The history of film is full of tragic love
stories, from Casablanca
to Brokeback Mountain, Brief Encounter, Ghost,
An Affair to Remember, Titanic, or Amour…
The list goes on and on!
Movies seem to capture that mix of yearning,
anguish, and exhilaration that comes with
falling in love so well.
Especially when that love can’t last.
And that’s because film is, at its core,
an emotional medium.
It immerses us in a world with intricate settings
and sounds.
And we live vicariously through characters
as their stories unfold before us.
No one can chart the complex course of the
human heart quite like the filmmaker Wong Kar-Wai.
And the film In the Mood for Love is a great
example of his skill, whether we see it as
a deep meditation on human longing, or a reflection
of the sociopolitical tensions in our world.
[intro music plays]
In the Mood for Love tells the story of a
doomed love affair set in 1960s Hong Kong.
It was released in 2000 and hailed an instant
classic, winning awards all over the globe,
from Cannes to Chicago.
But the film’s journey to the screen began
years before that.
In the mid-1990s, Wong Kar-Wai, the film’s
writer-director, was riding a wave to the
forefront of international cinema.
Films like 1990’s Days of Being Wild
and 1994’s Chunking Express put him on the
map as an exciting young filmmaker with a
distinctive voice.
He achieves that voice by working in a very
unusual way: He often goes off-script and
follows inspiration as it strikes, sometimes
changing the nature of a film in the middle
of a shoot.
As a result, many of his films end up playing
with time, repeating moments or scenes.
He’s not afraid to fragment a narrative
to illuminate deep yet simple truths about
the human experience.
In his book on Wong Kar-Wai, the film scholar
Stephen Teo notes that “Wong’s films are
best seen as a series of interconnecting short
stories.”
In the Mood for Love fits that bill.
It’s a movie made up of gestures, like closely
observed looks between characters, and moments,
like shots of people walking down the street
or racing up a flight of stairs.
Individually, the shots are gorgeous and atmospheric.
Collectively, they take on new meaning and
depth, and build a portrait of intense longing.
The film’s story came together slowly over
many years.
At one point it was going to be a sequel to
his breakout film, Days of Being Wild.
Later, it would be a romance called Springtime
in Beijing.
Wong Kar-Wai even started shooting some of
the movie under the title Secrets at the same
time he was making Happy Together in Hong
Kong.
Eventually, he found inspiration in a novella
by Liu Yi-chang called
“Dui Dao,” or “Intersection.”
True to its title, this vaguely stream-of-consciousness
work follows the interior monologues of two
characters whose paths keep crossing in the
streets of Hong Kong.
And, from this spark, he created the film
In the Mood for Love as we know it today.
Tony Leung plays Mr. Chow, a married man who
rents a room in one of Hong Kong’s famously
overcrowded apartment buildings.
Mrs. Chan, played by Maggie Cheung, and her
husband rent the room next door.
Mr. Chow and Mrs. Chan often find themselves
home alone, their spouses off traveling for
business or working late.
In fact, their spouses are so absent from
the film that the movie never shows us their faces!
Eventually, Mr. Chow and Mrs. Chan discover
that their spouses are having an affair.
So our heroes embark on an affair of their
own.
Sort of.
Rather than jumping into each other’s arms
or beds, they skirt the edges of an actual
romantic relationship.
They “play-act” the roles of each other’s
spouses.
And they improvise ways that affair might
have started.
When they go to dinner, Mrs. Chan orders Mr.
Chow the steak she imagines her husband would
have had.
And Mr. Chow orders her a spicy dish his wife
would enjoy.
Later, they act out an imagined confrontation
between Mrs. Chan and her husband, where she
accuses him of having a mistress.
Mrs. Chan: I didn't expect it to hurt that much.
Mr. Chow: This is just a rehearsal.
And finally, in an emotionally brutal scene,
they rehearse the end of their own affair.
It leaves Mrs. Chan devastated, as make-believe
hits too close to home.
Throughout their relationship, they collaborate
on a serialized story Mr. Chow is writing
and spend a single night together in a hotel.
What they do that night is left a mystery.
And while it’s clear to us that these two
are falling in love, they keep denying it
to themselves, even as their ambitions and
fears become more intertwined.
In the end, their love can’t survive, and
they go their separate ways.
A devastating coda shows them just missing
each other over the years, and eventually
makes it clear that their affair will never
be rekindled.
On its surface, In the Mood for Love is a
straightforward story of repressed love.
And, as with most Wong Kar-Wai films, it’s
meticulously designed, arranged, and shot.
Wong is a known fan of film noir and melodramas
from Hollywood’s Golden Age, like Douglas
Sirk’s All that Heaven Allows.
And he saturates this film with dark urban
streets, deep shadows, and almost lurid reds
and blue-greens – the colors of passion,
guilt, and jealousy.
Wong has often cited Alfred Hitchcock’s
Vertigo as a chief inspiration for In the
Mood for Love.
It’s another film drenched in color, built
on suspense, in which characters play-act
a relationship.
In this film, the camera embraces the central
affair in ways the characters never do.
It slides back and forth between them at dinner.
It tracks them in slow motion through the
street.
And it observes them thinking alone, their
faces betraying none of the emotions roiling
under the surface.
Instead, those emotions spill forth through
those brilliant colors and a lush romantic
soundtrack that spans Japanese and Chinese
period pop songs and Spanish-language ballads
sung by Nat King Cole.
Time and again, Mr. Chow and Mrs. Chan are
photographed through other objects – like
doorways, windows, furniture, or mirrors – as
though they’re being watched.
Because, of course, they are.
By us.
As wonderfully designed and shot this film
is, its real power is revealed in how the
characters act out their spouses’ affair
with each other.
In “Film & History: An Interdisciplinary
Journal,” Humanities scholar Tony Hughes-d’Aeth
looks at the film through a Freudian lens.
By reading the story this way, you can see
how the same fatal flaw that has doomed their
real marriages dooms their fantasy affair
too.
Hughes-d’Aeth writes: “Both Mr. Chow and
Mrs. Chan are, beneath their suave mannerisms,
paralyzed by a single, devastating idea: I
am not enough for the other.”
So the movie could be a deep examination of
tragedy, of two people who can’t escape
the sense of insufficiency they feel toward
their spouses, even when they have the chance
to start over with someone new.
In this reading of the film, the romanticism
of the design, camerawork, and soundtrack
are in sharp contrast to the characters’
inability to accept that romance in their lives.
In other words, the mood is set, and the love
may be real, but Mr. Chow and Mrs. Chan can’t
bring themselves to act on it.
In the end, they keep missing each other – first
in Singapore, and then back in Hong Kong.
And this reading suggests that this is because
they’re more comfortable loving the imagined
versions of each other, rather than the real
people.
Basically, the fantasy is what’s driving
their affair.
And as much as In the Mood for Love zeroes
in on Mr. Chow and Mrs. Chan’s story, another
way to look at this movie is to examine how
their relationship is a prism that reflects
the geo-politics of Hong Kong at the time.
The film is explicitly set in Hong Kong between
1962 and 1966, a pivotal time in the history
of the territory.
And even though the politics of the era take
place entirely in the background of the film,
some critics argue that they’re key to fully
understanding it.
The film begins in 1962, a period of relative
stability in the region.
At the time, Hong Kong was a British colony
and a waypoint for emigrants leaving the economic
and political uncertainty of mainland China
for other countries.
And those who settled permanently in Hong
Kong found themselves in an unusual place
– one where east met west and communism
met capitalism.
The music and film studies scholar Giorgio
Biancorosso described Hong Kong at the time
as: “a political, social, and cultural space
that has become distinctly local, a space
defined both by the immigrant’s desire of
starting from scratch and the islander’s
sense of being separate.”
This idea of being stuck between two worlds
also drives the central conflict of In the
Mood for Love.
Mr. Chow and Mrs. Chan find themselves caught
between their own failed marriages, their
desire for each other, and their allegiance
to the restrictive social codes of the time
and place.
When the film jumps to 1966, not only has
their love affair become deeply broken, but
the political realities of Hong Kong have
become chaotic too.
1966 was the start of the Chinese Cultural
Revolution, a violent class struggle that
gripped mainland China for the next decade.
Now, in 1966 in the world of the film, Mrs.
Chan returns to Hong Kong.
She visits her former landlady, who essentially
set Mrs. Chan’s affair in motion.
Her former landlady says she’s leaving Hong
Kong for the United States because of the
political instability.
So just as the safe harbor of Hong Kong is
going through major changes, the space that
first incubated the love between Mrs. Chan
and Mr. Chow is coming to an end.
That sense of uncertainty and of lost possibilities
infuses the film from its first carefully-crafted
frame to its last.
So whatever lens you use to analyze In the
Mood for Love, the film holds up.
It’s both a technical achievement and a
poetic examination of two people who fall
deeply in love but are unwilling or unable
to accept happiness together.
Which is, ultimately, kind of haunting.
Next time, we’ll trade the restrained longing
of 1960s Hong Kong for the raucous, scorching,
hip-hop-infused Brooklyn of Spike Lee’s
Do the Right Thing.
Crash Course Film Production is produced in
association with PBS Digital Studios.
You can head over to their channel to check
out a playlist of their latest shows, like
Origin of Everything, Deep Look, and Eons.
This episode of Crash Course was filmed in
the Doctor Cheryl C. Kinney Crash Course Studio
with the help of these [nice people] and our
amazing graphics team is Thought Cafe.
