My Wong Kar Wai Experience

In The Mood For Love
Wong Kar Wai
Hong Kong
2001

 

During my sophomore year at the film school, I used to ask my fellow film students about their favorite films ever. Asking them to list at least 10 of their favorite movies, “Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind” was the most common entry among the lists I’ve gathered. Aside from that surprise for I thought that Jim Carrey-Kate Winslet movie is nothing really special than a little above average break-up film of science and romance fiction, Wong Kar Wai films were also present in most of the list. It is right to say that Wong Kar Wai was, at least at that time, our batch’s favorite director.  Out of shame for not seeing any of his films, I started to have a Wong Kar Wai expedition. And I wish I could say it in a nice way but I have really been generally dissatisfied with my Wong Kar Wai experience. My fellow film students claim that it is not hard to fall in love with the director’s steamy visuals and romantic insights and I could never disagree. Yes, Wong Kar Wai has an ostentatious sense of vision and in fact they are most of the time spectacular, and I commend the Chinese director for that. However, I have always been uncomfortable with films that are overly fluid which are exactly his films. At times, you would feel so lost in his movies. It’s as if it has no backbone that would be the major support to have its structure conceivable by the audience. I understand his sentiments about lovers losing sense of times and it might have worked for many people including my classmates though I would prefer to see such films still with solid structure and clearer direction. I find his “2046” the hardest film to watch and understand because it is too cerebral, and consciously obscures fantasy and reality. Together with “Chungking Express”, Wong Kar Wai stipulates the life of a human soul in love in randomly affecting spheres of repressed feelings, misunderstood infatuation, and tainted impulse. Including “In the Mood for Love”, I’ve seen more of his technical inclinations. The director always employs tight editing. This philosophy never worked for me in “2046”, it feels so suffocating and isolating. There has been so much the film wants to shout out loud, its saturated red-orange-gold lighting and mise-en-scene could not be contained by the medium shot to close up shots in the entirety of the movie. In “In the Mood for Love” however, I found more room to breath in its tight cinematography. The two films have similar reasons of the applying such camera theme, I guess what pushed the latter film to more understanding is the fact that it doesn’t bloodily shout anything inside. In fact, “In the Mood for Love” has a gentle treatment of a love affair that is usually treated ungently. Among Wong Kar Wai’s films, “Happy Together” is the most endearing and heartbreakingly compelling. One thing I really like about this Chinese director is his courageous interpretation of unfulfilled love and it has been maximized in “Happy Together”. An aspect about the film that worked for me is that this one feels more a part of the world, it feels more attracted toward other people in the planet, whether a stranger, a fellow race, or a familiar face. This gay film has intense amount of romance, charming enough to love and conservative enough to keep its equation to notional carnal requirements. Above all else, in terms of spatial cinematography this is the most generous. Wong Kar Wai employs long distance shots to extreme long shots giving the film more relevance to the diversity of life.

 Shadows on the wall mimic a jail railing connoting the idea that these two lovers are prisoners of their love.

Focusing on “In the Mood for Love”, its self-contained gorgeousness and his use of metaphor are the film’s most triumphant weapon in the director’s arsenal. Aside from his recurring and parallel love stories, this is the director’s first direct employment of the time that has passed. This film doesn’t provide an accurate point of when the feelings between these characters started. They realized it without expecting it, and without the anticipation, and without the appropriate circumstances in their lives at that point of time, their ending would foretell a fate more indistinct than how they started. An unfulfilled love is where Wong Kar Wai finds artistic and dramatic sanctuary, and he has mastered it overtime. Woody Allen’s “Vicky Cristina Barcelona” also gave an affirmation about this—that only an unfulfilled love can be romantic. An anti love story can never get wrong. The main reason about the quest for anti love story is because of its revolutionary spirit against the happy ended love stories proliferating commercial cinema. Most of the films which involve a man and a woman that you can classify as quality, art, or award-winning are anti-love stories. What is it about humans that inclines art more to the pain, sorrow, and agony than the joy, happiness, and satisfaction? Is art an apparatus of skepticism and cynicism? Well I guess, being happy, joyful, and satisfied is too easy to bear and doesn’t need much interpretation about it or at least doesn’t find the need to interpret it, and being sad and in pain is too unbearable that we need to deeply express it. Life as we all know is a combination of the good and the bad, the pretty and the ugly, the happy and the sad, and understanding the negative ones needs more effort and seeks different media to communicate, and one medium is film.

This shot is reminiscent of the director's 1997 gay film "Happy Together.

What has also been magnified in the film is the director’s bittersweet observance of the time passed. There is a scene where after several years the main characters go back to the place where they used to be tenants and learn that most of their friends are no longer living there and even the landlady is about to move in America. After that scene, a text reads—that era has passed, nothing that belonged to it exists any more. It’s not a childhood nostalgia, but a longing that occurred in the adulthood—an adult nostalgia that is maturely bitter and serious.

Visually the film is really fantastic, as what I mentioned above “gorgeous” is the best word to describe it. I also love the smoothness of the music employed it, especially with the Spanish accompaniment of “Perhaps”. The film is not bad at all, as any Wong Kar Wai films can be. This is just a matter of personal definition of what is beautiful, significant, and competitive as a whole unit and not by parts. The last part is really heartrending. The story about the old time when they use to whisper a secret at a tree and cover it with mud will be mentioned 4 years after in “2046”. At the ancient Angkor Wat in Cambodia Mr. Chow (Tony Leung) whispers in a ruined wall to tell his love for his neighbor (Maggie Cheung). With an ancient tradition, their love story ends.