In Wong Kar Wai's Mood

Last night, I had 2 hours to kill before CSI: Miami was on, so I went through the sizeable stack of pirated DVDs I had brought home from my half-year in China and came across Wong Kar Wai’s In The Mood for Love. I popped it into the player, tore open a bag of Classic Lays, and settled back on our living room couch expecting a steamy, if not torrid, story of forbidden romance and unbridled passion.

My expectations were a little off.

Yes, it is a love story. And yes, it has forbidden romance, and to some degree it is steamy. But the passion between the two lead characters is intense not because they act on it, but because they repress it so much. Maggie Cheung and Tony Leung play a married couple... who are not married to each other, but their respective spouses are carrying on an affair with each other, leaving our protagonists to find that misery really does love company (it helps that Cheung and Leung look pretty damn good being miserable). The two develop a friendship and eventually an attraction that simmers, seethes, and comes dangerously, exquisitely close to spilling over... but never does. Their feelings are kept contained by the fear of the social stigma that comes with adultery, and perhaps the unwillingness to duplicate the betrayal their spouses have inflicted on them, the very betrayal that threw them together in the first place.

This is the first Wong Kar Wai movie I've seen, and now I understand all the hype over this Hong Kong director. His style is natural and surreal at the same time, from capturing the actors' tiniest movements and gesticulations as unforgivingly as a home movie camera would, to transforming a cloud of ordinary cigarette smoke into the most mesmerizing thing you've seen. If I were to use only one word to describe the movie, it would have to be "languid". Indeed, I don’t think I knew the true meaning of languid until seeing In the Mood for Love. You know how some adjectives don’t come alive until you’ve seen them for real? Well languid was just oozing from our TV screen. There is not much meaningful dialogue in the film, and many scenes are shot in slow motion, with the same almost hypnotic background music playing over and over (my brother passed through our living room a couple of times as I was watching, and around the 5th time he finally stopped to say, "yan lang ba ang music sa buong movie?!"). The plot is actually quite simple and straightforward, and if you take out all the slow-mo sequences and other gratuitous shots, the movie could have been as short as 15 minutes. But Wong takes his time, deliberately, delicately, dreamily, and by the end of the movie you feel as if you have been pining along with the two barely-lovers for what seems like eons.

Wong Kar Wai's In the Mood for Love leaves you feeling utterly frustrated, excruciatingly deprived, and agonizingly depressed, and in that way-- that teasing, tantalizing, tormenting way-- it really does put you in the mood for love.