In the Mood for Love, Wong Kar-wai’s Silent Dance: Where Image Meets Flesh in Fifteen Frames

  By

| Casey Jarrin |

In the Mood for Love plays at the Trylon Cinema from Sunday, May 7 through Tuesday, May 9. Visit trylon.org for tickets and more information.

i. I wonder how it began

A man's right hand extends to press the button at the center of a black doorbell; the walls have paint peeling; he's wearing a grey suit and around his wrist is a gold watch with a black strap.

A single finger pressing a doorbell: Mr. Chow (Tony Leung)

Hand grazing a doorframe: Mrs. Chan (Maggie Cheung)

A woman's right hand fans four fingers across the doorframe at the entrance to an apartment; she wears pink nail polish and the black strap of a purse hangs from her forearm.

The erotics of a single finger
pressing the doorbell
slowly

Quiet intimacies of space
slender hands graze
a forgotten doorframe

Wardrobes
lifted by ropes

A slash of fabric
midnights of rain

Every frame: a sigh
a wish held close
a silent exchange.

We look through a doorway into a living room with floral curtains on the windows; a man in a white shirt and a woman in a brightly-patterned dress stand facing each other, quite close, as the man attempts to leave and the woman stands with her back against the wall.

Electric currents in the spaces between bodies.

ii. you bottle things up

To enter the dance of Wong Kar Wai’s In the Mood for Love is to witness the spaces between breath and flesh, to linger in the threshold between architecture and damp air, to inhabit a place of electric hesitation. The audience, a hummingbird floating    waiting     watching
on the other side of window glass.

Here: fabric melts, glances dance and bounce off alley walls, skin waits.
We play witness then join in a visceral cinema of longing, palpable through the screen.

iii. we can’t all be Maggie Cheung

I sat in Theatre 3 at Lincoln Plaza Cinemas on Broadway and 65th and sighed. I couldn’t get my legs to move, to pull me up out of the chair, to want to leave. I was full of dreams, like I’d been swallowing celluloid for hours instead of the fancy ham sandwiches they sold in this subterranean theater. I could feel the subway roaring in my bones.

Still in its spell, I sleepwalked to the bathrooms, twirled up a new red lipstick, swooned at myself in the mirror. For a moment I became my own lover and took a closer look.

iv. that era has passed

In the Mood for Love drips with Hong Kong. I had a friend in college who’d grown up there. He wore round wire-rimmed glasses and wanted to be a filmmaker. He spoke quietly, if he spoke at all. He told me about a film he’d started to make about his parents’ love story, shot using Super 8. I wish I’d kissed him then instead of waiting. Though maybe he was a messy kisser and we just wouldn’t have meshed.

Regret isn’t the same as loss    not always

v. you notice things if you pay attention

Movies teach us how to see the world, experience our bodies, feel big things.

The camera eye of In the Mood for Love‘s dual cinematographers Christopher Doyle and Mark Lee Ping-Bing is both desiring machine and another body, a character alive within the screen who makes choices about what and where we see.

Voyeuristic horizonal pans
we squeeze our way
devouring Tony Leung’s eyes
all synchronized, inevitable
composer Shigeru Umebayashi’s

slow motion soft focus rain
up and down that staircase
Maggie Cheung’s silhouette
driven on by relentless percussive strings
not-quite-adulterous suite.

A man in a grey suit and rust & white tie walks down a narrow staircase while a woman in a floral print dress walks up the same stairwell; grey concrete walls, a street lamp overhead.

The stairwell ballet.

A man in a grey suit and rust & white tie walks down a narrow staircase while a woman in a floral print dress walks up the same stairwell; grey concrete walls, a street lamp overhead.

vi. how to feel (each frame, a painting)

In the Mood for Love trained me to seek out exquisite pain on screen.

Like some visual-acoustic-olfactory mashup of Peter Greenaway’s
            The Cook, The Thief, His Wife and Her Lover
            its steaming pots and viscera stews bubbling
and Pina Bausch’s Tanztheater
            a choreography of muscles and lungs
            limbs in Wim Wenders’ Pina
together we sweat, breathe uneasy
ache and wiggle our weary feet.

In the Mood for Love also taught me everything about regret, which isn’t the same as loss.

I learned to relish the long take:
to desire a shot that lingers
beyond action
uninterested in dialogue
the residue of two bodies
occupying the same space
an absence felt within the frame.     

ABOVE: A man in a grey suit smokes a cigarette while leaning against the window of a grey building in the rain, a street lamp in the foreground, another closer to him. BELOW: A woman in a floral dress in the same exact position in the scene, a few moments later. She leans against a grey building in the rain, a street lamp in the foreground, another closer to her.

Wong Kar-wai does Hopper in the Hong Kong rain. Diagonals, night city, waiting.

ABOVE: A man in a grey suit smokes a cigarette while leaning against the window of a grey building in the rain, a street lamp in the foreground, another closer to him. BELOW: A woman in a floral dress in the same exact position in the scene, a few moments later. She leans against a grey building in the rain, a street lamp in the foreground, another closer to her.

vii. not now

Maybe someday I’ll write that essay comparing In the Mood for Love to Hiroshima Mon Amour and decide that Marguerite Duras was the screenwriter for both and Wong Kar-wai’s collaborator all along.

viii. never alone | never whole

A woman sits at her dressing table in a green dress and white oval earrings, downcast after crying. You can see her from two additional angles in the mirror behind her.

Tears in triplicate: always visible, never alone.

seeing in duplicate and triplicate:
Mr. Chow and Mrs. Chan never alone
double shadow, mirror triptychs
fractured screens, no one is whole

doorways frame silhouetted bodies:
the opening shot of The Searchers
the break-up in L’Eclisse
(Tarantino copied them all)

ABOVE: Mr. Chow (Tony Leung) in the final moments of In the Mood for Love (2000). BELOW LEFT: Ethan Edwards (John Wayne) in the final frames of John Ford's The Searchers (1956). BELOW RIGHT: Colonel Hans Landa (Christoph Waltz) in the opening scene of Quentin Tarantino's Inglourious Basterds (2009).

Bodies in the cinema frame, in doorways, on the threshold.

ABOVE: Mr. Chow (Tony Leung) in the final moments of In the Mood for Love (2000). BELOW LEFT: Ethan Edwards (John Wayne) in the final frames of John Ford's The Searchers (1956). BELOW RIGHT: Colonel Hans Landa (Christoph Waltz) in the opening scene of Quentin Tarantino's Inglourious Basterds (2009).

ix. you notice things if you pay attention (Quizás)

The stairwell.
The alley.
The corner.
The rice cooker.
The all-night mahjong game.
The lamppost.
The rain that never ends.
The dark but not blackened sky.
The negative space between elbow and ribcage as she places her hand on her waist.
The soup canister.
Her slippers under the bed.
His cigarette.

Close-up on wrists.

The long heavy
inevitable
goodbye.

x. who gets to be a body, who is just a voice

A man and a woman sit at a restaurant booth, each with a plate of steak and potatoes, eating dinner together. He wears a grey suit and tie, she wears a patterned dress.

Intimacies of eating: “Order for me” and “Do you like it hot?” Mr. Chow and Mrs. Chan sit down for their first meal together.

focus on faces
shot-reverse shot exchanges
over potatoes and steak

we develop a taste for
mustard spooned slowly
onto her plate

offscreen disembodied voices  
walk-through cameos
martial arts serials

all caricatures:
anyone who isn’t
Them

xi. Hollywood co-opts everything

I read somewhere that In the Mood for Love was director Sofia Coppola’s favorite film.
I’m not sure I’ve come to terms with the fact that this film isn’t just mine.
It makes us crave intimacy, ownership, holding it in our palm. It wants us to want to ourselves.

Maybe it’s predictable to be entranced by this film’s pornography of longing, but still I am.

xii. a restless moment

everything a rehearsal for the end, our parting, some death
sometimes it seems a remake of Alain Resnais’ Last Year at Marienbad
sometimes it’s just irresistible cinema poetry

xiii. I wonder how it began (echo)

The shadows of a man and woman cast along a concrete city wall, the woman herself visible behind the shadows.

Seeing in double, never alone. Mrs. Chan and Mr. Chow (off-screen), haunted by the shadow spouses whose indiscretions they discover and reenact.

two shadows walk ahead of them in the frame
their doubles, adulterous spouses alive
in their absence

back of a cab in the rain
a film noir, the crime:
falling in love

first as tortured reenactment
and twisted revenge
then accidentally and actually
their undoing

A man and a woman sit in the back seat of a taxi, facing forward, not looking at each other. Through the back window we can see the night street, illuminated by city lights.

Back seat possibilities and regrets.

xiv. the past is something you can see but not touch (horizontals and verticals)

voyeuristic peeks over shoulder
through doorways and windows
down long hallways

witness to intimate unspoken fragments
slow motion ballet of bodies ascending
and descending a staircase

somewhere between Ozu and Antonioni
the camera eye that frames and lingers

inevitable rhythms of that string suite
a heartbeat of slow-motion pans across dark streets

our lovers hesitate                              
                                    breathe in and out
                                                                        in and out

desire moves in strange ways
cannot be spoken or explained
embodied in small gestures

her hand gliding
along a wall
across a banister

his hands and eyes
caressing stone
like a body
in those final frames

A single finger lit by the sun extends into a hole in a stone wall.

In the end, the beginning. Mr. Chow (Tony Leung) extends a single finger into stone wall at Angkor Wat. An erotic-nostalgic mirror of his opening gesture of ringing the doorbell.

xv. coda: cinema dreams

Alone with myself in that musty theater, age 24, this film was therapy.
I’d fallen in love and had lovers, but those rarely intersected.
This film helped me dream: I loved and lost and found myself again.

Edited by Olga Tchepikova-Treon

IN THE MOOD FOR LOVE
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2 Comments

  1. Pingback: Movie Stars, Maggie Cheung, and The Heroic Trio – Perisphere

  2. Joe Tougas
    May 9, 2023 at 10:25 am

    “I’m not sure I’ve come to terms with the fact that this film isn’t just mine.” Thank you, Casey, for this essay and thank you Trylon for screening the film last night (May 8.) Been in love with this movie for 20 years and this poem helps me understand why.

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