I think perhaps, that one of the difficulties or limitations with
In The Mood For Love, as with Wong Kar Wai's other work (including
Days of Being Wild, Chungking Express, Ashes of Time, and Fallen Angels) is the romantic-melodrama genre itself.
But what I found particularly striking about ITMFL was the concluding scenes from Cambodia [even though the rest of the film is set in 1962's Hong Kong] , the grainy video, the sudden shift of perspective, that lifted it out of its narrow genre limitations. though the often languid quality of the rest of the film was at times compelling, it was the suddenly larger view (geographically and esthetically) that provided the heartbreak.
With ITMFL, what Wong Kar Wai is doing is pretty simple (if difficult) and straighforward: he's attempting to convey the manner in which our lives are made up of small "unimportant" moments - that these moments are often "spectacular" or beautiful, but often don't resolve into any kind of traditional narrative satisfaction (eg. that life is not a novel). nor is life necessarily experienced in "realistic" terms - the jumps, the multiple angles, the repeats, the luscious close-ups, the slow-motion - it all seems like a perfectly valid way to convey the moment-to-moment timelessness of our lives (where we experience the intimate details of time in a way that seems to directly contradict the fact that we also simultaneously experience the larger view of time passing). Then combine into this a general mood of sorrow, of longing, of reticence, of kindness and I think you get a very persuasive bittersweet film where nothing much happens except we get a true, if depressing, glimpse of how people live their lives.
The film's exasperating melancholia (even endowing it with a sense of nobility, deriving as it does from the protagonists' moral restraint) aside, there's nothing too original or spectacular about any of this, but it is how the time-paradoxes above are emphasized and made even more poignant with the ending, which puts the previous "timeless" sections of the story in direct context of both our own times, the grainy video footage talking about the French in Indochina, and then of history, with the footage at the ancient Cambodian city of Angkor Wat - the final juxtaposition in Tony Leung's character's gesture of remembrance there - explicitly of one life's dreams and the dreams of all humanity - is something moving, and all the moreso for it's extreme simplicity. There's not too many films around that have managed to pull that off satisfactorily.
"There is nothing but emptiness, the empty existence I exchanged for the truth." — Lu Xun, 1926