"In the Mood for Love"
by Wong Kar Wai.
The spectator's idea of High Love, all over the world, has been insulted, in the past years, by the "Reality shows". The discourse of this new type of television is idiotistic and frustrating. It evolves around boys and girls barely wearing any underwear, walking uncombed between bedrooms and bathrooms, having sex or pretending to, among faked furniture and probably in the smell of perspiration... The result: characters and spectators are deprived of full moon summer nights, of exotic perfumes, of priestesses in long silk gowns that have provoked, or at least suggested so many delicious sins!...
If Cinema didn't exist, if a chinese movie didn't come by every now and then, if television was our only master of life, we would become a world of impotents, with slothful and inhibited sexual practices, perfect for the confessional, but deadly for those determined to dream at the troubles, the longing, the madness of Love!
Here is though the film of Wong Kar Wai:"In the Mood for Love", on our screens, dvd-s and souls. A movie that should be screened in high and elementary schools as a secure remedy against the horror beyond human of the reality shows...
The characters of this surprisingly asian movie seem pure products of the celluloid, artificial and stylized. Until the second when we find ourselves burnt by their untamed passion.
Of an almost physical beauty and deep sadness, this film is the story of a crossed betrayal, happening in the Hong Kong of the 60ies. The main characters are both married and neighbors. They both suffer from their legal half' absence, until they uncover their unfaithfulness. Follows a movie built on a refined "pas de deux" where self-imposed restriction fills up each scene in an almost claustrophobic manner.
Here is a woman of great beauty, in each moment of her life. She appears, in her eyes and in the others', in the sophisticated simplicity of several chinese dresses, adherent and monastic with their high necks, with small openings just exact for her small and feminine steps.
But it is precisely the chastity of this posture that pulses a maximized attraction. Maggie Cheung has long legs. She walks like an egret on her high heels which fatally contract her ankles. Fatally, like a call for help. She never laughs, she speaks minimally, she generates renunciation, compassion and passion... Her sanctuary is, like in a "mise en abime", the cinema theatre...
The companion of her drama is a gentleman of a gracious fragility, may be with the most sensual nape ever seen in Cinema. He is a sad and painful figure, prisoner of who knows what... He is Tony Leung- the Prize for the Best Actor at Cannes.
These two noble creatures evolve in a wretched Hong Kong, under the desolating, but vivid gray of the rain (that the anemic people of "Big Brother" can't even suppose), in tiny offices; they live next to each other in two archaic mini-apartments, certainly less horrendous than the atoned rooms of the reality tv transmissions... They meet by chance, here and there, and they want to meet again, without ever mentioning it other than by their looks. They become closer, living with the fear of having their relationship discovered by the landlady.
The virtuoso director retains, though, any impulse between the two, in order to further analyze the mechanics of desire, of loss and of regret, with an almost theological seriousness...The artist isolates their bodies by precise camera movements, by hand gestures, surrounding them with the smoke curls of endless cigarettes. Wong narrows the space repeatedly, as a perfect representation of their such unusual relationship.
The film is an interior piece of work. It is built like a visual texture: with a velvety dark tone, with nuances of crystal or deep red, with a fluffy blue...The camera swallows with one look the small chambers where the characters move. One minute later we become amazed of how well a pulled curtain becomes the bisector of our look. It is a narcotic and tactile world, where even the wallpaper breaths...
The omnipresent rain, the dark interiors of cabs, the illiberal spaces where they live only emphasize their need of love and the frustration of living in unfulfilling couples. This is the solitude and the darkness of "the mood of love" that Wong Kar Wai wanted to create.
Christopher Doyle’s and Mark Lin Ping’s images evolve like a dance, like a revery, opposing their physical bodies, like a meditation on lust and attraction.
Maggie Cheung is angular and metallic in the restriction of her costumes of a typical middle class wife in the sixties' Hong Kong. Leung, at his turn, is invested by the camera with a liquid sensuality and an immaculate beauty. Between the two grows an amorous tension, never expressed, a wish that cannot or does not want to be achieved. Mister Chow will discover he has talent for drawing comics, having Misses Li-Zhen as his muse. Together they start to create, but also to masochistically rehearse their future. The rehearsal scenes are extremely painful: Li-Zhen faces the adultery of her husband, and she concludes with an apparently wise(?) phrase: "We shall not be like them"...
"In the Mood for Love" is also a fragranced movie. Not only by the noodles and chinese dumplings which abound, but also by the smell of clothes drying, after having been caught by rain...
We do not know if they end by making love...Everyone could bid for the conclusion they wish for: repudiation, or fusion.
By the end of the film we expect the two melancholiacs to consume their love in a very cinematic manner...
At the climax of their passion, we only see two hands barely touching, filled with desire, but also with renunciation... But hasn't always High Love been that way?
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