REVIEW: 花樣年華 [In the Mood for Love] [2000]

Rating: PG | Runtime: 98 minutes
Release Date: September 29th, 2000 (Hong Kong) / February 2nd, 2001 (USA)
Studio: Block 2 Pictures / USA Films / Janus Films
Director(s): Wong Kar-Wai
Writer(s): Wong Kar-Wai

I thought I was the only one who knew.

It’s shot as a series of glimpses. Brief vignettes fading to black with indeterminate time passing between meant as fleeting snapshots that both Mrs. Chan (Maggie Cheung) and Mr. Chow (Tony Leung Chiu-wai) can hope to keep in their memories as the years pass. That first tight squeeze on the stairwell between Mrs. Suen’s (Rebecca Pan) and Mr. Koo’s (Man-Lei Chan) apartments. A chaotic scene wherein they unintentionally scheduled their moving trucks to arrive simultaneously, confusing the drivers as to which door was which. Their numerous encounters in the rain as one comes and the other goes. Moments they wouldn’t have cared to hold onto if not for what happened next.

Because they’re simply neighbors at this point: young, married, and often left behind. They greet each other with smiles. She borrows his martial arts serials. He takes her up on her offer to have her husband purchase items from Japan whenever he’s on business. Their exchanges are friendly, polite, and routine … until their spouses’ absences begin to coincide and stories told start to make less sense. And since Chow is a doting husband who looks to pick his wife up from work and Chan knows all the tricks an adulterer wields considering she’s often the one running point to ensure her boss’s (Kelly Lai Chen’s Mr. Ho) wife and mistress never meet, it’s not long before coincidence breeds suspicion.

I absolutely love the way writer/director Wong Kar-Wai presents their inevitable shared moment of truth. The signs become unavoidable and Chow knows Chan’s husband is away, so he invites her out to dinner to ask advice about a gift. They sit and talk like the meal is a business function—neither wanting to risk giving life to gossip whether the neighborhood wondering about their relationship or the other judging either’s respective marriage. He wants to know if she could point him towards where she bought her purse. She asks him to do the same with his tie. They’re both certain they’ve played it cool, holding their pleasant façades despite her explaining her husband found the bag and him confessing that his wife picks his ties. Then everything changes upon finally admitting the truth.

This is when In the Mood for Love opens a new world of possibilities because its characters (whether they allow themselves of not) are able to interact without pretense … or our judgment. Because it’s one thing to watch adulterers pursuing each other with dubious morality. It’s another to witness the two people scorned attempting to reclaim the piece of themselves that was lost in that betrayal. We root for them. We applaud their knowledge of the other’s schedule being used to orchestrate run-ins in the hallway or outside. We grin when Chow asks her assistance in writing a martial arts serial of his own now that he needn’t worry about his wife’s opinions on his hobbies. We raise a knowing eyebrow when Mrs. Suen wonders why Chan gets so dressed up just to visit the noodle stand.

But they would never do what their spouses do. That’s rule number one—at least that’s what they speak aloud while their actions break it time and time again. Hanging out is initially less about a desire for the other as it is a desire to understand. Because the people they were before realizing what their spouses did wouldn’t have even thought about something so indecent. So, it’s only sensible that they’d seek to wrap their head around it by play-acting how it might have happened. Did Mr. Chan make the first move? Could it have been Mrs. Chow? Does Chow pretending to do it feel like something Mr. Chan would do? How about vice versa when she pretends to be Mrs. Chow? These rendezvouses are purely based in research. Then a necessary distraction. Then … much more.

There’s a great passage where Chow and Chan are discussing what could have been if they hadn’t married so young. They admit that the moment they said “I do” was the moment they no longer thought only of themselves. Wants and desires became shared. Free time became used in pursuit of the couple’s future and needs rather than one individual. They’re pretty much laying out everything that’s wrong with the traditional notion of marriage being a necessity for adulthood wherein you don’t move out of your parents’ home until after the wedding. Where even a “love match” feels “arranged” because you can’t truly know another person until you’ve lived with them. It’s no wonder so many unions end in divorce or endure on obligation alone. You discover their true self too late.

Sometimes you discover your true self too late too. That’s what Wong portrays. Not two people commiserating about their poor fate in hitching themselves to horrible partners. Chow and Chan are instead two people coming into their own because of the freedom afforded to them by those partners’ horrible act. Whereas their marriages were born out of a contract that laid out every subsequent step, the romance blossoming between them rises from longing. They’re getting to know each other removed from convention and societal demands—vulnerable and alone yet unencumbered and empowered to pursue their hearts’ desire. And the more they open themselves up, the more that desire turns towards the other. Because no one knows them better. Perhaps, no one else ever could.

The passion on-screen is inescapable as written and shot (by Christopher Doyle and Mark Lee Ping-bin), but the performances from Cheung and Leung make it even more palpable. Add the 1960s period aesthetic in wardrobe and mannerisms and the chemistry rises higher since it’s precisely how these two characters desperately try not to give into temptation that turns their every move into a flirtatious attraction. That built-in sense of the forbidden ingrained by their decency and loyalty only ensures their lust for each other increases to the point of needing to make a choice: be together or leave forever. It’s the most important choice of their lives because it will mean giving something up either way. Run away together and shatter their conservative code like their spouses or preserve that dogma by throwing away the deepest love they’ve ever experienced.

When I saw In the Mood for Love twenty-some years ago, I’m certain it was the quick passages of time via multiple “endings” that prevented me from giving full marks. In my mind I probably thought the bittersweet fade to black of Chow and Chan’s first missed opportunity was the better conclusion, not realizing how crucial each subsequent stroke of fate was to understand the mix of wonder and curse that love is. Now, in hindsight, after having experienced love myself, those epilogues become a brilliant capstone to the film’s themes and emotions. Not only narratively as far as bringing the characters into a changed world or calling back to romantic ideas like telling secrets to trees, but also philosophically in the sense that “lost love” isn’t actually lost. It’s real. It endures. It shapes you.

Even though Chow and Chan’s physical connection never goes beyond hand touching or a comforting embrace in the face of doing the “right thing,” what they share is more intimate than anything shared with their spouses. It’s not a mistake that Wong left Mrs. Chow (Paulyn Sun) and Mr. Chan (Roy Cheung) as voices and backs of heads despite having shot footage to put them in the film as more than just catalysts. Nor that the leads playact those deceivers as cold and emotionless in their rehearsals for confrontations that never occur. There’s a difference between being duty-bound to another and being bewitched by them. There’s also a difference between preserving the potential of love at its height and acting on it only to discover its inevitable decline. There’s magic in the uncertainty of maybe.