In the Mood for Love: Haunted Heart

By Steve Erickson
ESSAYS—OCT 2, 2012

At the turn of the twenty-first century, Wong Kar-wai was the most
exciting director in the world, and 2000’s In the Mood for Love is his greatest
movie. Like the other Hong Kong directors of his time, Wong imbues
everything the West regards as film cliché with a new glamour and fervor; but
whereas in the cinema of John Woo and Tsui Hark this romanticism lurks
behind an operatic violence, in Wong’s films love is never merely a distraction
or a motivation or a fleeting promise of redemption but the dominating
conflict. Even at their most melodramatic, Wong’s love stories are sometimes
funny but rarely ironic, played out against a psychically adrift cityscape where
lovers don’t have the luxury of irony.
Praising a particular work in an ever-growing oeuvre as “mature” is as
condescending as it is meaningless, so let’s say that, Wong’s psychedelic noirs
having peaked with Chungking Express (1994) and Fallen Angels (1995), In
the Mood for Love is distinctive for its quieter classicism and looming sense
of history. Occupying next-door apartments, Chow Mo-wan (Tony Leung
Chiu-wai), a newspaperman, and Su Li-zhen (Maggie Cheung Man-yuk), an
executive secretary, notice that their respective spouses are always out of
town at the same time, and soon these forsaken partners of two adulterers
flirt with the possibility of their own affair. “We won’t be like them,” they vow
to each other, even as they take a hotel room—not to consummate anything
but to collaborate on scenes they imagine from the other affair, as well as a
series Chow is writing for his newspaper. Rehearsing illicit overtures and
responses in the winding streets and throbbing corridors and pulsing
stairways of a cloistered Hong Kong—as ravishingly shot by Christopher
Doyle and Mark Lee Ping-bin—the two remain no more sure than we are of
whose desire is being expressed; they’re compelled by the constraints they’ve
imposed on themselves out of both a fragile honor and moral vanity, and they
waver but not to the point of succumbing. Of course, this only turns up the
temperature between them; sometimes nothing is more erotic than
repression. Like many who’ve been cheated on, Chow and Su blame
themselves, and deny themselves what they’re confident they don’t deserve.
There’s a devastating scene a third of the way into the film, when Su is so
lonely that she reaches out to the woman next door, not yet suspecting that
this neighbor is taking her husband from her. Or does Su sense this after all?
Once the door closes, a passing comment by the other woman suggests that
Su’s husband may be in that very room at that very moment, feet away from
the conversation that’s just taken place; in some part of her mind she hasn’t
yet registered, has Su subconsciously recognized one of the muffled voices
through the wall? Like the emotions that flicker across the exquisite mask of
Cheung’s face, scenes in In the Mood for Love surface and then submerge back
into the murk of memory and fate called coincidence. The couples move into
their respective apartments on the same day; their belongings become mixed
up in a way that anticipates how their lives will intermingle—or, we might
wonder later, is it the other way around? Have their lives already
intermingled before the moves ever take place, before the movie even starts?
This is a film where all our initial assumptions circle back on themselves,
where the crisscrossing hallways mark the coordinates of destinies already
mapped. Is it, in fact, Chow and Su who were fated all along to be lovers, and
out of fear and rectitude defy and lose one of the rare chances for happiness
that life offers?
 In retrospect, it seems unfathomable that Wong at one point planned to
set In the Mood for Love in Beijing, or anywhere other than Hong Kong—an
example of how sometimes fate knows better. Beginning with his debut
feature, As Tears Go By, in 1988, Wong’s movies are about nothing if not this
City of the Betwixt and Between, lost amid West and East, capitalism and
communism, freedom and oppression, the vortex of a dying century draining
into one being born, to which a displaced filmmaker moved as a child and
grew to adolescence unable to speak Cantonese. Its mash-up culture
engendering his obsessions with pop imagery, magical realism, and, finally,
obsession itself, Hong Kong is an entropic city untethered in time and space,
through which Wong’s characters float from film to film. Cheung’s Su first
appears in Days of Being Wild (1990), which takes place just a year or two
before In the Mood for Love and where she seems so much another woman
that we can’t help wondering if she’s really a female of dual incarnations, not
unlike Brigitte Lin’s literally named Yin and Yang in Wong’s Ashes of Time
(1994).
The number of the hotel room where the two would-be lovers meet,2046,
is the year when the arrangement promised by China at the time of the 1997
British handover of Hong Kong, allowing the island to maintain its capitalist
economy, is supposed to end. It’s also the title of Wong’s follow-up to In the
Mood for Love, in which Leung returns as a Chow who’s become as detached
as he is debauched, making a game of the same luck that’s treated his heart so
capriciously. Sporadically involved with another woman who’s also named Su
(played by Gong Li) and an escort played by Zhang Ziyi, who is now the
occupant of room 2046 and whose powers of bewitching men are lost on the
one man she wants, Chow wanders from conquest to conquest with a
premeditated aimlessness, unable to lose his heart no matter how recklessly
he gambles it. Taken together, Days of Being Wild, In the Mood for Love, and
2046 are a triptych, but In the Mood is the trilogy’s heart and the most
autonomous of the three. Nothing Wong has made before or since (including
2007’s My Blueberry Nights) matches its hushed rapture.
For much of its filming, what would become In the Mood for Love was
called Secrets, and without divulging too much to those who haven’t seen it
yet, the movie ends with a secret, whispered into a hole in a wall and then,
with the mud of the earth, sealed off from what we can hear or know. In the
Mood’s two lovers are bound by the conviction that what divides them is the
same sensual inertia that drove their spouses into each other’s arms. But
watch Cheung walk to and from the noodle shop and you know this isn’t
possible. There is nothing sensually inert about that walk. It would be
lascivious, that walk, were it by any actress other than Cheung, or from any
director other than Wong Kar-wai. Su’s body may keep a secret from Su but
not from anyone who watches her, and long after the wounds of betrayal
pretend to heal, long after she and her coconspirator in an eluded passion
have separated, long after this serenely delirious movie is over, the secret of
that walk haunts us as much as whatever it is that Chow has murmured in the
dark.