In The Mood For Love

jenks

thread death
I always had fond memories of this film when it was released in the cinema and i just got it on dvd and spent last night watching it.

still find it absolutely spellbinding - surely the two leads are the most beautiful actors in recent times
- that fantastic nat king cole (i think) song as motif.
- the idea of the two playing at lovers at the start to try and understand their own partners' infidelity which inevitably leads to their own
- the clothes that show off her swan neck
- his suit
- the smoke
- the rain...

i could go on.

anyone else a fan?

has anyone seen the sequel? any good? worth a purchase?
 

jed_

Well-known member
2046 is NOT GOOD. it soured my opinion of ITMFL which was one of my favourite films of the decade & now i'm not so sure about it. alot of people disagree with me though.
 

owen

Well-known member
i think both 'in the mood...' and 2046 are utterly glorious. though i know at least one dissensus poster who violently disagrees with me on this, so will post my case and some pics and things when i have a bit more time...
 

zhao

there are no accidents
glad to see a few Dissensians dropping their Eastern-Bloc-Spritual-Ennui critical agenda to praise these films... the sequel is not nearly as heart wrenching as the first, but makes up for it by being a lot more fun. Like Owen I absolutely love both films - ITMFL is kind of unique in Kar Wei's ouvre in that it is a singular, cohesive narrative; and 2046 is more fragmented like the others. only thing I'm not sure works perfectly are the sci-fi bits.

speaking of Tony... just bought myself 3 suits in that 60s timeless style. now to work on the icy cool demeanor... :)

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Both loathsome IMHO! Dragged to see them both by various cynical sentimentalists - second worst than first, though only by virtue of its additional appallingly bad sci-fi elements, tackily acted and severely daft.

Without doubt I lack a 'soul' or something, but the endless I'm-so-bad-but-I-love-her-or-do-I motif of both films, coupled with the total fetishisation of memory and secrecy (oh go tell it to a tree, whydontcha) annoys rather than excites or incites pathos, or whatever it is suppose to do...not a fan of the film as vehicle for romantic soppiness, so obvious....

And anything whose tagline is 'Feel the heat, keep the feeling burning, let the sensation explode'...erk....

Obviously approve of the dressing up, though, especialy the glove the gambling woman wears in 2046.
 

Padraig

Banned
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.

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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.

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"There is nothing but emptiness, the empty existence I exchanged for the truth." — Lu Xun, 1926
 

D84

Well-known member
My mate dragged me along to see this at an Asian film festival which he was involved in years ago when it came out. I had never heard of the director or cinematographer then (we also saw Away With Words) but was really impressed - everything Padrig said.

I really wanted to see 2046 at the cinema but missed it and haven't seen it yet.
 

owen

Well-known member
infinite thought said:
Without doubt I lack a 'soul' or something, but the endless I'm-so-bad-but-I-love-her-or-do-I motif of both films, coupled with the total fetishisation of memory and secrecy (oh go tell it to a tree, whydontcha) annoys rather than excites or incites pathos, or whatever it is suppose to do...not a fan of the film as vehicle for romantic soppiness, so obvious....

sigh...nothing if not predictable :p (do forgive me for this brief turncoatery in defending confucius)

Well, precisely what is interesting in these films is their use of romantic conventions.

there's a long-running psuedo-left critique of romantic melodrama, the 'women's picture' and so forth, which was boring in the 1930s and is boring now. if anything the sheer earnestness, of wong kar-wai's sentimentalism marks him out from all that currently blights cinema- the endless inverted commas set around any gesture or statement, all that sub-brecht sub-simpsons tarantinoism. the furtive gestures and endless deferrals of gratification in 'in the mood...' in contrast to boring over-sexualisation.

another thing is that they aren't quite 'weepies', they aren't necessarily supposed to elicit any sort of pathos- the point is their sheer luxuriant surface, the play of light, THE CLOTHES, and so forth. the sci-fi bits work in the same way. curious of you to be looking for characterisation or depth in yr cinema...go and read henry james or something :D

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(though personally Fallen Angels is my favourite. particularly the rubber-dress-tiny room-by train line scene, surely the most lonely scene ever filmed)

btw criticising a film for its tagline is the definition of pointlessness
 
I precisely don't want depth/characterisation, never have, never will. You know full well that this is a badly-aimed shot at an extinct species...!

The idea that contemporary film is a choice between grumpy leftists complaining about the portrayal of women, or ceding to (an already outdated) form of Tarantino pomo irony is simply...a weird projection on your part, and not a defence of earnestness at all. if anything, I found the two wong kar-wai films I've seen utterly cynical, and not earnest at all, in the way that most 'melodrama' (if we are going to call it this) just is by its very nature - the question is rather whether one is willing (or - even - can) be swept away by it (for better or worse). Would that I could 'give in' and let the 'exasperating melancholia' (as Padraig interestingly puts it) wash over me - a couple of hours in the cinema marvelling over sci-fi pretty-girls and nicely-dressed men is hardly something I would object to in principle...

I didn't and wouldn't call wong kar-wai's films 'weepies' - that's a whole 'nother category of film/affect, it's clear, one with a completely different message and tone. I'm generally interested in formal innovation; I think I understood, on the other hand, that these films are, ahem 'all about the surface'- I simply didn't see the ripples on this particular puddle as courting melancholy/playing with romantic conventions in an interesting way. Point taken about the tagline - but perhaps I am all about the text! I have a longer and perhaps not very worked out critique of the relationship between 'memory' and the false movement of cinema, but now is possibly not the time...

and no amount of pretty pictures is going to bolster your argument, young owen! (ok. maybe a bit)
 
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