In the Mood for Love

Wong Kar-wai's In the Mood for Love is often remembered as a film about a love affair that never quite happens, which is accurate but incomplete — it is really a film about the architecture that prevents it. Two neighbors in 1962 Hong Kong discover that their respective spouses are having an affair with each other, and in response begin meeting to rehearse how that affair might have started, a fiction that becomes, slowly and almost against their will, indistinguishable from the real thing.

The film's style — a camera that watches from behind pillars and through doorframes, slow-motion passages timed to a waltzing score, a corridor that keeps recurring — has been imitated so often that it's easy to forget how functional all of it is. These aren't mood for mood's sake; they're the physical expression of two people who have decided, out of dignity or fear, never to let their feelings occupy open space.

What makes the film linger is its final refusal to resolve the tension it spent ninety minutes building. A secret is eventually whispered into a hole in a wall and sealed with mud, and the gesture works precisely because we never learn what was said. Some feelings, the film argues, are only real as long as they stay unspoken.

— Amir Morsali, BIPA Editorial