IMDb 8.1 / 10
Official trailer
In the Mood for Love is the film that turns up at the top of critics’ lists and stays there. The rating on this page is IMDb’s, since I haven’t watched it. Wong Kar-wai directed. Tony Leung plays a journalist and Maggie Cheung plays a secretary, neighbors in a crowded Hong Kong apartment building in 1962 who work out that his wife and her husband are having an affair with each other.
What they do about it is the film. They meet, they rehearse conversations, they try to understand how it started, and they refuse to become what their spouses became.
What I know of this film comes from clips and stills, and the look alone stops me cold. Those saturated reds and cramped hallways, with Maggie Cheung walking to buy noodles in slow motion while the waltz plays, are images I could stare at for an hour. I’m a sucker for a story where two people want something and won’t take it, and this seems to be the purest version of that anybody’s put on screen.
The Premise
Two couples move into rooms in the same building on the same day. The spouses of the two leads are constantly away on business, always at the same time, and the film never shows either of their faces.
Mr Chow and Mrs Chan work it out slowly, from a handbag and a tie that turn up in the wrong places. Once they know, they meet to ask each other how it must have begun, and they act out the conversations their partners might have had.
That role-play is the film’s engine. Rehearsing somebody else’s affair is how two restrained people get close without admitting they’re doing it.
The role-play is the idea I admire most here. Two wounded people rehearsing their spouses’ affair is a cruel, clever way to let them get close, and it gives every one of those conversations a second meaning they both pretend not to hear.
The Restraint
Nothing happens, and that’s what most writing about the film comes back to. The two leads never act on what they feel. The film keeps them in corridors, stairwells and noodle shops, passing each other, and the closest they get is a hand held for a second.
That restraint is a period detail as much as a personal one. 1962 Hong Kong is a small world of shared kitchens and watchful landladies, where an affair would be public within a day.
It’s also why the film has the reputation it has. Audiences accustomed to consummation find it unbearable in the best sense: two hours of deferral with no release. I think the film is right to hold them back. If they gave in, they’d turn into their spouses and the ache would drain out of the story. A hand held for a second does more for me than any love scene could.
For Writers
Wong builds two hours on what his characters refuse to do, and the tension never slackens. Withheld action is stronger than action, as long as the reader knows exactly what’s being withheld. When you write restraint, make the want unmistakable and the obstacle immovable, then hold. Take a scene where your characters come close and pull back. Cut the moment where one of them explains why. The reader will supply it, and what they supply will be sharper than anything you’d have written.
Tony Leung and Maggie Cheung
Leung plays Chow as a man holding himself very still, and the performance is built almost entirely on what he doesn’t allow onto his face. It won him best actor at Cannes, and it’s the work he’s best known for outside Hong Kong.
Cheung’s Mrs Chan is the harder part, because the film puts her under constant observation: by the landlady, by the neighbors, by the camera. Every gesture is being watched, and Cheung plays somebody who knows it.
They’d worked with Wong before, on Days of Being Wild and Ashes of Time, and the shorthand shows. Two people with this much history can play a scene about not saying something and make the silence specific. Leung got the prize at Cannes, but from everything I’ve read and seen in clips, Cheung has the harder job. Playing a woman who knows she’s being watched, in a film that never stops watching her, sounds like the kind of discipline I find more impressive than any big dramatic scene.
For Writers
Both leads act mostly through what they withhold, and the audience reads the pressure behind it because the situation is airtight. Suppressed emotion only reads when the reader knows exactly what’s being suppressed. When you write a restrained character, make their circumstances so clear that the reader supplies the feeling. Write the scene where a character says nothing. Then check the surrounding pages make what they aren’t saying unmistakable.
How It Looks
Christopher Doyle and Mark Lee Ping-bing shot it, and the look is as famous as the story: saturated reds and golds, cramped frames, doorways and mirrors cutting the characters into pieces, and slow motion used for people walking to buy noodles.
Maggie Cheung wears more than twenty different cheongsams across the film, and the changes mark time in a story that otherwise refuses to tell you how much has passed. The camera watches from behind objects and around corners, so the audience is placed as a neighbor would be: seeing a fragment, guessing the rest.
The Music
Shigeru Umebayashi’s Yumeji’s Theme, a waltz written for a different film, plays over the slow-motion sequences and has become inseparable from this one. Nat King Cole’s Spanish-language recordings fill the rest, a deliberate anachronism. The songs place the film in a version of 1962 that’s remembered instead of documented. The repetition is the method. The same theme returns under the same kind of moment until the audience feels the loop the characters are trapped in. The music is where I’m most firmly on the film’s side. Bringing Yumeji’s Theme back again and again under the same kind of moment is a bold choice, and I think it’s the right one. Every return of that waltz tightens the loop a little more.
For Writers
The same waltz returns under the same kind of scene until the audience recognizes the pattern and starts to feel time passing inside it. Repetition with slight variation is how you make a reader feel duration. When you want to show years of the same ache, repeat a scene shape with small differences instead of summarizing the period. Choose a recurring situation your characters return to. Change one element each time, and let the reader measure the distance. Time passing is a feeling.
The Ending
The film ends in Angkor Wat in 1966, with Chow whispering a secret into a hollow in a stone wall and sealing it with mud, an old practice the film explains a moment before he does it.
They’ve missed each other by minutes more than once by that point, in a building they both left and later returned to.
That closing image is why the film sits where it does on the lists. The story ends with a man burying something he will never say to anyone, and that’s the whole film in a single shot.
Its Standing
It won best actor at Cannes for Tony Leung, appears near the top of the Sight and Sound critics’ poll, and is routinely named the best film of the 2000s in international polls.
Wong made it in chaotic conditions, shooting for over a year without a finished script and cutting a great deal, including material that became the follow-up, 2046. An IMDb score of 8.1 is high for a subtitled art film, since that audience is self-selecting. The critical standing is higher still.
Craft Note
Craft Note
Wong spends two hours on a relationship that never happens and makes it unbearable through repetition, restraint and one recurring piece of music. Give your reader an unmistakable want and then refuse it, and the refusal becomes the story. What a character won’t do defines them faster than anything they will.
Is In the Mood for Love worth watching?
IMDb users have it at 8.1, critics rate it higher still, and it appears near the top of most rankings of the greatest films of this century. The photography, the music and the two lead performances are the reasons.
There’s no rating from me on this page, since I haven’t seen it. The 8.1 looks earned to me, and if anything a touch low, because a subtitled film about two people not having an affair doesn’t score that well with a general crowd unless it’s doing something special. If you want a film where two people spend two hours not doing the obvious thing, this is the one everybody names, and the closing shot at Angkor Wat is the image I’d most want to see in its full context.
