Hong Kong 1962. Journalist Chow (Tony Leung Chiu-Wai) and secretary Li-Zhen (Maggie Cheung Man-Yuk) happen to move in next door to each other on the same day in a Shanghainese-style tenement block. Both are married, but with their spouses often away for work, they keep running into each other as they purchase dinner from a nearby noodle stall, and a polite friendship develops. Drawn even closer by the realisation that their absent partners are conducting an illicit affair together, Chow and Li-Zhen share their indignation, loneliness and incomprehension – and so begins a slow, flirtatious dance, filled with missed opportunities, restrained passions and unspoken secrets.
'In the Mood for Love' is a work of rare and poetic beauty, in which every moment is like an exquisite painting. The languid poise of the leads, the immaculate period detailing of their costumes and hair, the sumptuous textures of William Chan Suk-Ping's production design, the dreamy grace of Christopher Doyle and Mark Li Ping-Bin's cinematography – all choreographed to a soundtrack ranging from the Latin beats of Nat King Cole, through a magisterial waltz by Shigeru Umebayashi, to the plangent calm of Michael Galasso's closing piece – combine to make 'In the Mood for Love' quite simply one of the most stylish and sensual films of all time. Of course, in Hong Kong as much as in Hollywood, an excess of style can often point to a lack of content, but in Wong Kar-Wai's film, on the contrary, all the layered fabrics and plush décor are barely enough to conceal the emotions welling up just beneath the surface – even if their only release is in quiet whispers or extravagant billows of cigarette smoke. In other words, far from being an exercise in mannered emptiness, the film is a model of carefully managed restraint, where clothing, furniture, and even shadows, tell as much of the story as the characters themselves. This is a film not of grandiose actions and overblown speeches, but rather of nuanced gestures and moody silences, where less really is more.
Like Wong Kar-Wai's previous 'Days of Being Wild' (1991) and his forthcoming '2046' (2004), 'In the Mood for Love' evokes a 1960s Hong Kong that is now almost unrecognisable, and focusses on the closed community of Shanghainese exiles in which Kar-Wai spent his own childhood, but which had all but disappeared within a generation. By making this fleeting period and shifting landscape the backdrop to a series of possibilities unfulfilled and events that leave no trace beyond a buried secret and a fading memory, Kar-Wai has fashioned not just a nostalgic film, but a film about nostalgia itself. For beneath the idealised allure of 'In the Mood for Love' there shimmers a sense of aching loss, as a moment shared between two people passes and is forever gone, and even the viewers are not sure exactly what , if anything, has happened. As such it is a monument to time, memory and yearning as mysterious and ageless as the ancient Angkor Wat temples with which it ends.
A masterpiece of romantic melancholy that gets better and better each time you see it.