You Love to See It: In the Mood for Love

Wong Kar-wai’s In the Mood for Love is a film composed almost entirely of minutiae. It has no dramatic set pieces, no driving plot. It’s a movie about the formation of an emotional state and the slow, quiet failure of that state to manifest in life. It’s a movie about two people passing on a narrow staircase, about the slow sway of a woman’s hips as a man watches her walk away and the quiet tension of whether or not she knows he’s watching. Kar-wai’s shots of empty hallways deepen the tension of unconsummated longing. When wind stirs hanging draperies or rain pounds the characters as they walk home, the world highlights their emotional stillness, their pained restraint. Nature moves around them, however constrained by the artifice of 1960s-era Hong Kong, but they cannot move with it.

The film’s most haunting moment is a simple one. As Su and Chow stand together in an alleyway, dancing around the truth of their feelings for one another and Chow’s imminent departure for Singapore, Su takes his hand. When he pulls away she clings, but not hard enough to pull him back. Her clutching hand retains the shape of his in negative space, as though she would rather hold onto his ghost than to the living man himself. Isn’t it safer to love the absence of someone than the changeable, volatile reality of their flesh? Isn’t it safer to carry the truth of your feelings within you where they can never meet the harsh and wasting light of other people?

In the Mood for Love is as much about the absence of a love affair as it is the presence of one. When Chow whispers the secret of his love for Su into a hole in the wall of Angkor Wat, he transmutes the emotion into something ageless, fusing it forever with the stones of the vast temple complex. There is grandeur in that, and heartbreak, but also a great and irreducible stillness. The stones of that place will hold his secret forever. They will magnify it, render it monolithic and awe-inspiring, but they will never yield it to a living soul. It will remain forever the absence of a hand in the curled fingers of another.