In the Mood for Love

Fifteen months of shooting, a script that kept dissolving, and one of the most precisely controlled movies ever made about people not doing something.

Released

2000

Director

Wong Kar-wai

Starring

Tony Leung Chiu-wai, Maggie Cheung

Runtime

98 minutes

Cantonese title

花樣年華

Two neighbours in 1962 Hong Kong work out that their spouses are having an affair with each other. They begin meeting to discuss it. That is the plot, and the movie is about what they decide not to do about it.

It is a movie of corridors, stairwells and the narrow gap between two rented rooms. The spouses are never shown — a back, a voice on a telephone, a hand. The two people we do see are almost never shown in a wide shot together without something in the way of them: a doorframe, a curtain, a wall the camera is standing behind.

Why it looks like that

The framing is not a style applied to the story; it is the story. Every shot puts an obstruction between the audience and the two characters, so watching the movie feels like overhearing something through a wall. By the time they are finally in an unobstructed frame, the moment has passed.

The 1962 Hong Kong on screen is largely a reconstruction. The city had rebuilt itself several times over by the late nineties, and much of what stands in for it was shot elsewhere and dressed. The movie is set in a Hong Kong that had already stopped existing when it was made, which is part of why it plays as memory rather than as period drama.

Wong shot for well over a year without a finished script, accumulating far more material than the 98 minutes that survive. Whole strands were cut. The restraint the movie is admired for was found in the edit as much as it was written.

Tony Leung and Maggie Cheung

Leung won Best Actor at Cannes for a performance in which he mostly declines to say the thing he means. Maggie Cheung's cheongsams — a different one in nearly every scene — do the work a calendar would do in another movie: they are how you feel time passing in a story with almost no events in it.

Where it sits

It is the middle movie of a loose trilogy, following Days of Being Wild (1990) and preceding 2046 (2004), and it is comfortably the best entry point of the three. Watch it before the other two rather than after.