11/17/09 2:06 PM Wong Kar-wai's In the Mood for Love Page 1 of 6 http://archive.sensesofcinema.com/contents/01/13/mood.html contents great directors cteq annotations top tens about us links archive search Wong Kar-wai's In the Mood for Love: Like a Ritual in Transfigured Time by Stephen Teo Stephen Teo is the author of Hong Kong Cinema: The Extra Dimensions (London: BFI, 1997). He is currently engaged in his research project for a Ph.D degree at RMIT University (Melbourne). In Dream Time It is by no means coincidental that the two most celebrated Chinese-language films of the last two or three months - Ang Lee's Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (2000) and Wong Kar-wai's In the Mood for Love (2000) - hark back to old genres and times past. Some grand design of time has brought the films about. Both directors and their films recollect childhood memories of pleasures induced from going to the cinema. Both men are roughly of the same generation (Lee was born in 1954; Wong in 1958), and have come of age as directors at about the same time: this, above everything else, appears to have informed their choices of genre. In the case of Ang Lee, the director's own memories of watching martial arts pictures spawned boyhood fantasies of a China "that probably never existed." (1) Watching the pictures of the wuxia (sword and chivalry) genre throughout his formative childhood days evoked a dreaming time for Ang Lee - his film being in his own words, "a kind of dream of China". (2) Both Ang Lee and Wong Kar-wai, each in their own ways and working in radically different genres, have tried to duplicate this kind of "dream time" in their respective movies. Wong's In the Mood for Love is a romance melodrama, which tells the story of a married man (played by Tony Leung) and a married woman (played by Maggie Cheung), living in rented rooms of neighbouring apartments, who fall in love with each other while grappling with the infidelities of their respective spouses whom they discover are involved with each other. The two protagonists are thrown together into an uncertain affair which they appear not to consummate, perhaps out of social propriety or ethical concerns. As Maggie Cheung's character says: "We will never be like them!" (referring to the off-screen but apparently torrid affair of their respective spouses). The affair between Cheung and Leung assumes an air of mystique touched by intuitions of