“The repressed does not cease to exist; it merely changes its form.”-Sigmund Freud
When you watch a movie like In the Mood for Love , it’s almost imperative you watch it with a notepad in your hand, because what might unfold in front of you is so hypnotic, you will inevitably forget. To watch an art film especially when you see the name Wong kar Wai, one must operate at the level of an art critic.
Five minutes into the movie and every shot is a frame within a frame which means that every single shot features characters not only framed by the rectangle of the film itself but by smaller internal shapes itself. This is a film technique you’ll find that filmmakers have used for decades now. One of my favourite examples for this would be in the famous Godfather where throughout the film, Francis Ford Coppola repeatedly places characters inside doorways, windows, and architectural openings, creating smaller frames inside the larger film frame, But seldom is it used so ubiquitously as I saw in Wong Kar Wai’s masterpiece.
In the mood for Love is a story of two married couples who happen to rent rooms in the adjacent homes of older couples in 1960’s Hong Kong. The film focuses on the husband of one couple Mr. Chow and the wife of the other, Mrs. Chan as they both gradually discover that their spouses are cheating on them with each other and then, how those two innocent victims of infidelity come together to deal with the pain of that. The film forces the audience to remain neutral and detached with the subject matters while carefully couching the events in seductive, painterly cinematography.
The narration skips and leaps forward at such an unpredictable speed as one might recall the story in memory and the viewer is often left entirely confused as to how much time has passed between the scenes. There is an almost Proust like sensibility in Wong Kar Wai, they both are less interested in what happens than in how it feels to remember what happened. This cinematography prompts a strong engagement with the film, a need to have an attention span longer than we are used to but it also reflects how the film was made.
A little research about Wong kar Wai’s process will reveal details which often pull me into an existential spiral. There was merely an outline when the shooting began and the scripts and individual scenes were written on the spot by the director and actors themselves. It’s a kind of film where you can’t help but feel that it’s the work of someone in complete control of his craft.
It’s undeniably both visually and emotionally a “Consistent” Art. So self-contained and boxed up that it only features the same locations each filmed from the same angle.
As audiences we experience a kind of Circular effect, which is almost missing in films we see today. In the search for novelty and excitement not only are the audiences deprived of what is real, the artists themselves chase plots and cliffhangers in order to appeal to the majority. This particular technique, far from feeling sluggish or boring, instead isolates itself against fixed backgrounds, the inner lives of the two lead characters, and for the most part these interior worlds are explored wordlessly.
The real action of the movie is its subtleties and nuances of the postures , glances, touches and by restricting the language itself, Wong kar Wai restricts action that sort of mirror the restriction of Mr.Chow and Mrs.Chan in the social scenario of 1960’s Hong Kong where they risk being under the constant surveillance, threats of gossip from their landlords and community at large.
This is where we observe another intentional choice made by the director, why everything in the movie is Doubly-framed. By carefully placing certain objects in foreground, the director enhances the feeling that the characters have, of being observed and not to mention our own feelings of being observers.
In retrospect, the major theme of “In the Mood for Love” is a feeling – observed and the observing, what we desire from others and what others desire from us and most importantly seen and being seen. This movie appealed to a deeper literary part of me. Like Shakespeare’s play-within-a-play, the reenactments in In the Mood for Love use performance as a moral disguise, allowing repressed desire to surface while preserving the characters’ illusion of innocence. So in the scene where they re-enact the seduction of their spouses in which each attempts to embody the spouse of the other while being coached by the other on what they think the spouse would do or wouldn’t do, this makes for a really complex , but also a kind of perverse interplay.
Though the film aggressively focuses on only Mr.Chow and Mrs. Chan to the point of never even showing the faces of their spouses, we’re always aware that four people, not two, are involved. But it’s not four real people, it’s two people and two phantoms. In the guise of understanding what happened, each victim attempts to seduce their own spouse in the form of the other’s spouse. A task that has to be doomed from the start because the fact of the affair itself means that neither of them can no longer elicit that kind of desire that they’re trying to recreate. This action is masochistic but Wong kar wai wants us as audience to feel that unease and sit in it.
This is the kind of movie where you watch something and the reality hits you all of a sudden. In their uncanny coaching of what their spouses would have done, they control the version of story they want to tell themselves. Modulating perfectly how their betrayal feels. Wong Kar Wai in an interview explicitly said that if the actors Tony Leung and Maggie Cheung weren’t such beautiful actors the darkness at the centre of their characters and their fantasy would be obvious. Of course, they can’t keep it up forever. When Mr. Chow confesses his love, they are like their spouses, refusing to see their own lack the truth dawning upon them, they are no longer the people their spouses loved. In the end they don’t act on it.
They can only let the brutal truth in so much. In order to survive, in order to move forward, Mr. Chaw and Mrs.Chan doom themselves to missed connections. This is why at the end, the film jumps forward to them just missing each other twice.
Just missing each other, the mere possibility of a connection, now the connection itself is what sustains them now. Everybody lives within fantasy, within frames.Sometimes those frames are made by us, sometimes they’re made by others.
We need to believe that those made by us are made by others. But whatever the case, there’s no way out of the frame. When fantasies rupture or crack or breakdown completely, that’s trauma, like living temporarily in a storm.
Wong Kar-wai’s ‘In the Mood for Love’ is a gorgeous, quiet and painful exploration of what happens when the fantasy you create for yourself is a perverse one, when it only serves to keep you from the pain that it was created to avoid. And, the reason the film is so heartbreaking is because this kind of perversity is common to us all.