Wong Kar-wai made In the Mood for Love as a film about what does not happen. Two neighbors — a man and a woman, both with absent spouses who are having an affair with each other — discover the betrayal and spend the rest of the film in each other’s company, carefully, without crossing the line their spouses have already crossed. The film is about that restraint: what it costs, what it means, what it leaves behind.
Maggie Cheung and Tony Leung play the two leads with a quality that can only be described as exquisite withholding. Every scene between them is charged because the charge is never released. They share stairwells and noodle shops and borrowed time in rented rooms, and the camera — Christopher Doyle and Mark Lee Ping-bing shooting on lush, saturated film — circles them slowly, as if afraid to look directly. The cinematography is the film’s argument: some things can only be glimpsed sideways.
The score, built around Shigeru Umebayashi’s recurring waltz and Nat King Cole songs performed in Spanish, does something unusual: it makes you feel the passage of time as a kind of grief. You understand, watching this film, that the moment passing is also the moment being lost, and that the characters know this too, and that knowing it does not help.
Watch it in a room with good light and no distractions. It requires your full attention and rewards it completely. Afterward you will want to sit with it for a while before talking about anything at all.
VERDICT — One of the most beautiful films ever made. A masterwork of mood, restraint, and longing that has no equal.
POUR — A glass of something red and slightly smoky. Something that asks to be held.
MOOD — Still. Attentive. Willing to feel something without needing it resolved.
Plan this evening with a Date Night guide: The Wine Bar at Six.
Some films belong on the shelf. Find it on Blu-ray.
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