In the Mood for Love

It's visually stunning. There is no denying Wong Kar Wai's masterful eye for color and pattern with creation of one painting-like mise en scene after another. The style reminded me of 18th century engraver Hogarth, actually, whose speciality was to create stories through his paintings and imagine the canvas to be a stage.

Setting as well as the choice to never reveal the spouses' faces to the audience highlight the film's self-enclosure and single-minded focus on the two main characters' stirring chemistry. In the first half of the film, Mr. Chow and Mrs. Chan squeeze past each other in the apartment's tiny halls, smiling, making neighborly small talk, never quite finding the time for proper conversation until their spouses' infidelity throws them together. In one early scene where the two move into their rooms on the same day and various personal items get mixed up, we receive telling hints of two lives that will be inevitably intertwined, almost forcibly so due to physical proximity.

Notably, Mrs. Chan is a distancer. She repeatedly, politely refuses her host's invitations to share meals, only for solitary ventures to buy noodles - we see her return to the apartment, lunchbox in hand, in slow motion and frozen loneliness, again and again. Why? She turns down Chow, who is visibly enamored with her. Why?

Did she love Chow? She breaks down when they "rehearse" their separation. Yet we have to return to the title and how she is in the mood for love - but only the highest, most idealized kind. She turns down Chow due to the unflattering circumstances leading up to his affections, won't cook for herself when her husband is away in defiance of the family dinner table she cannot have. Yet it is impossible to identify her true feelings. She is beautifully impermeable. This is what makes the film so frustrating although I found its relentlessly realistic portrayal of misdirected love incredibly moving.

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A note on the title

It appears that I was wrong (sorry Neil) about Hua Yang Nian Hua (this is the Mandarin hanyu pinyin, or spelling) not being the actual title of the film - it is. However, there is a short film on the DVD called Hua Yang De Nian Hua which is something entirely different, a short film also by Wong that consists of a montage of scenes from vintage Chinese films set to a song from the In the Mood for Love soundtrack.

A more direct translation of Hua Yang Nian Hua would be "Flowers like Years" (Hong Kong working English title), although the most accurate translation would be along the lines of "Variety of Years" (since the Chinese term for flower - hua - can have different meanings when paired with other terms; hua yang is literally "different kinds").

I think Wong acknowledged the difficulty of direct translation by choosing an English title with an entirely different meaning but one just as appropriate. Apparently, it was inspired by the British art-rock group Roxy Music's "I'm in the Mood for Love".