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22 November 2000
The story itself is as familiar as the chorus of a favourite song, a budding romance in the "Age of Blossom" - not uncoincidentally the film's original Chinese title, the 1960s pop hit "Hua Yang De Nian Hua". The players are Mrs Su Li-zhen and Mr Chow Mo-wan, the unacknowledged couple whose complicitly adulterous spouses are each reduced to a distant voice, seldom heard and never seen. The setting is a Shanghainese community in Hong Kong, 1962, in the summer season of vegetable won-ton between the noodle shop down the stairs, the rice cooker imported from bubbling Japan, gift ties and handbags "not sold here", loud games of mah-jong below room #2046, a dusty old office building, and deserted streets after dark. The tone lies beneath the soundtrack of gossipping voices, restaurant clamour, mandarin tunes on the radio and latin beats on the jukebox, in Michael Galasso's original cello music which conveys the repressed longing of a misplaced courtship.
Time stands still for those who wait. In the time it takes for the smoke to evaporate from the burning cigarette between Tony Leung's fingers, Maggie Cheung has changed cheongsam dresses for each change of camera angle, so the succession of ellipses recalls the silent passing of their unconsummated affair. Dialogue is superfluous, and the fantasy ends with the terseness of an understatement: "It already happened." Wong Kar-Wai has been known to orchestrate this choreography of space and time with touching precision. In "Chungking Express" He Qi Wu (aka. policeman #223) describes himself falling in love at first sight in the length of a voice/over a freeze-frame: "At our most intimate, we were only 0.01 centimeters apart." Su Li-zhen, character of same name interpreted by same actress in "Days of Being Wild" in 1988, remarks: "Today, April 16, 1960 at 3pm, you and I were friends for one minute." And four years after the facts, Mr Chow Mo-wan whispers his secret of summer in Hong Kong, 1962 into the timeless immensity of Angkor Wat.
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Thursday
night at the Curzon Soho, the young crowd of dark-haired paparazzis and
autograph hounds grouped around the entrance reminds us that Hong Kong
star culture is still very much alive abroad. The London Chinatown premiere
of "In the Mood for Love", in the exclusive presence of Wong Kar-Wai,
Maggie Cheung Man-Yuk and Tony Leung Chiu-Wai is a sold out event, and
after the director and his two leading actors step into the spotlight
together off-stage to salute their applauding fans, we are the privileged
spectators of this movie of moods and manners, made in the image of Hong
Kong.
But
like all of Wong Kar-Wai's films, "In the Mood for Love" is inspired by
rhythm. While Li-zhen's husband's dedication of the Mandarin title song
sets the clock to the radio days of the nostalgic sixties, the unscripted
screenplay reposes on the slowly moving images of Maggie C. and Tony L.
repeatedly segueing into the valse of Shigeru Umebayashi's romantic refrain.
The cinematic flirtation is emotionally seductive, much the same way the
karmakomic rhythm of "Fallen Angels" soothed the violence of each one
of Leon Lai's corridor killings. Yet this routine is the leitmotive for
a momentary lapse of solitude, as the camera-voyeur lingers erotically
on the couple's furtive exchanges of intimacy, while other times dwelling
on claustrophobic close-ups and partial viewpoints which frame the parallel
bodies in the physical grids of their morally rigid environment.
"A
place is like a person, it witnesses many situations over the years. (...)
I don't construct my films from stories or characters, but from places."
For Wong Kar-Wai, "In the Mood for Love" first began to take shape at
the local noodle shop, a place of familiar smells, solitary souls and
shared rituals - for the true star of his movies is Hong Kong itself.
Hong Kong as a place where people cross but don't meet at the Chungking
Express, a purgatory of fallen angels from very different horizons, a
haphazard collision of individual destinies. As journalist and film critic
Serge Daney wrote en voyage through Asia in the summer of 1980, "Hong
Kong ne s'appartient pas." Hong Kong doesn't belong to Hong Kong.
