Make Mood, Not Love
With films of style and suggestiveness,
nobody creates sexual tension quite like Hong Kong director
Wong Kar-wai
By
RICHARD CORLISS
Whispers
in doorways. long, longing looks. Desire smothered by propriety.
A love that dare not show its face. Wong Kar-wai's enthralling,
enigmatic In the Mood for Love is an essay in appetite and
inhibition. Its theme is withholding-withholding love, commitment
and information to the characters and the viewer. The film
lives in the realm of emotional suppression and artistic suggestion.
It weaves an erotic web around two of Hong Kong's comeliest
stars, Maggie Cheung and Tony Leung Chiu-wai, then lets the
audience decide whether they have an affair. "People who watch
films think they need to be provided with details," Wong says.
"I don't want to give them."
The "story"
of In the Mood for Love (which releases in Australia this
week) is simple enough. In 1962 two couples, the Chans and
the Chows, move into adjacent boarding houses in Hong Kong.
Proximity forces Mrs. Chan (Maggie) and Mr. Chow (Tony) together,
and gradually they realize that their spouses are having an
affair. This abandoned pair are united at first by bereavement-for
their compromised marriages and their dented egos-and then
by something else. Could it be love? That's what In the Mood's
audience is in the mood for. But Wong isn't.
"I hate
love stories," he says. "They sell prettiness. I don't do
that. There's more to life than love." Yet love, sex and their
attendant ache are at the humid heart of his films; that's
one reason he is Hong Kong's most distinctive director, and
Asia's most imitated. He eroticizes his images with a dreamy
sensuality edited at a sprung-rhythm pace: slow-motion gazing
at a woman carrying a thermos of noodles, a man dragging on
a cigarette. And the subject of every Wong film, from the
early As Tears Go By and Days of Being Wild to Chungking Express
and Happy Together, is the combustion of yearning and isolation-the
need for closeness within the life sentence of solitude.
"I'm tired
of making Wong Kar-wai movies," the director half-seriously
once said. In the Mood has the bleak glamour and daring craftsmanship
of his other work, thanks to Chris Doyle, the cinematographer,
and William Chang, who designed both the production and the
costumes (including a ravishing cheongsam wardrobe for Cheung)
and edited the film. But for his first period piece since
the kung-fu Ashes of Time, Wong wanted a style that evoked
the colony and its movies in 1962: more classical, less ornate.
To capture the density of middle-class life in the Shanghainese
sector of Hong Kong, he keeps the camera close to the actors
as they edge past each other in narrow corridors and alleyways-so
close you can feel their heat and pain.
In its first
hour, the film draws the viewer into the characters' frustrated
lives. How do people behave when they learn they have been
betrayed? And later, when they are considering an affair of
their own? On the outside, nothing unusual. They play mah-jongg,
go to the corner for take-away food, sit alone in a room.
Visually and dramatically, the film doesn't raise its voice;
it never reveals the faces of the adulterers and often shows
only one of two people in a doorway chat. In 1962, Wong was
four years old (he came to Hong Kong from Shanghai the following
year). In the Mood could be seen as a child's perspective
on grown-up matters-of adults speaking their private language,
sotto voce.
But the
attentive viewer will see signs of furtive feelings. The strained
courtship of Maggie and Tony is a symphony of fumbling gestures.
Her hand brushes past his jacket; his hand rests, for a tense
moment, on hers. One night she stays in his room, because
the landlord has come home and they don't care to stoke a
hotpot of gossip. As incarnated so beautifully by two actors
who can suggest worlds without words, the pair have all the
wariness and guilt of adulterous lovers. But do they have
an affair?
The director
says they do; he shot love scenes that he later cut. But who
needs a big revelation? "It's easy to understand," he insists.
"Hong Kong audiences are saying, 'Finally, we understand a
Kar-wai movie.' I get a little upset about that. I think I've
let them down." Still, some viewers are confused by the way
the film veers into opaqueness toward the end. At its Cannes
Film Festival premiere, Cheung said she was shocked by how
much was left out in the editing. And Leung says, "When I
saw it for the first time, even I felt like an outsider. I
had lived that character for a year and a half and I couldn't
get into that character, live with them both, flow with them."
Wong acknowledges
that his actors were often exasperated during the grueling
15-month shoot. "It took four hours just to set up Maggie's
hairdo," he says. "So if we shot 12 hours, it meant 16 for
her. That's tough, she hated it, and she hated me for it."
But the plot doesn't matter as much as the mood in a Wong
Kar-wai film, which has to be an active collaboration between
its makers and the audience. And for the viewer who can get
beyond did-they-or-didn't-they, the film has all the mystery
of real life transformed into seductive art.
At the end
of Happy Together, the gay man played by Leung sought refuge
in a lighthouse at the southern tip of Patagonia. At the end
of In the Mood, Leung is in the majestic ruins of Angkor Wat,
speaking his secret (of guilt or loss or deceit) into a hole
in a temple wall, then sealing the crack so the words will
be safe from prying minds. He might be Wong, disclosing and
securing the secret of his film.
The last
shots are of Angkor Wat's ancient doorways, echoing 800 years
of con-fessions, prayers and betrayals. The story of these
two sad people is as small as a shrug, as soft as a whisper,
as lovely as a Maggie Cheung dress, as old as Adam and Eve,
as cold as the ashes at the end of an affair that kindled
all too briefly, or never was.
-Reported
by STEPHEN SHORT Hong Kong
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April 2, 2001 | No.
13
COVER
STORIES
Dread
Heads
Scared? You're not alone-millions of people suffer from debilitating fears.
But science is devising cures for every anxiety, from ablutophobia (fear
of bathing) to zoophobia (fear of animals).
THE
ARTS
CINEMA: In the Mood for Love delights and
mystifies
A gender-bending Thai film takes on the
world
BOOKS:
Calling from Carverland
TRAVELERS
ADVISORY
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