Wong Kar-Wai is one of those directors that has rarely made any missteps in his career. Starting from 1988’s As Tears Go By to 2013’s The Grandmaster, the Hong Kong film director has worked on 10 impressive feature films. Because of poor distribution, or just in a series of unfortunate events, I have only managed to watch In the Mood for Love in a proper cinema in 2021.
The open-air venue in front of the Schloss Charlottenburg (one of Berlin’s Baroque palaces) welcomed a large number of guests, eager to go back to the movies after a long lockdown, and thrilled to enjoy Kar-Wai’s sophisticated aesthetic.
Watching In the Mood for Love a third time (after having watched Kar-Wai’s complete filmography), I was struck by Kar-Wai's use of urban spaces to affect the character’s journeys. The movie is inspired by Hong Kong writer Liu Yichang’s novella, Intersection, set in 1962 Hong Kong.
Visual Representation of a Growing Relationship
The film centers on a journalist named Chow Mo-wan and Su Li-Zhen; they live under the same roof, renting rooms in the same apartment complex. Their relationship grows when they realize that their spouses are having an affair. There is a strong sense of nostalgia that permeates every aspect of the film—starting from the aesthetic, colors, dialogue, and selected locations.
As in many of Kar-Wai’s movies, the domestic and urban spaces are a set of hotel rooms, hallways, stairs, corners, bedrooms. The two protagonists are always hiding, running, and searching for privacy from a group of neighbors who constantly enter their private spaces. In the Mood for Love works through a synchronous combination of images of spaces and soundtracks. In its visual storytelling, each shot has a subtext. The portrait of desire and impossible love is presented through recurring changes of location. It creates a dissonance that reflects characters that appear and disappear, and as the protagonists who are always in perpetual motion.
As Su and Chow pretend to be each other’s partners and reenact how their spouses could have met and started their affair, they start to surrender to their inner yearnings. Their intimate relationship is based on their attempt to push each other’s boundaries. In the movie's second act, while the two protagonists try to cope with their feelings, the cycle of visual repetition becomes even more consistent. Drawing on what the theorist Ackbar Abbas calls a “metonymic substitution,” which is a device of “doubling where characters are interchangeable” in a narrative cycle, Kar-Wai creates symmetrical layouts and always switches from Chow’s to Su’s apartment—from the urban streets of Hong Kong to the doorways and corridors of the domestic spaces.
How Location Affects Tone
Wong Kar-Wai's film is a love story affected by urban and domestic settings, and the epilogue disrupts the cycle by drastically changing location. The conclusion is set in a temple which is a refuge for Chow and an essential element for the protagonist’s catharsis. Following the Buddhist tradition, Chow decides to bury a secret within the temple's walls and cover it with grains of earth.
With this switch to a sacred and isolated environment, Kar-Wai exposes the utter loneliness of Chow and his way of coping with the loss he is experiencing. Once again, the spatial dimension affects the characters and somehow changes some subtle aspects of the story. The temple is the last space that mirrors the characters’ subtle emotions. As Chow explains, “In the old days, if someone had a secret they didn't want to share, you know what they did? They went up a mountain, found a tree, carved a hole in it, and whispered the secret into the hole. Then they covered it with mud. And left the secret there forever.”
In the Mood for Love is a story of an identity crisis based on conflicting loyalties and unbearable social constraints. Wong Kar-Wai depicts Hong Kong of the 1960s by using only fragments of famous streets, angles of restaurants, or hotel rooms. As the director explained in an interview with The New York Times, his primary concern was to create a visual memory of the transitory spaces of Hong Kong: "I always wanted to put someplace in my films, a corridor, a restaurant or a street, because I knew it would be gone soon. Things change so fast here.”
Hong Kong is a city in perpetual motion, like Chow and Su. They are forced to be in a state of transition, and they can only find comfort in their coded love language and in burying their secrets in spaces that will keep them safe from the violent forces of an unfathomable future. In Wong Kar-Wai's In the Mood for Love, memories of Hong Kong and of their love will stand the test of time.