As a collage of time and place, Wong Kar-Wai’s In the Mood for Love captures a city in a state of transition
Inspired by Hong Kong writer Liu Yichang’s Modernist novella, Intersection (1972), In the Mood of Love, made in 2000, follows the relationship that develops between two Shanghai immigrants – Chow Mo-wan, played by Tony Leung, and Su Li-zhen, played by Maggie Cheung – as they saunter through the maze of Hong Kong’s cityscape with their restless gaze.
The film is a spatial collage of bedrooms, mahjong rooms, hotel rooms, hallways, corridors, stairs, corners, steps, streets; the density of Hong Kong’s domestic spaces is embodied in the apartment building interior. Private spaces feel public – every neighbour seems to know everyone else’s schedules and whereabouts. Portraits of desire displayed through synchronic visual storytelling techniques create a feeling of interaction between shots and components. The stairs, the corridor, the hallway inside the subdivided apartments, the living room, the kitchen and the bedroom appear as fragments, cut in from one to another as the occupants appear and reappear, moving between them. We never see the living room in its entirety in either apartment. In the interior, the doorway frames the occupants inside the hallway, living room and bedroom, and the long hallway frames the kitchen. Shots, people, dialogues and places move in a kind of synchronic dissonance with each other.
Close and intimate domestic settings and urban scenes combine in artful montage to evoke a city in flux
Depicted as still-life scenes and animated by the perpetual motion of people, portraying Hong Kong as a city in transition, the public places of In the Mood for Love are intimate and isolated. Su’s husband, Chan, is always away on business in Japan and after work as a secretary at a shipping company, she occupies herself with trips to street vendors and the cinema. As a corridor scene cuts to the corner of a lane of steps leading to the street vendors below, there is no visible division between interior and exterior. The rain and dim flicker of street lamps augments the intimacy of these urban places, overflowing with displaced people, missed experiences and longing. The heavy rain – Typhoon Wanda swept into north-east Hong Kong through the South China Sea from the Philippines on 1 September 1962 – transforms the corner of the building into a room. Viewed through the rusty metal grilles of the street windows and shopfronts with their shadows cast against bare concrete walls, the buildings lining the street create a contiguous enclosure that extends into the interior as the camera cuts from the lane to the building stairs and back.
Cultural theorist Ackbar Abbas describes this as a ‘metonymic substation’, a doubling device where characters become interchangeable in a narrative cycle of repetition. Chow and Su glide in and out of the apartment doorways, passing each other through seemingly endless corridors, up and down the interior stairs, exterior steps and round the corner in a repetitious tango of flirtation. The actor Tony Leung doubles as Chan, Su’s husband, and Maggie Cheung’s Su doubles as Chow’s wife.
Places are mirrored as well. Just as we settle into thinking that the apartments are adjacent to each other, an uncanny feeling arises that they are, in fact, the same. For instance, two-thirds into the film, a tracking shot from one apartment to the other passing through the partition wall shows Chow and Su sitting contemplatively in their respective hallways, suggesting that the layouts are symmetrical. Yet in other moments, Su and Chow seem to be coming out from the same doors, and looking over the same living-room balcony.
As the protagonists Chow and Su contemplate whether to be together or not, the camera pans between the two apartments, cutting through the shared wall and rendering them
as one
In the Mood for Love is a temporal collage, taking the viewer from 1962 to 1966 using 21 temporal changes, each announced by Su Li-zhen’s changing cheongsams. Seventeen black screens transition us between places. And the historical conflates with the autobiographical: Wong reminisces about 1960s’ Hong Kong – a place of his childhood ‘remembered in oneiric images ... mediated by a particular consciousness’, according to cultural critic Rey Chow. At that time, Hong Kong was a visibly migrant society, and the period between 1962 and 1966 was significant not only to director Wong Kar-Wai – a new émigré himself from Shanghai where he was born in 1958 – but also to the city of Hong Kong and the region. Set in Tsim Sha Tsui at the southern tip of the Kowloon Peninsula, where Wong grew up, the film’s assemblage of places, temporalities, objects and bodies represents the people in transition. The places in the film in Hong Kong and South-east Asia, where the characters live, work and visit, constitute the spatial networks of the Chinese diaspora in a decolonising, regional context.
Chow rents a hotel room in the film, at a time when Tsim Sha Tsui was undergoing major redevelopment into a commercial and retail hub of hotels, malls and massive mixed-use buildings, rapidly replacing the urbanism of low- and mid-rise tong laus (tenement houses), back alleys, street vendor stalls and open-air markets. There were almost 20 multi-storey hotels in the area by 1962, together with other new leisure venues, from cinemas to clubs to western-style restaurants. But by the late 1990s, only five of the hotels remained standing. The hotel room scenes in the film were shot instead at Hong Kong’s British Military Hospital at King’s Park; opened in 1966, the hospital was demolished soon after filming finished in 1999. With the city’s appearance irrevocably changed, the crew shot the hotel where Mrs Chow works and the outdoor street scenes in the Charoen Krung Road area in Bangkok instead: 1990s Bangkok blends into 1960s Hong Kong.
The two characters circle and mirror each other, with the busy, narrow streets of the city providing a backdrop for fleeting encounters and charged moments
The film sustains the overlapping of interior spaces, the characters entering and revealing glances of each others’ hallways, living rooms
and bedrooms
Hong Kong’s identification with regional geopolitics is present throughout. Chow and Su’s meal of steak and potatoes was filmed at the Goldfinch Restaurant in Causeway Bay, which opened in 1962, the same year the film is set. The restaurant’s dimly lit interiors, smoked mirrors and dark-red leather booths are one of the few scenes shot in Hong Kong. The images of coconut trees on the menu are the film’s first visual reference to Singapore, while Chow’s move to work as a journalist in Singapore in 1963 is signalled by a still photograph of the coconut tree against a dusky sky. Chow’s landlord wearing a sarong, passers-by wearing batik shirts and the rattan chair in which Su lounges in Chow’s apartment are further nods to Singapore.
The Chinese diaspora in British Hong Kong intersects with places in Cold War South-east Asia. If Chow had stayed in Singapore, he could have become a naturalised citizen in the new nation. Instead, Wong sends him back to Hong Kong in 1966, one year after Singapore’s independence. Chow arrives in a Hong Kong battling in the Star Ferry Riots. Greater unrest was to come in 1967 as local Communists and British government troops clashed in violent skirmishes that would shape Hong Kong in the decades that led to the 1997 handover. When Chow and Su return separately to the apartment building in 1966, Mrs Suen, Su’s former landlady, is preparing to migrate to the US to be with her daughter. The Gu family, Chow’s former landlords, had already moved to the Philippines. The film keeps time and space, relations and identities,
in suspension.
Wong’s characters also migrate between films, drifting into the same places, bedrooms and hotel rooms – including the hotel room number 2046, which appears in In the Mood for Love and becomes the title of Wong’s loose sequel, the 2004 film 2046. Chow – who is also a protagonist in 2046 – is writing novels in both films; rather than a martial arts serial, its a sci-fi dystopian novel, confusingly also titled 2046. Discarded footage from In the Mood For Love is reused in 2046, including archival footage from the Star Ferry Riots.
The heavy rain of Typhoon Wanda, which hit Hong Kong in September 1962, is present throughout the film
In the Mood for Love embodies the intersections of transient and conflicting identities and loyalties, in Hong Kong and areas of South-east Asia, and in historical and autobiographical temporalities. Wong’s Hong Kong of the 1960s is an assemblage of fragments, displaced people and disrupted places. ‘I always wanted to put some place in my films, a corridor, a restaurant, or a street, because I knew it would be gone soon’, Wong said in 2001. His concern to capture every place, person, event, thing and thought in a city described through the transitional is a palpable rejoinder to Richard Hughes’ 1968 description of the city as a rambunctious ‘borrowed place’ on ‘borrowed time’.
At the end of the film, Liu’s words read: ‘That era has passed. Everything that belongs to that era no longer exists.’ Indeed, history occurs as a notion of coetaneous experiences of disappearance and reappearance. 2046 is a place, a time, a novel, a film, a hotel room, an anime megalopolis and the idea of a specific set of aspirations that are coming to pass. In the Mood for Love recuperates these migrancies, mobilities and transient identities, with collage as an inevitable – albeit stylistic – escape from the crises of the present and the unfathomable future: a transitory freedom.
