Letting Go of Heartache: 25 Years of ‘In the Mood for Love’
The Scoop features personal essays on movie-related topics.
If asked, I’ll say In the Mood for Love is my favorite film. I don’t like picking favorites and pigeonholing myself when there’s this whole big world of cinema and art out there to discover. To me, a favorite implies something you watch over and over again, clutching at it like a childhood teddy bear giving your soul comfort. A favorite feels like something that defines you. Wong Kar-wai’s 2000 film doesn’t bring me comfort; it’s often the opposite, if anything, but I admittedly have used it to help define part of my identity for much of my adult life.
“Feelings can creep up just like that.”
“If something great happens to you, can you keep it a secret?” Those words began a brief but impactful romantic relationship I had in my late teens that haunted me off and on for years after, ended prematurely by diverging religious and cultural backgrounds that never would have allowed us to be together. And as I pined over a love that never was, in walked, or, rather, slow-motion sashayed up the stairs from the noodle shop, In the Mood for Love.
In the Mood for Love follows two lonely Shanghai expatriates renting rooms in adjacent apartments in a cramped Hong Kong building in the early ‘60s. Their spouses are often working late or on long business trips, leading Chow Mo-wan (Tony Leung) and Su Li-zhen (Maggie Cheung) to concurrently conclude they are having an affair with each other.
Chow and Su are drawn toward each other, initially trying to understand their spouse’s affair by playacting how it may have started. It’s not long before the two find they have more in common than just the circumstances that have brought them together, and internally debate whether to explore their own “forbidden” passions.
Going through this period of “unrequited” love and simultaneously learning more about film as an art form, I found much to adore about In the Mood for Love. Beyond its simple yet intriguing premise, Wong Kar-wai harnesses every aspect of filmmaking to create a seductive world that you never want to leave, even as it breaks your heart. You can enjoy it purely as a movie, or take that next step to dissect all of the different aspects that make this film work.
“You notice things if you pay attention.”
Shot masterfully by Christopher Doyle and Ping Bin Lee, In the Mood for Love is visual storytelling at its finest. The slow-motion, closed-off framing, creeping movements around corners, and ‘60s color palette give this film an otherworldly atmosphere of yearning and longing that conveys everything we need to know about these characters’ internal states without a ton of dialogue.
That’s just the tip of the iceberg of the work that went into this movie. The score, as in other Kar-wai films like Chungking Express, reuses songs over and over, creating motifs and recurring feelings (here it’s the beautiful “Yumeji’s Theme”). There are the breathtaking performances from Cheung and Leung, whose expressions create an ocean of desire and meaning even when they don’t say a word. I could go on about the tension created by the cramped set design, how time and feeling are conveyed through the many exquisite Qipao dresses Su wears, and how Wong Kar-Wai created a masterful film through editing together what was essentially 18 months of improvisation.
It was the perfect film for me at that moment as a would-be student of cinema trying to go beyond the surface level of movies. There was a world to explore that was accessible in many ways while still mysterious in others, like how those pieces created this 1960s world that felt mythical. As a heartbroken young man with too many feelings I couldn’t yet process, I could lean into Chow Mo-Wan’s journey of desire, heartache, and trying to move forward.
“That era has passed. Nothing that belonged to it exists anymore.”
Since its release twenty-five years ago, In the Mood for Love has continued to stay relevant, and its ideas and style are still actively found in modern cinema. Even if it’s not always a movie title people recognize, they’ve experienced at least a part of it as many of the striking scenes or low-res screen caps have migrated from one social media network to the next—from Tumblr to Instagram and now TikTok—inspiring new teenagers and young adults year after year.
There are both echoes and overtures of In the Mood for Love everywhere in film. Just a few years after its release, Sofia Coppola’s Lost in Translation took her own stab at creating a story about two people encountering each other through unique circumstances, tied to a specific place and time, and shot in its own dreamy style. Céline Sciamma’s Portrait of a Lady on Fire offered its own take on many of Wong Kar-wai’s themes and came with its own cathartic final sequence. Barry Jenkins’s Oscar-winning Moonlight followed the In the Mood for Love playbook in its final third, and Everything Everywhere All at Once made one of its many universes a Wong Kar-wai homage.
While I still struggle with the idea of favorites, I consider this a “perfect” movie. Not because it doesn’t have flaws, but because I can watch it and pick up or focus on something every time. That includes paying closer attention to how it’s made, or learning more about the implications of the time period it was both set in and made in—a consistent feature of his films that’s not easy for Western audiences to pick up on.
Most recently, I’ve been curious about In the Mood for Love’s exploration of how we create stories of our lives. Chow Mo-wan and Su Li-zhen spend their early moments together playacting how their spouses started their affair, which, in turn, leads to their own blossoming desire for each other. Chow tries to focus his career as a newspaper editor on writing a ridiculous-sounding martial arts series. His final moment of the film, sharing his secrets before plugging it up and leaving, is inspired by a story he heard. There are so many questions raised about how we tell ourselves stories or use other people’s stories to make sense of our lives.
I long created my own narratives about what my bout of brief romantic desire meant, finding it easier at times to cling to those memories than move my life forward. I built them up more and more over time in my head until the reality of it was no longer as real as the story I told myself. As a late intertitle echoes, “He remembers those vanished years. As though looking through a dusty window pane, the past is something he could see, but not touch. And everything he sees is blurred and indistinct.”
“Am I hopeless? Not really.”
In my youth, I turned to In the Mood for Love to recreate that creation of myself as a spurned lover. As I grew older, I moved towards the release Chow has at the end of the film, unburdening himself and moving to an uncertain future (what happens to him in the semi-sequel 2046 is another warning of staying too long in one story of ourselves). While there is a younger part of me that still wishes to follow his path to Angkor Wat and tell the secrets that no longer burden me to an ancient, eternal piece of stone, it was another film that exists in the spirit of Wong Kar-wai that gave me a similar feeling: Celine Song’s 2023 debut Past Lives.
Past Lives explores lost cultural identity like In the Mood for Love, as well as universal concepts of how those would-be relationships we continue to carry with us, and all the potential lives we could have led to get us to the one we have now. Like the main character Nora, who bursts into tears after being confronted with this, I left the theater weeping. Not for my own present, which was in the throes of a new romance, but perhaps for my past self and that story I clung to that I no longer needed.