In the Mood for Love
2000, directed by Wong Kar-Wai
Precisely an hour and a half into In the Mood for Love, as Mr. Chow begins to whisper his secret into a hole in the wall at Angkor Wat, a quick flare of sunlight reaches its maximum intensity. This light underscores the secret’s importance, while the serendipity of its timing suggests a possible figurative illumination on top of the literal. Up until the Cannes Film Festival, Wong Kar-Wai’s working title for this film was Secrets, and the whispered secret is the last action on the screen, so that there can be little doubt that the film builds to this moment with a sense of purpose. One hallmark of a great film is to end with some unspoken thought, inviting the audience to read a character’s mind, having provided all the material needed to do so. Our goal, therefore, in approaching In the Mood for Love, should be to define what secret Mr. Chow would wish to bury in that wall.
Despite the film’s vibrant colors, its cinematography evokes the style of a noir. Mr. Chow’s workplace in particular, with its filing cabinets, typewriters, cigarette smoke, and fluorescent lighting, resembles a stereotypical 1940s or ’50s detective bureau. Chow will play a sort of detective, looking for love instead of solving a crime, and his search will bring us closer to the secret at the ending.
The flash of sunlight is not the only precisely timed moment. At exactly thirty minutes, Mrs. Chan and Mr. Chow reach a shared understanding that their spouses are having an affair. The revelation is not spoken, but it follows Mrs. Chan’s question “What are you getting at actually?”, and it’s underscored by a change of music and a hypnotic cloud of smoke from Mr. Chow’s cigarette. The hour mark is another major turning point, albeit harder to pinpoint, as Mrs. Chan reacts with unexpected pain to her husband’s hypothetical confession during one of the “rehearsals”. This, coupled with her landlady’s gentle warning a minute later, drives a wedge between the two protagonists, precipitating his departure for Singapore and the end of their intense but unfulfilled relationship.
The arrangement of three key plot points at half-hour intervals is only part of the film’s abundant symmetry. Beginning with the two couples moving simultaneously into the spare rooms of adjacent Hong Kong apartments, the story is full of coincidences and doublings: two couples, two affairs, two neckties, two handbags, two rainy nights, two passings on the noodle shop stairway, etc. Mrs. Suen calls each protagonist “too polite” on separate occasions. A tracking shot from one apartment to the other reveals Mrs. Chan and Mr. Chow leaning on the same wall. When he craves sesame syrup, it just happens that she’s made a whole pot of it. Mr. Koo comes in drunk right when Mr. Chow has written the entrance of the “drunken master” in his martial arts serial. Toward the end, each protagonist pays a visit to the other’s home without actually making contact.
All these doublings reflect on the basic premise of the two couples, i.e. the main couple and their adulterous spouses. The four persons pair off symmetrically, forming two legitimate couples and two illegitimate, but it’s the deviations from the symmetry that make the film lifelike. On the face of it, the situation is tantalizingly convenient. When the spouses have an affair, the leftover couple finds themselves attracted to each other. No better excuse could be expected for two people to come together outside of their marriage vows – and yet the flirtation appears to remain unconsummated (although the coda finds Mrs. Chan a single mother to a boy old enough to have been conceived during the main story, and it’s ambiguous who the father might be). They spend their shared time on the streets, in restaurants, in taxicabs, in a hotel room, or hiding in Mr. Chow’s room, either working on the martial arts serial or play-acting their own spouses. Whether they remain chaste or not, the film’s focus is on their unfulfilled longing – we never even see them kiss.
Walking at night, the couple’s silhouettes sometimes precede them as if their charade has turned them into mere shadows of their spouses. Their failure to connect is psychologically grounded, and it has little to do with their professed propriety (“We won’t be like them.”). However strong their mutual attraction may be, their status as victims would likely dampen the spark that pulls them together. To be enamored is not only to desire another person, but also to imagine oneself capable of ascending to the desired person’s level. The leftover couple’s diminished status must interfere with this second condition.
Though the situation works against the couple’s sexual union, it does not diminish the potential for romantic longing. In a sense the two couples, the unseen and the seen, are opposite reflections of each other, the spouses enjoying a physical relationship while the protagonists revel in romantic intensity, neither relationship complete. Though we know little of the spouses, we catch a glimpse of Mr. Chow’s wife crying in the shower, hinting that her experience is not altogether happy. The two alternatives shown here are probably typical of relationships in the real world, where total fulfilment, both physical and spiritual, is the exception. Here we witness a predominantly spiritual relationship, and the film’s much noted beauty – its colors, costumes, atmosphere, music, attractive cast, and languorous camera movements – is a correlative for the flavor of a longing so intense that the lovers evidently carry it years after their last meeting.
Because the spouses are mostly hidden from view, shown only from the rear on brief occasions, we don’t get a fully developed contrast between the couples. Instead, Mr. Chow’s friend and colleague Ah Ping stands as the foil to the lovers’ romantic longing. Ah Ping is ugly but carefree, unburdened by the anxieties of romance, finding his satisfaction in prostitutes and gambling. The two men may seem like opposites, but their differences don’t necessarily go deep. Each finds his pleasure where he can, given his looks and his circumstances. Mr. Chow seems to look down on his friend (“Not everyone’s like you”), but a close examination of his romance suggests that he’s no better.
When Mr. Chow tells Mrs. Chan he’s leaving for Singapore, he echoes her earlier line: “I thought we wouldn’t be like them.” Although it’s their spouses who cheat, there’s something suspicious in the assumed superiority of those words, just as there’s something suspicious in the way they try to reenact their spouses’ conversations. Mr. Chow seems to have been the instigator, excusing the strange rehearsals after announcing his departure for Singapore: “I was only curious to know how it started.” She too had expressed this curiosity, but in a more casual way: “I wonder how it began.”
The more closely we look at In the Mood for Love, the less it looks like some idealized, wistful, romantic memory. Its focus is much more on Mr. Chow than on Mrs. Chan, and he comes out far from innocent. Just as her husband may have used Chow’s wife for physical gratification, there’s a strong insinuation that Mr. Chow takes advantage of Mrs. Chan for romantic gratification. More than sex, he’s after the thrill of intimacy… but that doesn’t make his intentions any less one-sided. The title is a comment on his attitude, as if love were so transient that it depended on one’s mood.
It’s not exactly that Mr. Chow isn’t serious about Mrs. Chan. His fault is a surfeit of ego, causing him to misinterpret her hesitations as rejections. She pulls her hand from his in a taxi (which could be part of their role-playing); she doesn’t want to “be like them”; she tells him they “shouldn’t see so much of each other” in order to avoid gossip; and she cries about her husband’s infidelity – but the evidence points to a genuine love for Mr. Chow, and when he realizes she came to his apartment in Singapore he finally understands that he’s foolishly thrown away the love of his life, doing as much wrong to her as to himself. All of this is already expressed in the opening inscription:
“It is a restless moment. She has kept her head lowered to give him a chance to come closer. But he could not, for lack of courage. She turns and walks away.”
This surely is the nature of the secret at the end, and it’s right after discovering Mrs. Chan’s visit that Mr. Chow tells Ah Ping the custom of whispering a secret into a hole. Still, he denies to Ah Ping that he has any secrets, and it’s another three years before he whispers his own secret. For a man like Mr. Chow, self-awareness takes time, and the film is attentive to time’s effects. The romance is filled with slow motion and clocks, as if every moment is heightened. Afterward, the passing of years puts the romance in perspective, and when Mr. Chow comes to Cambodia the perspective widens further. Angkor Wat connects him to the distant past, while a newsreel of Charles de Gaulle’s visit grounds the scene in its historical present, while also reminding us of the horrors awaiting Cambodia. Past, present, and future are thus combined, and their respective senses of wonder, banality, and realism are an antidote to the romantce of Mr. Chow’s memories.
At the end, when Mr. Chow releases his secret, a Buddhist monk watches from a temple window. Four years earlier Mr. Chow’s desire had taken him over, at great cost to himself, to Mrs. Chan, and to their relationship. The idea of Buddhism is to steer its followers away from such attachments, so that the monk’s presence is a silent yet gentle rebuke to Mr. Chow’s past sins. More than that, the monk forms a pair with Ah Ping – two bald men from seemingly opposite poles, a hedonist and an ascetic, each personifying a particular critique of romantic obsession.
CONNECTIONS:
Brief Encounter – Unconsummated extramarital affair with ambiguous intentions on the man’s part; the man extricates himself from the relationship by announcing his departure to a foreign country
Beauty and the Beast – Long corridor with a row of windblown curtains on one side
Late Spring – Antique location at or near the end representing a general idea of the past
Vertigo – A seemingly genteel man deceives a woman who loves him, drawing her into an unhealthy reenactment of another relationship
Persona – Conversation(s) repeated verbatim in succession, but with a different flavor
Cries and Whispers – Key moments at the three half-hour marks; vivid colors; abundance of clocks
India Song – Languorous period piece with recurring musical themes; significant use of mirrors & shadows
The Moon in the Gutter – Male protagonist plays detective in an introspective mystery
Raise the Red Lantern – Key character(s) minimized onscreen to deflect focus from them
CREDITS:
This essay was inspired by a conversation with my friend Victor Provenzano, who contributed some of the thoughts, including the idea that Mr. Chow is like a film noir detective, and the observation that past, present, and future come together in the Cambodia ending.