The ‘restless moment’ and mood of uncertainty that defines both the protagonists and the era is significant within In the Mood for Love. Indeed, Wong’s films may not be directly or overtly political, however there is often an "indirect relation to the political" via Wong’s conveying of "a particularly intense experience of the period as an experience of the negative; an experience of some elusive and ambivalent cultural space that lies always just beyond our grasp".
A. Abbas, "The Erotics of Disappointment" Wong Kar-wai. Ed. J. Lalanne, D. Martinez, A. Abbas & J. Ngai. Paris: Dis Voir, 1997, p. 41.
This is great! I can write something about a movie and not have to cross all my t-s and dot my i-s.
A while back I watched Wong Kar-Wai’s In the Mood for Love, a quiet little movie set in 1962 Hong Kong, that uses a slew of imagery from the past, particularly music and dress to evoke that time and place.
Wong himself is Shanghainese, but his family moved to Hong Kong when he was five years old. Some critics have argued that he couldn’t know what Hong Kong was like back then. So, in a perhaps futile (hence the quote above) attempt to recover what he never had, Wong obsessively uses the imagery of that by-gone era, imagery he’s mined from movies, magazines, music and fashion.
The movie centers on two thirty-something types, Chow Mo-wan (Tony Leung) and Su Li-zhen (Maggie Cheung), who, after they move into adjacent apartments, begin to realize that their respective spouses are having an affair with each other. The movie very poetically details the course of Mo-wan and Li-zhen’s relationship, which, though they are attracted to each other, remains platonic, because, as Li-zhen says, “We’re better than them.” Cold comfort indeed. But there’s this sense that they’re both missing out on an opportunity, that something is slipping by just beyond their grasp. And the erotic charge in the movie centers precisely on that, on the almost-but-never-quite realized.
So, Wong’s use of the material from that era as a way to evoke the era that would have been just beyond his grasp is thematized in the relationship between Li-zhen and Mo-wan. In the same way that he cannot quite recover early 60s Hong Kong they can’t quite consummate their relationship.
True, as far as it goes. But there’s more to the movie than that. First, no one can really recover the past at all. It’s dead and gone for all of us, and what we retain of it are only the artifacts that preserve in one way or another the faint scent of yesterday that might accidentally jolt us into reexperiencing what that past was like. But there’s a more powerful sense in which what Wong is doing is actually making 1962 Hong Kong for us. In fact, no matter how many madelines (or the Chinese equivalent) I might sniff, I’m never ever going to remember my experience in Hong Kong, because I had none. But the power in Wong’s movie is to make that Hong Kong come alive. Now, Hong Kong in that era exists for me, in powerfully evocative fashion, but the poignancy of what I never had is made palpable by the actors portraying that frustrated passion of the missed opportunity.
In fact that is what Li-zhen and Mo-wan do themselves. The movies become a way for them to come to terms with their spouses’ infidelities, or at least to understand that infidelity. At least twice we see the couple enact what their spouses do.
In the first example, they play out the first encounter between their cheating spouses, and Mo-wan says something about how beautiful Li-zhen’s eyes are, as being an example of what her husband must have said to his wife. But Li-zhen dismisses this: “my husband wouldn’t talk like that”. They then move on to another scenario, in which Li-zhen moves the back of her hand towards Mo-wan’s belt (pretty sexy!) but then she breaks it off saying that she can’t imagine how the spouses could do this.
This scene could have been shot realistically, but Wong ends the first half of the reenactment with an abrupt cut, as though we were actually watching outtakes of the film, and seeing how Wang arrived at the particular telling he did. So, in that moment, we see the couple doing what a movie maker him- or herself would do, try out the possibilities and see what would make sense, or at least to try to make sense out of what they see.
So when Wong uses all the pop culture of the era as a way to evoke it he seems to be doing only what he would do in any other movie. He takes the reality that is available to him, the artifacts of the culture, the things that happened and he runs them by us
The couple’s reenactment of that first move is just a miniature version of what Wong is doing in the movie itself. He shows us the process he used to arrive at his vision of that by-gone Hong Kong: the clichés or pop culture (which he obviously loves) are selected and rejected for their fidelity to reality or, failing that, for their evocation of the past. My husband wouldn’t talk like that? Well try out another endearment. And Wong must shuttle back and forth between trying to find that particular artifact that works and what he actually remembers.
