the Mood for Love only a couple of weeks before, and the two seemed so similar. Thanks to this post I can now sleep at night...
Have you seen it?

[MC]

Cool, always glad to help. I haven't seen the film, but it is on my list. The new academic year starts in April, which means a new research budget, so I'll be doing some ordering from Amazon then.