When I write the film analysis, I usually start by watching films with a notepad, writing all the things that are interesting. When I started watching Wong Kar-Wai's 'In the Mood for Love', the first thing I wrote was: 5 minutes in and every shot is a frame within a frame, meaning that every single shot features characters not only framed by the rectangle of the film itself but by smaller internal shapes as well. Now this is a visual technique that filmmakers have used for decades. My favorite example is the great last shot in John Ford's masterpiece 'The Searchers'. But seldom is it used so ubiquitously.
‘In the Mood for Love’ is a story of two couples who happen to rent rooms in the adjacent homes of older couples in 1960s Hong Kong. The film focuses on the husband of one couple Chow Mo-wan referred to as Mr. Chow (Tony Leung Chiu Wai) and the wife of the other Su Li-zhen Chan referred to as Mrs. Chan (Maggie Cheung Man-yuk) both gradually discover that their spouses are cheating on them with each other and how those two victims of infidelity come together to deal with the pain of that. The film manages to be unsentimental with its subject matter while couching it in sumptuous, painterly cinematography. The narrative skips and jumps forward through time at an erratic speed as one might recall the story in memory and the viewer is often left entirely confused on how much time has passed between scenes. This prompts a strong engagement with the film, and a need to pay attention but it also reflects how the film was made.
There was little more than one outline when Wong Kar-wai and his crew began filming a process that took a long 15 months in which the script and the individual scenes were written on the fly by the directors and the actors together which is surprising because watching the film you can't help but feel that you're in hands of the somebody with complete control.
Visually and emotionally ‘In the Mood For Love’ is fully consistent. The film is so self-contained that it only features a handful of locations each filmed from the same angle that you experience a kind of circular effect of returning again and again to the same things. The technique, far from feeling sluggish or repetitive, instead isolates against fixed backgrounds, the things that actually are changing in the film- the inner lives of the two leads. For the most part, these inner lives are explored wordlessly. The real action of this movie is in postures, glances, touches, and the restriction of language. Wong Kar-wai echoes the restriction of the actions that plague Mr. Chow and Mrs. Chan in 1960'S Hong Kong where they are under constant threat of gossip, a kind of surveillance from their landlords and the community at large. This is one reason why everything is doubly framed.
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By placing objects in the foreground the director enhances the feeling that the characters have, of being observed, not to mention our own feelings of being observers. Observed and observing, seen and being seen, what we desire from others, what others desire from us- These are major themes of ‘In the Mood For Love’.
I think the most extraordinary element of this film is what is introduced just after the two main characters admit to each other that their spouses are cheating. Instead of confronting the situation head-on, their primary goal becomes to understand exactly how it happened. So we get this incredible scene where they re-enact the seduction of their spouses in which each attempt to embody the spouse of the other while being coached by the other on what they think the spouse really would or wouldn't do. This makes for a really complex, but also kind of perverse interplay.
Though the film aggressively focuses on only Mr. Chow and Mrs. Chan to the point of never even showing the faces of their spouses, we're always aware that four people, not two are involved here. Although it's not four real people, it's two people and two phantoms. Each player is constantly coaching the other, they're able to construct a fantasy in which they control their own betrayal. It's a tragic and twisted state of affairs, and Wong Kar-Wai has said that if Tony Leung and Maggie Cheung weren't such beautiful actors the darkness at the centre of their characters and their fantasies would be obvious.
Of course, they can't keep it up forever, and in the scene where Mr. Chow finally admits his love for Mrs. Chan most of the fantasy comes crumbling down. As he says they are like their spouses, which means that the thing they've been refusing to see is their own lack that they've ceased to be an object of love for their loved ones rushes into consciousness, like a wave. And yet, they don't act on it. They can only let the brutal truth in so much.
In order to survive and in order to move forward Mr. Chow and Mrs. Chan doom themselves to missed connections. This is why at the end, the film jumps forward to see them just missing each other twice. Just missing each other, the mere possibility of a connection, not the connection itself is what sustains them now.
Everybody lives within a fantasy within frames. Sometimes the frames are made by us, sometimes they're made by others. Sometimes we need to believe that those made by us are made by others. But whatever the case, there's no way out of the frame. When fantasies rupture or crack or break down completely, that's trauma, like living temporarily in a storm.
Wong Kar-wai's 'In the Mood for Love' is a gorgeous, quiet, and melancholic exploration of what happens when the fantasy you create for yourself is a perverse one when it only serves to keep you from the pain that it was created to avoid. The reason the film is so heartbreaking is because this kind of perversity is really quite common to all of us.
