![]() ![]() At that time, Hong Kong was a visibly migrant society, and the period between 19 was significant not only to director Wong Kar-Wai – a new émigré himself from Shanghai where he was born in 1958 – but also to the city of Hong Kong and the region. mediated by a particular consciousness’, according to cultural critic Rey Chow. And the historical conflates with the autobiographical: Wong reminisces about 1960s’ Hong Kong – a place of his childhood ‘remembered in oneiric images. Seventeen black screens transition us between places. In the Mood for Love is a temporal collage, taking the viewer from 1962 to 1966 using 21 temporal changes, each announced by Su Li-zhen’s changing cheongsams. Yet in other moments, Su and Chow seem to be coming out from the same doors, and looking over the same living-room balcony.Īs the protagonists Chow and Su contemplate whether to be together or not, the camera pans between the two apartments, cutting through the shared wall and rendering them For instance, two-thirds into the film, a tracking shot from one apartment to the other passing through the partition wall shows Chow and Su sitting contemplatively in their respective hallways, suggesting that the layouts are symmetrical. Just as we settle into thinking that the apartments are adjacent to each other, an uncanny feeling arises that they are, in fact, the same. The actor Tony Leung doubles as Chan, Su’s husband, and Maggie Cheung’s Su doubles as Chow’s wife. Chow and Su glide in and out of the apartment doorways, passing each other through seemingly endless corridors, up and down the interior stairs, exterior steps and round the corner in a repetitious tango of flirtation. Viewed through the rusty metal grilles of the street windows and shopfronts with their shadows cast against bare concrete walls, the buildings lining the street create a contiguous enclosure that extends into the interior as the camera cuts from the lane to the building stairs and back.Ĭultural theorist Ackbar Abbas describes this as a ‘metonymic substation’, a doubling device where characters become interchangeable in a narrative cycle of repetition. ![]() The heavy rain – Typhoon Wanda swept into north-east Hong Kong through the South China Sea from the Philippines on 1 September 1962 – transforms the corner of the building into a room. ![]() The rain and dim flicker of street lamps augments the intimacy of these urban places, overflowing with displaced people, missed experiences and longing. As a corridor scene cuts to the corner of a lane of steps leading to the street vendors below, there is no visible division between interior and exterior. Su’s husband, Chan, is always away on business in Japan and after work as a secretary at a shipping company, she occupies herself with trips to street vendors and the cinema. Shots, people, dialogues and places move in a kind of synchronic dissonance with each other.Ĭlose and intimate domestic settings and urban scenes combine in artful montage to evoke a city in fluxĭepicted as still-life scenes and animated by the perpetual motion of people, portraying Hong Kong as a city in transition, the public places of In the Mood for Love are intimate and isolated. In the interior, the doorway frames the occupants inside the hallway, living room and bedroom, and the long hallway frames the kitchen. We never see the living room in its entirety in either apartment. The stairs, the corridor, the hallway inside the subdivided apartments, the living room, the kitchen and the bedroom appear as fragments, cut in from one to another as the occupants appear and reappear, moving between them. Portraits of desire displayed through synchronic visual storytelling techniques create a feeling of interaction between shots and components. ![]() Private spaces feel public – every neighbour seems to know everyone else’s schedules and whereabouts. The film is a spatial collage of bedrooms, mahjong rooms, hotel rooms, hallways, corridors, stairs, corners, steps, streets the density of Hong Kong’s domestic spaces is embodied in the apartment building interior. Inspired by Hong Kong writer Liu Yichang’s Modernist novella, Intersection (1972), In the Mood of Love, made in 2000, follows the relationship that develops between two Shanghai immigrants – Chow Mo-wan, played by Tony Leung, and Su Li-zhen, played by Maggie Cheung – as they saunter through the maze of Hong Kong’s cityscape with their restless gaze. As a collage of time and place, Wong Kar-Wai’s In the Mood for Love captures a city in a state of transition ![]()
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