In the Mood for Love

Another foray into the world of devastating romantic dramas. In the Mood for Love follows a young man and woman (both married but not to one another) in 1960s Hong Kong after they realize their spouses are having affairs. As neighbors finding themselves in similar situations, Su Li-Zhen and Chow Mo-Wan begin to spend time with one another, bonding over their frustrated confusion and eventually, of course, falling in love.

The film finds profound depth by intentionally sidelining much of the context that kicks off the main events of the film. The deliberate choice is made to never allow the respective spouses of our main characters to appear on the screen. They are only made reference to in conversation and entirely omitted from phone calls with our protagonists—the details of these calls needing to be gleaned from one side of the discussion. The most important people in the protagonists’ lives are deemed unimportant by the film, which much prefers to focus on the emotional journey of Su Li-Zhen and Chow Mo-Wan. In the Mood for Love remains hyper-focused on the reactions to infidelity and the themes of finding love in tragedy, abandoning the “meatier” plot events of watching the affairs occur. In this way, it is able to fit such profound themes into such a short runtime.

Another artistic choice that particularly caught my attention were the interspersed shots of slow motion. When the rhythmic strings of the film’s score start kicking in, you know exactly what is coming: a decelerated clip of Li-Zhen and Mo-Wan gazing at one another. While perhaps repetitious to some, I enjoyed the way each of these quick hiatuses reflected the stage of the two’s relationship at that point in the film—brief glances at the beginning, playful laughter later on, intense longing in the middle, and sincere sadness towards the end. And although it awkwardly interrupted the pacing at times, I respected how clear each of these clips were in conveying our young couple’s feelings.