where are the wong kar wai's d'antan????....

"In the Mood for Love"

 

Wong Kar Wai

 The spectator's idea of High Love, all over the world, has been insulted, lately, by of sorts of "Reality shows".

The discourse of this 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 behavour for the confessional, but deadly for those determined to dream at the troubles, the longing, the madness of Love!

There are though films like Wong Kar Wai's :  "In the Mood for Love".  A movie that should be screened in high and elementary schools as a secure remedy against the  horror beyond human of commercial television...

 

 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 painfull 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 the reality shows 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 a chamber piece of work.

It is built like a visual texture.

Velvety dark tone, nuances of crystal or deep red, fluffy blue...

 

The camera swallows with one look the small rooms where the characters move.

One minute later we become amazed of how well a pulled curtain becomes the bysector 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 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?

 

by Giulia Ghica Dobre

 

jeremy talks....

Interview with Jeremy Irons

by Giulia  Ghica Dobre

Berlin 2013

 Jeremy loves food. Jeremy loves women. Jeremy loves clean landscapes. Jeremy loves fashion, litterature, scents and vintage. Jeremy loves LIFE.  Over a hearty dinner in freezing Berlin, Jeremy talks....

 Affable and relaxed, but with that amazing voice that kind of makes everything, no matter how trivial, sound profound, Jeremy Irons talked me through his ‘Night Train’ character, and gave me some insights into his unusually pragmatic approach to the often mysticized craft of acting.

 

Giulia Ghica Dobre: You are sustaining here the latest of Bille August. A part that seems quite restrictive...Are you aware when you play that you are who you are, or do you completely lose yourself in a part? How do you enter a character?

Jeremy Irons: You enter a character by learning what he does, what he does not, what he likes, what he likes not, what he wants, where he lives, all the things which make up us. You make that up for the character and you live that...Once I am out of a role, than I forget about it all...I only retain the reasons for which I have accepted that character, and the story that character requires to be known. What's the character's function in the story.

 

When Bille told me about the other actors, they were all actors I wanted to work with. Martina Gedeck I’d seen in “The Lives of Others,” and admired her so much… Bruno Ganz was an actor I’d never worked with but always admired. Tom Courtenay I knew but hadn’t worked with, Christopher Lee -- again, a man I knew but never worked with. Charlotte Rampling I had worked with before, but they were all good actors and the joy of working with good actors… it’s like if you love driving to get behind the wheel of a Ferrari or something. It’s great, it’s easy - you can drive well, easily.

...However Irons confesses to finding learning his lines difficult, and learning new languages even trickier.

 Jeremy Irons: I was so impressed with Christopher [Lee] that he knew all his lines -- I’m sometimes a little edgy on my lines, and I thought if he can remember them, at that age, get your act together Jeremy. [With languages] I’m hopeless. It’s all I can do to learn my lines. I’ve been in Hungary for 15 months filming “The Borgias” over three years and I know about four words of Hungarian. It’s actually rude.

 Giulia Ghica Dobre: How would you position yourself  in the year 2013? Have you evolved since we last spoke, 6 years ago?

Jeremy Irons: ...I think that is probably my age, rather than the date, which makes me feel in an evolution...I think I have learnt with the age to be more laid back than I was six, ten, twenty years ago.

 

But I am still looking for risk, I am looking for things that interest me. Because I get bored very easily, I like new things . I like to be challenged. I like to feel the risk.

Giulia Ghica Dobre: What if you lose? Can you take it?

Jeremy Irons: Oh, yes. If I lose, that's all for the best. If I win, even more so. I just risk. I think that one of the great joys of risking is that you could lose, or you could win. I find more joy in doing that than in doing things I know I can do, which are safe, which I might get bored with.

Giulia Ghica Dobre: So what would be the essential tool for your job?

Jeremy Irons: Imagination. And a fit instrument, which in my case is the body. For a musician it may be a piano. But I have to use all the things which so far computers aren't able to do...Which is to imagine, which is to communicate on deep levels with audiences.

Giulia Ghica Dobre: Your characters are always so unusual...How have they shaped your actual persona?

Jeremy Irons: I think when you play a character which is different from you, and many of the characters I've played are very different from me, cause I'm quite a normal person, is very much like you're going on a holiday, in a different place, and I'm then a different person.You explore a side of yourself you never use in your life.  When you come back to your normal life, you see your life differently. When you come home from your holiday, you've changed a bit. And I suppose I probably changed a little bit because of my work. May be I get to know myself better...

 

 Giulia Ghica Dobre: Have you chosen your parts according to a certain pattern or image you needed to attain?

Jeremy Irons: No, I just try to do things that I haven't done before...As I've mentioned earlier I am easily bored. So I like to play characters that aren't like the ones I played before, so a certain evolution occurs because of that. I like to play characters who are very different to me because I like to get excited from exploring a person who's new to me.

 Alongside that i have to remember that an audience has an expectation, so I try to upset that expectation by giving something which they haven't expected, so they are surprised...Delighted...I've always been attracted to characters who drew at the very extreme, who live on the edge of normal experience. But alongside that I ma mixing films which will allow me to play to a wider audience. I like change. I like variety...

Giulia Ghica Dobre: Your characters are usually living on the edge and are also driven by a sexuality on the edge...Do you think sexuality, love are a central compound of your work, of the world going on?

Jeremy Irons: I think love is... Certainly...I think many people are driven by their sexuality. I don't know if my characters are raw-models...

 

Giulia Ghica Dobre: The choices they make are coming from the choices they had with their sexuality...So their life unfolds according to these choices...

Jeremy Irons: I think our sexuality is a very big part of ourselves. I suppose it's inevitable, that is a part of what makes up a character...I think our desire to love and to be loved is one of our biggest desires. We are taught to rechanel that in our ambitions towards success...But I think it has nothing to do with me...

 

Giulia Ghica Dobre: Is this what pushes life ahead?

Jeremy Irons: No. I think the dawn of a new day is what pushes life ahead...You know, that happens, whatever you do. A new day dawn means that you need to get going on with something else.

... Describing his marriage as ‘dysfunctional’, Irons reveals:

Jeremy Irons: Sinead and I have had difficult times. Every marriage does because people are impossible. I’m impossible, my wife’s impossible, life’s impossible. No marriage is what it seems. I will say that it is very difficult to be everything to one person.

 

Giulia Ghica Dobre: Are you building yourself a story in your own reality that matches the character's story, in order for you to get in that character better?Is there anything there like a magician trick?

Jeremy Irons: No... There is not trick, this is what children do all the time, they have a great facility of doing it. If you concentrate on the perceptions of a child, it's perfect. Most people grow out of it, but the's no use in doing that. They leave childish things behind.

 

But to play-and to act, are the same thing, the same understanding. That's what children do. They imagine, they create brand new worlds. That's all...Well, that's not all, but that' s one of the main things to do. Then they have to establish a bridge tot their audience, so the audience could know what are their feelings, their story. They have to play with their bodies, their eyes, their voices, to communicate what they are feeling. It's like when you play a piece of music.

 

Playing means having all the channels of communication open. That's what I am, I am a telephone wire...

 

Giulia Ghica Dobre: How much do you let a Director interfere with your work?

Jeremy Irons: Completely, he can do what he likes, I am employed by him! He is my boss. I work with him. If he;s a good director, he'll cope with the ego, with everything. Hopefully, everyone puts the ideas all together: the crew, the actors, and finally he will cut it through all that. It's a collaboration, for the best. Good ideas are always coming in the process...Working with each other...

 

Giulia Ghica Dobre: What would you call a very good actor?

Jeremy Irons: Someone who's very free, who's very open. A lot of confidence is required. And then, not too much confidence, so he peaks up on his gifts...Somebody who is an interesting person, has an interesting life. Who is ready to try, ready to risk anything. And who listens. Listening is one of the most important...To listen to what is spoken to you.

 

Most people think that acting is about talking. I'd say it's about thinking...Acting with a good actor is very easy. It makes all the difference....

...Irons’ major influences are mostly culled from the ranks of Great British Classical Actors.
Jeremy Irons: ...Laurence Olivier for his bravery, Ralph Richardson -- there was really Olivier, Gielgud and Richardson. Ralph never got quite as famous, but he kept until his dying day a childlike quality. Peter O’Toole! I love the wildness and the magic and the Celtic-ness of Peter. Long before I became an actor I remember seeing “Lawrence of Arabia” and thinking “Wow! I would love to be able to do what he can do.” Of course I’ve never got anywhere near it, but then I don’t have his blue eyes.

 

Giulia Ghica Dobre: What are the movies/the authors you prefer?

Jeremy Irons: I am very open. Everything that touches me. A film should give me the feeling of having travelled, it should dislocate me completely from the present, I should get out, for instance, from a cinema in New York and feel like totally being in Nepal...I like Mike Nichols, or the Italian directors...Or the French...

 Giulia Ghica Dobre: What was your relationship with Romania?

Jeremy Irons: Well, I have been there for a bit more than four months.

At the beginning, I thought I'll have nothing to do there.

 

 But then, via a Romanian close friend, a woman with a very special personality, I came to get out to town, and in the countryside. As I am very Irish in my heart, I am very attached to the ground and its values, and what really touched me it was to see so many similarities with Ireland and its people...I saw peasants laboring their land, and the strength and the beauty they have, I've seen amazing colors of the land and of the sky, above the Sea and above the fields...

 

Through that special friend I came to know other Romanians, very interesting and different of each other, but mainly warm and very cultivated people.

 I could say I am pretty much inlove with your country, and I need to explore it more.

I might be going back with my bike, sometimes, in a near future, and travel freely from North to South...

 

By Giulia Ghica Dobre

INTIMACY- what kind of a furry animal is that?

Intimacy

- an european film

 

Criticized for its "pornographic eroticism", "Intimacy" by Patrice Chereau ( a film that won the Golden Bear in Berlin 2000) unveils the ugggggly of our every day life...

 

It is a realistic, hard and explicit film about our irresistible wish of always having more...

Claire and Jay are lovers, but they do not know each other intimately.

Their encounters are exclusively sexual and filmed so explicitly that they cannot become immoral. Or morbid. The failed actress and the bartender meet every Wednesday afternoon on the worn out carpet of a hideous apartment somewhere in the East End.

 Under the apparent perversion of their gestures there is the basic need of the two to survive.

They enter each other's body with the wish of entering their souls, even in this case when the bynom sex+love does not lead to Intimacy+LOVE...

 

What is love, admitting it exists?

Is there enough to have sexual intimacy, in order to  lure ourselves of having reached the real thing?

 One of these Wednesdays Claire doesn't show up.

It will be the trigger for Jay to depart in an exhausting chase for the woman's identity. A desperate attempt to win more space in her life.

 

The image is shaken, many times unclear, as a reflexion of the chaos the bartender lives in.

It alternates the camera on the shoulder and its claustrophobic consequences, with more conventional frames, which returns a sort of documentary and a tragic dimension to the movie.

As it recreates Jay's interior disturbance, the camera is also an echo to the brownien hazards of the outside world.

 Jay's living space seems more of a squat, impossible to manage.

There dominate terrible dirt and disorder, with nothing really personal: old clothes thrown among desuete cd-s, fallow interiors, a minimum of comfort, flooded toilets.

A typical house for an inconstant budget...

In contrast we see his bourgeoise family house, a typical London home: clean neighborhood, kitchen curtains and fluffy carpets, faience warm bathroom..

 The irony of the title is a reflection on the human condition of always wanting to belong to something or someone, despite the cruel reality of our existential isolation.

It thus forces us to meditate on a double interpretation of the concept of "intimacy".

 

Far from the edulcorated image of love in the Hollywood movies, "Intimacy" shines in its natural light, without being distorted by visual effects, choreographed scenes and perfect bodies.

Its graphic realism is an aggression for a public expecting the classical "romantic film".

 

"Intimacy" is human and attentive... a film about vulnerability, brittleness and susceptibility...

 

Giulia  Ghica Dobre