In the Mood for Love

In the sleepy, proper Hong Kong of 1962, Mrs. Chan (Maggie Cheung) and Mr. Chow (Tony Leung, Best Actor prize-winner in Cannes 2000) are neighbouring tenants who discover that their respective spouses are having an affair. Mr. Chow, a journalist and would-be novelist, begins finding excuses to spend time alone with Mrs. Chan; he suggests that they rehearse the show-downs they should have with their spouses, and invites her to collaborate on a martial-arts serial. Does he intend to make her love him and then jilt her? Is this all some oblique attempt to punish the adulterers? Whatever, it ends up with Mr. Chow finding himself in love… Years later, visiting Angkor Wat, he still has an obsession he cannot shake. The closing scenes are set (in Singapore and Cambodia as well as Hong Kong) in 1966, the year Hong Kong saw its first serious anti-colonial riots. The implications are suggestive. Does this relationship, which may or may not have been consummated, somehow rhyme with a turning point in the region’s development?No less than two main and four ancillary cinematographers are credited on the print, but the film’s look, style and rhythms are absolutely consistent. From the degree of creative control as much as from the seductive tone of yearning, you can tell that this is one of Wong Kar-Wai’s most heartfelt movies. A paean to the agony and ecstasy of buttoned-up emotions, a valse triste for incurable romantics. (Tony Rayns)