In The Mood For Love. (PG.)
Directed by Wong Kar Wai
Starring Tony Leung Chi-Wai, Maggie Cheung, Rebecca Pan, Sui Ping Lam and Kelly Lai Chen. 99 mins.
And now the beloved masterpiece, arguably the most critically acclaimed film of this century. Set in 1962 Hong Kong within its ex-pat Shanghainese community, it's the story of Mr Chow (Leung) and Mrs Chan (Cheung), who meet when they rent rooms next to each other. It's the Asian Brief Encounter, but with overwhelming Proustian overtones. This delicate creation has a battering ram melancholy. It's emotionally devastating but in a very attentive and caring way.
Mr Chow and Mrs Chan move in on the same day to rooms in adjoining apartments and gradually find themselves compelled together by the discovery that Mr Chan and Mrs Chow are having an affair. At first, their time together is an attempt to understand their partners' infidelity; a role-playing activity. Then an attraction grows that they, her in particular, can't quite bring themselves to act on.
The film was made over a period of fifteen months, WKW extemporising on a vague idea from a Japanese novel about a couple that pass each other on a staircase and eventually end up killing themselves. (Of course Japanese. From the synopsis, could it have been from anything else?) Over that time, as well as filming bits that would end up in 2046, WKW seems to have explored just about every possible option for the two characters, before narrowing it down to what is left here.
And narrow is the optimal word. This is one of the most cramped films imaginable. Early on, when both couples move in on the same day with workmen lugging oversized furniture up tiny little staircases, the frame is so cluttered it's almost impossible to get a clear look at them. (Lost in the fifteen months of improvisation and making it up as we go along, is any explanation of why two childless couples, each consisting of two people working in decent seeming jobs at least one of which requires a lot of foreign travel, could only afford a single room in the apartments of noisy middle-aged women who often play Mahjong all night.)
This is a Hong Kong without sky. Apart from the constant rain, you might imagine it as being a subterranean post-apocalyptic community. The film is so enclosed, so tightly encased that it is almost suffocating. It desperately needs the fresh air and blue skies provided by the coda in Cambodia. This sequence, set in Angkor Wat, is so affecting because it throws a spiritual dimension around the hill of beans of their relationship. But it also offers them and us a sense of release. So tight, so rigorous is the control of the image that for the audience it is a moment of decompression, before being returned to reality. A more sudden ending might have left us with the bends.
It's very Wong Kar Wai that the most important element of the film is the clothing but the incredible Cheongsam dresses that Maggie Cheung wears throughout, long of neck and short of sleeve, are remarkable creations. They are merciless tight and figure-hugging but they are sensual in the chastest way possible. They are the film's metronome and the sway and grace which they impose on Cheung's movements is the rhythm that the film is set to.
The dresses are of course utterly preposterous. As one of the other characters observes, “She dresses up like that to go out for noodles!" Every element of the movie is tied to elegance and the pace must always be that of a glide.
It's a remarkable piece of filmmaking but a great deal of that is down to the leads who give two of cinema's most monumental performances. Watching this boxset is to realise that Tony Leung Chi-Wai is one of the world's great screen actors. He can do a bit of kung fu and hold a tune but most of all he can win any audience over. You will have no defence against his looks of wide-eyed betrayal here.
It's been amazing to track Maggie Cheung Man yuk's progress across these films. The spoon faced child of As Tears Go By has become this remarkable, unattainable screen icon. I can't think of anything in cinema that resembles what she does here. The closest perhaps is the robotic alien female simulation played by Lisa Marie in Mars Attacks, whose overstated movements were an exaggeration of feminity. She was a joke but Cheung is an ideal: she floats above it all like this otherworldly beauty, a creature for whom every step is along a catwalk, yet she has this childlike vulnerability.
Might I gently suggest that perhaps Mrs Chan is something of a prig? It's her that always seems to be putting the brakes on the relationship, the one that is insistent that they don't want to be like "them", their other halves who seem to actively enjoy sex. In a deleted scene included here they are in a bedroom, tentatively beginning to undress and Cheung's face offers up an extraordinary array of expressions, all of them delivering her hurt and furious confusion.
Maybe this is the masterpiece, the one people relate to because this is about real people, not moody gangsters or Femme Fatales or other cinematic archetypes. No heterosexual couple ever really get it on in a WKW film but here the forces keeping them apart are real and societal, rather than gimmicky narrative conceits.
Review of 2046
Directed by Wong Kar Wai
Starring Tony Leung Chi-Wai, Maggie Cheung, Rebecca Pan, Sui Ping Lam and Kelly Lai Chen. 99 mins.
And now the beloved masterpiece, arguably the most critically acclaimed film of this century. Set in 1962 Hong Kong within its ex-pat Shanghainese community, it's the story of Mr Chow (Leung) and Mrs Chan (Cheung), who meet when they rent rooms next to each other. It's the Asian Brief Encounter, but with overwhelming Proustian overtones. This delicate creation has a battering ram melancholy. It's emotionally devastating but in a very attentive and caring way.
Mr Chow and Mrs Chan move in on the same day to rooms in adjoining apartments and gradually find themselves compelled together by the discovery that Mr Chan and Mrs Chow are having an affair. At first, their time together is an attempt to understand their partners' infidelity; a role-playing activity. Then an attraction grows that they, her in particular, can't quite bring themselves to act on.
The film was made over a period of fifteen months, WKW extemporising on a vague idea from a Japanese novel about a couple that pass each other on a staircase and eventually end up killing themselves. (Of course Japanese. From the synopsis, could it have been from anything else?) Over that time, as well as filming bits that would end up in 2046, WKW seems to have explored just about every possible option for the two characters, before narrowing it down to what is left here.
And narrow is the optimal word. This is one of the most cramped films imaginable. Early on, when both couples move in on the same day with workmen lugging oversized furniture up tiny little staircases, the frame is so cluttered it's almost impossible to get a clear look at them. (Lost in the fifteen months of improvisation and making it up as we go along, is any explanation of why two childless couples, each consisting of two people working in decent seeming jobs at least one of which requires a lot of foreign travel, could only afford a single room in the apartments of noisy middle-aged women who often play Mahjong all night.)
This is a Hong Kong without sky. Apart from the constant rain, you might imagine it as being a subterranean post-apocalyptic community. The film is so enclosed, so tightly encased that it is almost suffocating. It desperately needs the fresh air and blue skies provided by the coda in Cambodia. This sequence, set in Angkor Wat, is so affecting because it throws a spiritual dimension around the hill of beans of their relationship. But it also offers them and us a sense of release. So tight, so rigorous is the control of the image that for the audience it is a moment of decompression, before being returned to reality. A more sudden ending might have left us with the bends.
It's very Wong Kar Wai that the most important element of the film is the clothing but the incredible Cheongsam dresses that Maggie Cheung wears throughout, long of neck and short of sleeve, are remarkable creations. They are merciless tight and figure-hugging but they are sensual in the chastest way possible. They are the film's metronome and the sway and grace which they impose on Cheung's movements is the rhythm that the film is set to.
The dresses are of course utterly preposterous. As one of the other characters observes, “She dresses up like that to go out for noodles!" Every element of the movie is tied to elegance and the pace must always be that of a glide.
It's a remarkable piece of filmmaking but a great deal of that is down to the leads who give two of cinema's most monumental performances. Watching this boxset is to realise that Tony Leung Chi-Wai is one of the world's great screen actors. He can do a bit of kung fu and hold a tune but most of all he can win any audience over. You will have no defence against his looks of wide-eyed betrayal here.
It's been amazing to track Maggie Cheung Man yuk's progress across these films. The spoon faced child of As Tears Go By has become this remarkable, unattainable screen icon. I can't think of anything in cinema that resembles what she does here. The closest perhaps is the robotic alien female simulation played by Lisa Marie in Mars Attacks, whose overstated movements were an exaggeration of feminity. She was a joke but Cheung is an ideal: she floats above it all like this otherworldly beauty, a creature for whom every step is along a catwalk, yet she has this childlike vulnerability.
Might I gently suggest that perhaps Mrs Chan is something of a prig? It's her that always seems to be putting the brakes on the relationship, the one that is insistent that they don't want to be like "them", their other halves who seem to actively enjoy sex. In a deleted scene included here they are in a bedroom, tentatively beginning to undress and Cheung's face offers up an extraordinary array of expressions, all of them delivering her hurt and furious confusion.
Maybe this is the masterpiece, the one people relate to because this is about real people, not moody gangsters or Femme Fatales or other cinematic archetypes. No heterosexual couple ever really get it on in a WKW film but here the forces keeping them apart are real and societal, rather than gimmicky narrative conceits.
Review of 2046
