In the Mood for Love

It’s 1962 in Hong Kong. Mr. Chow (Tony Leung) and Mrs. Chan (Maggie Cheung) have just moved into an apartment building as neighbors. They both lead a rather lonely life because their spouses are always away on business trips. Over repeated and prolonged absences of their spouses, they both come to realize that their spouses are actually carrying on a clandestine affair. They are both heartbroken as they realize the truth. And over time, out of their mutual loneliness and sorrow, there grows a tender relationship between them as they seek refuge in each other’s company. But they are so conscious and dignified – they don’t want to be like their spouses, they say, and they vow not to get carried away – that they refuse to acknowledge the love that they both start feeling for each other. Wong Kar-Wai’s In the Mood for Love is about the subdued melancholy of love that both these characters experience, the tumultuous feelings they want to bury within them, and the enormous restraint that they exercise to avoid ending like their partners.

In the Mood for Love is a vibrant, colorful, and dizzyingly romantic film. It’s about love – unrequited and unconsummated. So when, near the end of the film, four years later, Chow, in the ruins of old temples in Combodia, whispers his secret in a hole in the wall and buries it up with mud in the hope of getting rid of his secret (it’s an old belief), it becomes a scene of extreme poignancy. And, of course, what heightens the mood of melancholy of the film is the impeccable acting, the dreamlike cinematography and the haunting background score.

I found the whole film to be available on YouTube (that’s where I watched it but probably it’s not the best way to watch the film). Incidentally, the film will also come on Zee Studio on 24th of August, just in case you didn’t know already.