"In the Mood for Love" and Using All Aspects of Cinema to Tell a Story

Recently I was able to see the Wong Kar Wai  film "In the Mood for Love" from the year 2000. Set in 1962 Hong Kong, it tells the story of two married neighbors whose spouses are never around and begin to have feelings for each other. I found the film to be engrossing for many reasons and upon reflection I realized that this was due in part to the director's use of all the tools at his disposal.

The first thing that stands out for me is the editing. The random jumps in time are very jarring at first but after awhile a pattern emerges. There will be a few jumps, then a few concurrent scenes and then a montage of time held together by specific pieces of music. The viewer is then able to settle in so to speak and get enraptured in these two characters.

Which brings me to my second immediate observation and that is the phenomenal acting by both leads, Tony Leung and Maggie Cheung. Tony has to play the straight man to her tortured housewife and thus she has the attention grabbing moments, which she plays to great effect. Watching them play off each other is truly a wonderful piece of filmmaking and there are so many nuances in each performance that I don’t know if you could ever watch the film without discovering something new. That is something to truly be applauded and my hat is off to all of those involved in making this happen.

Then there's the beautiful score and use of existing music throughout the film. As I mentioned in the paragraph on editing, these pieces of music not only serve as contextual placeholders to help ground the audience in the frantic jumping of time and place. They also provide powerful undertones of emotion and depth to what is happening on screen as all good scores aim to do. Simply listen to the main theme in the video below and you will have an idea of that which I am speaking about.

Next, the ending. It’s so rare in film for the director/writer to be able to craft a story with a truly ambiguous ending but that is exactly what Wong Kar Wai has accomplished here. Part of this is he does not present the mystery until the last second before the final scene. I don’t know if this is brilliant or maddening but in the context of this story, with how information is presented and more importantly withheld, I am of the opinion that it works to great effect. It certainly will lead to much discussion afterwards, with multiple viewpoints able to express their version of the ending and be able to back it up. This is one of the great effects of a great film. Everyone is able to intake the same information and digest it in different ways to produce wholly different viewpoints and ideas on what they have seen/heard/felt.

Lastly, the production design of the film (I’m including the wardrobe in this as well) was spot on perfect. The environment of the film was so much a reflection of the characters and themes of the story that if you watched the film with no sound, I have a feeling you would be able to get the gist of what’s going on and the main conflicts/struggles, from the cinematography and the sets. The framing, camerawork and again the editing all combine to tell this story.

Wong Kar Wai has masterfully used every aspect of cinema to tell this story, with each contributing in its own way. The editing influences the cinematography, which informs the production design, which reflects the acting, which evokes the score, which combined with everything else informs the director and his choices. While this is not my favorite foreign film of all time (that honor would go to Ikiru), I can say that this is the first film I have seen in a while to consciously use all aspects of filmmaking to tell its story. Bravo!