In The Mood For Love (Huayang Nianhua) (BFI Film Classics) (Tony Rayns, Jimmy Turrell, Wong Kar Wai Etc.)
In The Mood For Love (Huayang Nianhua) (BFI Film Classics) (Tony Rayns, Jimmy Turrell, Wong Kar Wai Etc.)
The BFI Film Classics is a series of books that introduces, interprets and
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Tony Rayns
© Tony Rayns 2015
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Contents
Acknowledgments
1 Valse triste
2 Secret Origins
3 Oblique Strategies
4 Miscellany
Credits
Acknowledgments
Primary thanks go to Wong Kar Wai and his past and present colleagues in
the production company Jet Tone and its affiliated talent agency Project
House: particularly line producer Jacky Pang, production designer and
editor William Chang, cinematographers Christopher Doyle, Mark Lee and
Kwan Pun-Leung, director’s assistant Charlotte Yu and actors Tony Leung
and Maggie Cheung. This book benefits in many ways, large and small,
from conversations with these people and I’m grateful to them for sharing
their experiences and insights.
I was first introduced to Wong Kar Wai by my friend Shu Kei during the
roll-out of Days of Being Wild in 1991, and had a closerthan-average
relationship with Jet Tone from 1994 (when I was invited to see one of the
later cuts of Ashes of Time and to catch the world premiere in Hong Kong of
Chungking Express) until 2008, when I was axed from the company’s
Christmas-card list after some bad-tempered exchanges with Wong over
texts in the press kit for Ashes of Time Redux. During those fifteen years, I
met Wong fairly often and helped him with English subtitles and the editing
of press kits – for his own films and for Jet Tone productions by Jeff Lau
and Eric Kot, with both of whom I also had interesting conversations.
The sometimes hair-raising tales of my experiences with Jet Tone will
have to wait for another time; what’s relevant here is my aborted project to
produce a book-length interview with Wong Kar Wai, which resulted in
many hours of unpublished audio tapes. A couple of brief quotes in this
book are taken from those tapes. I’ve also taken occasional phrases and
sentences from my earlier writings about Wong. I recorded video pieces on
the film and its music for Criterion’s Region-A Blu-ray edition of In the
Mood for Love, and some of the observations that follow are necessarily
recapitulations of what I said there. But time constraints kept the Criterion
extras relatively short, and much here was not said there.
I must thank Jerry Liu, who edited a stylish press kit for As Tears Go
By, for first drawing my attention to Wong Kar Wai in 1988. Also Li
Cheuk-To (artistic director of the Hong Kong International Film Festival),
Simon Field (Wong’s first UK distributor), Michael Werner and the late
Wouter Barendrecht of Fortissimo Film Sales (for many years Wong’s sales
agents), Anurag Kashyap and Jean-Claude Carrière (fellow panellists at a
seminar in Delhi), Curtis Tsui of Criterion, Norman Wang, Chua Lam,
Stanley Kwan and David Bordwell for sharing opinions and providing
information. This book would not have been written if James Bell (of Sight
& Sound) had not urged me to knuckle down to it at short notice. It goes
without saying that any mistakes in the following pages are mine alone.
1 Valse triste
From the very beginning I knew I didn’t want to make a film about an affair. That would be too
boring, too predictable, and it would have only two possible endings: either they go away together or
they give each other up and go back to their own lives. What interested me was the way people
behave and relate to each other in the circumstances shown in this story, the way they keep secrets
and share secrets.
Wong Kar Wai (19 June 2000), from an interview by Tony Rayns, published in Sight &
Sound, August 2000
We’ll come to the ‘very beginning’ in Chapter 2, but let’s start with the film
itself. In the Mood for Love, set mostly in the Hong Kong of 1962, is a film
that luxuriates in the feeling of being in love – without actually turning into
a love story. Its two central characters, Mr Chow and Mrs Chan, are
surrounded by sexual promiscuity. But when they ultimately succumb to
their palpable desire for each other, they do so off screen. The film hinges
on their tremulous uncertainty about their own feelings and their feelings
for each other. Like David Lean/Noël Coward’s Brief Encounter (1945)
several decades earlier, it’s a film about desire repressed. Worries about
social appearances and gossip play a significant part in stopping the
nonlovers from acting on their feelings, but Mr Chow and Mrs Chan are
shown to be addicted to the manoeuvring and rehearsing – actually, the
foreplay – that obviates the need to commit to an affair. They are, precisely,
in the mood for love.
For most viewers, the bittersweet tone of the not-quite-sexual
relationship crystallises in the haunting piece of music most often heard on
the soundtrack, a valse triste (‘sad waltz’) composed by the Japanese
musician Umebayashi Shigeru. This piece is called ‘Yumeji’s Theme’,
because it was written originally for the film Yumeji (1991), the final part of
Suzuki Seijun’s Taisho Trilogy, so called because all three films are set in
the Taisho period (1912–26), the fifteen-year bridge between the Meiji and
Showa periods. Meiji saw the restoration of imperial rule in Japan, and the
opening-up and modernisation of the country after centuries of feudal
isolation under the shoguns; Showa saw Japan turn militarist, invade China
and attack the USA as it prosecuted the Pacific War. The short-lived Taisho
period had much in common with Edwardian Britain and Weimar Germany.
Taisho is now fondly remembered as a time of hedonism and the rise of an
ero-guro culture – the term is shorthand for ‘erotic-grotesque-nonsensical’ –
rooted in the pulp fiction of the day and perpetuated in, for example, Ozu
Yasujiro’s student comedies and thrillers of the late 1920s and early 30s. All
three films in Suzuki’s trilogy are ghost stories of a sort, exploring the era’s
cultural confusions and its sexual perversity and licence.
In the Mood for Love is not a ghost story, but Wong Kar Wai evidently
heard something in the yearning ‘Yumeji’s Theme’ that matched his sense
of the vanished manners and morals of Hong Kong in the early 1960s. He
uses Umebayashi’s cue no fewer than nine times in his film – that is, even
more insistently than he used The Mamas and the Papas’ ‘California
Dreamin’’ in Chungking Express (1994).
We need a scene breakdown of In the Mood for Love to anchor our
discussion of the film, so here it comes, as readable as I can make it. It
describes the film’s dramatic content and visual syntax in some detail and
includes all the main music cues; it’s designed to highlight issues I’ll
discuss later in the book. Since Wong and his designer/editor William
Chang use music to camouflage the film’s many elisions, this description,
which notes the film’s visual idiosyncrasies, may help some readers to
disentangle what the film says from the way it says it. Readers who know
the film closely already may prefer to skip these pages or refer to them only
to verify points in the rest of the text – but if they do so, they risk missing
several clarifications of the film’s cultural context. Except where noted, the
film’s dialogue is in Cantonese, the ancient southern Chinese dialect spoken
in Hong Kong.
The film opens with a few main credits, assertively printed in white on a
strong red background. Next up is a quote from the writings of Liu Yi-
Chang, printed in white on a black background; another will appear just
before the end caption, giving the film a literary frame. This first one reads:
‘It is a restless moment. She has kept her head lowered to give him a chance
to come closer. But he cannot, for lack of courage. She turns and walks
away.’ A third Liu Yi-Chang quote will appear between the film’s two 1966
codas; none of the quotes has a direct bearing on the film’s plot, but all
three evoke the hesitations and regrets that dominate the story. After the
opening quote, another caption, also white on black, situates the action in
Hong Kong in 1962.
The first scene opens with a quick fade-in from black to a tracking shot
along an apartment wall hung with framed family photos from pre-
communist Shanghai; it ends on Mrs Suen (seen from behind) calling her
guests to dinner in Shanghainese. Cut to Mrs Chan, wearing a floral qipao,
opening and gazing out of the living-room window; she turns and
apologises (in Cantonese) to Mrs Suen for interrupting her dinner party.
They sit and introduce themselves to each other. (Mrs Suen goes on
speaking Shanghainese and Mrs Chan Cantonese.) It becomes clear that
Mrs Chan is considering renting a room in the apartment for herself and her
absent husband. A jump-cut takes us to Mrs Chan’s departure, promising to
phone with her decision. Cut to Mr Chow, seen from behind, mounting the
narrow stairs of the tenement building. He checks a newspaper small ad,
and reaches the upper hallway just as Mrs Suen ushers Mrs Chan out with
the words ‘It’s settled, then’. In response to Mr Chow’s enquiry, Mrs Suen
(now speaking Cantonese) very politely explains that her vacant room has
just been let (‘to that lady’) and advises him to try her neighbour Mr Koo,
whose son has just married and moved out. The scene ends with a quick
fade to black on Mr Chow pressing Mr Koo’s doorbell.
The first change of scene: Chow climbs the tenement stairs
Fade-in on Mrs Chan and Mr Chow moving into their rented rooms in
the adjacent apartments. Their deliverymen have arrived at the same
moment, so there is much confusion about what goes where. The shots are
tightly framed, to emphasise how cramped the space is. Amid the chaos,
Chow and Mrs Chan formally introduce themselves to each other, and it
emerges that her still-absent husband reads Japanese and often visits Japan.
Fade to black. A brief coda to the scene shows Mrs Chan leaving for Kaitak
Airport to welcome her husband back from a trip. She passes Mrs Chow
(seen from behind) on the narrow stairs and gives her a nodding greeting.
Mrs Chow hurries into Mrs Suen’s apartment, where guests are settling
down to snacks and beer over their mahjong game. Chatter about Mrs Chan.
The group is seen from another room, through the open doorway. The
camera sinks slightly (the first of several ‘unmotivated’ camera movements)
as the image fades to black.
Hard cut to another tiny vignette in Mrs Suen’s apartment, with the
focus shifting from the kitchen in the background (where the Amah is
cooking) to the hallway in the foreground. Mrs Chan is going out ‘to buy
noodles’. She politely declines Mrs Suen’s invitation to join her mahjong
party, saying she ‘needs some air’. The conversation ends with two reverse-
angle cuts. Mrs Suen goes into the kitchen. Fade-out.
Fade-in on another eccentric composition: the reception desk of a hotel,
seen through an oval hatch in a side wall. Mrs Chow (first off screen, then
in a second, similar shot seen from behind) speaks on the phone to her
husband; she is clearly working as the hotel’s receptionist. She says that
she’ll be home early. Cut to Mr Chow ending the call in the newspaper
office where he works. He’s called back to the laborious task of typesetting
in Chinese, using an apparatus which selects each written character in turn.
He asks his colleague Ah Ming to get him time off for a holiday with his
wife. The conversation is shown in a series of reverse-angle cuts. Fade-out.
Fade-in on the hallway of Mr Koo’s apartment, with a babble of voices
off. Mr Chow returns home to discover Mr and Mrs Koo excitedly trying
out a new-fangled rice cooker, brought from Japan by Mrs Chan’s husband.
Cut: Mrs Chan reads the newspaper, seen through the doorway of another
room. Mrs Koo recommends Mr Chow to get a rice cooker too, ‘since your
wife is so often back late’ – the first hint of her affair with Mr Chan. The
Koos clamour to sample the steamed rice. Hard cut to a moment evidently
weeks or months later. An extended, fixed-angle close shot of Mr Chow
thanking Mr Chan (heard, not seen) for the rice cooker he’s bought for the
Chows. He hears to his surprise that his wife has already paid for it (‘Didn’t
she tell you?’) and rallies by asking Chan if his wife could get him cheap
tickets for a passage to Singapore, clearly for the holiday mooted in the
newspaper office conversation. Cut to new angle medium shot of Chow
returning to Mr Koo’s apartment along the corridor.
Two consecutive shots of the hotel lobby where Mrs Chow works; and laborious Chinese typesetting
in the newspaper office
The hotel reception desk, seen as before through the oval hatch. Mrs
Chow (not seen) tells her husband on the phone that she is stuck there late,
on a replacement shift. The back of her head is briefly glimpsed as she ends
the call. Hard cut to a similarly framed shot:
‘Through a dusty windowpane’: a neighbourly exchange seen in a mottled mirror
Mr Chow is at the desk, asking for her. A man (seen from behind) tells him
that she’s gone. ‘Didn’t she tell you she was off early today?’ Chow says
‘She never remembers to’ and leaves. Cut to a shot of Chow thinking dark
thoughts, against an alley wall.
‘Yumeji’s Theme’ makes its second appearance on the soundtrack over
the hard cut to a slowed-motion shot of Mrs Chan in a vertically striped
qipao descending outdoor stone steps. She carries a thermos pail for the hot
noodles she’s about to buy. Still in slowed motion, she waits in the
daibaitong for her order to be prepared, then leaves, climbing the stone
steps. When she exits the frame at the top of the steps, the camera lingers on
an old street light and the wall beneath it, covered with scraps of old
posters. Shortly afterwards, Mr Chow enters the frame and descends the
stone steps, also in slowed motion. Cut: the camera tracks past a black wall
to a medium shot of Mr Chow eating in the daibaitong. (The Hong Kong of
the 1960s had street food everywhere, served at makeshift outdoor
restaurants known as daibaitong. These disappeared from most areas in the
1980s, as Hong Kong’s Urban Council tidied them away into covered
markets in the name of hygiene and public health. Some of the best
daibaitong moved indoors and became famous restaurants in their own
right.) Umebayashi’s music fades over the hard cut to another occasion in
the same location. Mrs Chan, again carrying the thermos pail and wearing a
green-maroon qipao, crosses Mr Chow on the stone steps and greets him in
passing.
Hard cut to the newspaper office. Ping scurries along a corridor to
Chow’s office and bursts in with a demand for an urgent loan of HK$30. He
gabbles out a long, crazy story involving hospital, stitches, losing his shirt
on a bad racing tip, visiting a whorehouse with only HK$2 and needing
money to redeem his ID card, left with the girl as a guarantee. Chow can
spare him only HK$20. (The conversation is filmed and edited rather
eccentrically. The two men are first shown separately, and cross-cut
according to no known convention; there is only one cut based on an
orthodox eyeline match. The second part of the scene is filmed in wider
shots of both men, complete with some reverse-angle cutting.) Chow agrees
to join Ping for a supper snack when he’s finished what he’s working on.
Cut: camera tracks past a wall to their table in a daibaitong. As they eat a
late supper, Ping hesitantly tells Chow that he saw Mrs Chow in the street
the day before – with another man.
Recurrent motifs: Chow looks for his wife, Mrs Chan waits for her noodles
Hard cut to Mrs Suen’s apartment. The Amah hands Mrs Chan a letter
from her husband … but Mrs Chan tells her it’s actually for Mr Chow next
door; it was the Japanese stamp that confused the Amah. She takes it to the
next-door apartment; shot holds on Mrs Chan alone in the kitchen. Cut:
Chow sits in his room and angrily crumples the letter he’s just read. He
reaches across to close the door.
Hard cut to a close-up of the Siemens clock in the shipping office; it
shows 1.10 p.m. The camera slowly starts to crane down as we hear an off-
screen phone conversation between Mrs Chan and Chow. She asks about
the letter and when his wife will be back. Cut to black.
‘Yumeji’s Theme’ makes its fourth appearance on the soundtrack over
the film’s first flash-forward. Fade-in on a fixed angle showing an upper-
floor corridor in the hotel where Chow will later rent a room to write in
collaboration with Mrs Chan. Crimson drapes billow in the breeze along
one side of the corridor; the image is redolent of David Lynch’s Twin Peaks
(TV, 1990–1). Cut to the interior of Chow’s rented room. He is there with
Mrs Chan, she wearing a bold red coat over her qipao, standing in the light
from the window. Neither speaks. She crosses the room to the door, in the
background of the shot. Cut: rear view of a taxi moving through a night
street; they are visible through the rear window. Mrs Chan (heard in
voiceover) wants it to pull up so that she can get out first – so that they
don’t arrive back home together. The taxi stops, and the gentlemanly Chow
gets out. The taxi drives off. Umebayashi’s music fades as it starts raining.
Chow dashes for cover. Scene ends with a long shot of him sheltering.
Hard cut to the same alley in daylight, seen from a nearly identical
angle. Ping walks through the shot. Cut: he emerges from Koo’s apartment
just as Mrs Chan gets back (she is in the foreground of the shot). She’s
surprised to see Ping back in Hong Kong. He explains that he came to visit
Chow, only to find that he has a bad cold and can’t taste anything. Ping will
buy him some food; he says Chow has a craving for (strong-tasting) sesame
syrup. Cut: inside Mrs Suen’s apartment, Mrs Suen calls for the Amah. Mrs
Chan, cooking in the kitchen, tells her the Amah is hanging washing on the
roof. They chat about shopping for Mrs Suen’s mother’s coming birthday
and Mrs Suen’s new hairdo. Mrs Chan is making a big pot of sesame syrup.
Very hard cut to Chow bumping into Mrs Chan in the alley near the
daibaitong. He’s on his way out for noodles (‘I’m starving’), and she’s
coming home from the pictures (the movie was ‘so-so’). He comments that
he used to enjoy seeing movies too. They chat about married life, about
making decisions as a couple and giving up the things you used to do alone.
Chow says he wonders what he’d be if he hadn’t married. Mrs Chan:
‘Maybe happier?’ Chow says he doesn’t brood on his mistakes, and that
he’s embarked on writing a wuxia (martial arts) serial for the newspaper. He
invites her to help, as a fellow fan of the genre, and then remembers to
thank her for the sesame syrup – ‘Just what I was craving that day.’ She
pretends that it was a coincidence that she was making it. They go their
separate ways. A quick dissolve to a short shot of Mrs Chan heading home,
then another quick dissolve to another shot of her turning the corner of the
alley.
Cut: Chow arrives in the newspaper office at night. He’s the only one
there. He sits at his desk, smoking. ‘Yumeji’s Theme’ makes its fifth
appearance on the soundtrack over a slowed-motion shot of his cigarette
smoke rising. Cut: tracking shot passes lace curtains to the interior where
Mrs Chan sits alone, writing. Cut back to Chow, writing in the newspaper
office. Cut back to apartment, where Mrs Chan is reading Chow’s
manuscript as he waits in the background for her reaction; they are seen in
long shot through the frame of a doorway. Umebayashi’s music cuts out as
the image cuts to a white screen.
The white screen turns out to be a close-up of the light in the corridor
outside the apartments. Camera pans down to the commotion below, exactly
echoing the shot of Chow’s first arrival in that corridor at the start of the
film. Mr Koo has got drunk (‘Again!’) during one of Mrs Suen’s mahjong
parties and is being helped back to his own apartment. Chow, who came out
to see what was happening, returns to his room – where Mrs Chan is hiding.
And since Mrs Suen has moved the mahjong party to Koo’s apartment (to
accommodate Mrs Koo’s need to keep an eye on her husband), Mrs Chan is
trapped there. Chow tries to work on his wuxia serial; Mrs Chan queries the
sudden appearance of a ‘drunken master’ character. (This part of the scene
will be reprised as even broader comedy in 2046 [2004], with Wang
Jingwen – played by Faye Wong – replacing Mrs Chan. The joke about
illogicality in wuxia plots reminds us that Wong’s last scriptwriting chore
was a rewrite with Jeff Lau on the all-stops-out martial arts fantasy Saviour
of the Soul [1991].)
Cut: daytime in Chow’s room. The mahjong game still hasn’t ended, but
player Mr Yang has to leave for work. Mrs Chan remains trapped in Chow’s
room; Chow has called Mr Ho to apologise for her non-appearance at work.
Mrs Chan frets that she’s been too cautious, since she’s always visiting
Koo’s apartment anyway. But her innate caution prevails. Cut: a panning
shot across Chow’s room. He’s asleep in a chair, Mrs Chan is on the bed.
Cut: a floor-level shot of the room from under the bed. We see Chow’s
slippers and Mrs Chan’s feet in high heels, and hear Chow say, ‘You can
go.’ Mrs Chan dashes back to her own room next door. Later(?) she is
intercepted by the Amah, who remarks that she’s back late from work and
tells her that Mrs Suen is sleeping after playing all night. Cut: Chow stands
smoking in Koo’s apartment. He walks off, suddenly decisive. Close-up of
his slippers on the floor. Fade to black.
At this point, the film goes into a suite of interconnected scenes set in its
recurrent locations – now including the hotel room seen in the earlier flash-
forward. First seen is the crumbling alley wall, with the shadows of Chow
and Mrs Chan preceding them as they stroll; when they enter the frame, we
see them at waist height as they talk. In the next shot, they are seen through
the bars in the wall on the other side of the alley. He has taken her to dinner
to thank her for her help with writing the serial – because she refused any
share of the fee. He says he’s being asked to write more; she worries that
he’s taking on too much. He says he’s thinking of renting somewhere
specifically to write in, somewhere she can work with him without being
seen. Chow: ‘It’ll be more convenient. There’s nothing between us, but we
don’t want gossip.’ She thinks that would be a waste of money, and adds
that he doesn’t need her help anyway. She walks away and he half turns to
watch her go, Nat King Cole’s ‘Aquellos ojos verdes’ begins on the
soundtrack.
Decision and indecision: Chow and Mrs Chan approach room 2046
The action resumes with more ‘role-playing’: they have reached the
point where Mrs Chan asks her husband if he is having an affair. When
Chow-as-Mr Chan admits it, Mrs Chan breaks down. They repeat the
dialogue. The second time Chow says ‘Yes’, Mrs Chan says and does
nothing, but looks emotionally overcome. Chow asks if she’s all right. Mrs
Chan: ‘I didn’t think it would hurt so much.’ She sobs and moves forward
to rest her face on his chest. He tries to console her: ‘This is just a
rehearsal.’ Cut: a shot of the room’s red carpet with the shadow of the
billowing curtain. Cut: Chow hugs Mrs Chan, seen reflected in a wall
mirror. Chow:
‘He won’t really admit it so readily. Don’t take it so hard.’ The camera pans
to the billowing pink curtain.
Hard cut to the back of Mrs Chan’s head (she’s wearing a white qipao)
as she listens to advice from Mrs Suen, speaking in Shanghainese. Mrs
Suen warns her about gossip and urges her to spend more time with her
husband. Mrs Suen has been out of focus in the background of the shot
while speaking; she comes into focus as Mrs Chan bids her goodnight and
steps away. Cut: Mrs Chan’s shadow on the wall as she returns to her room.
She pauses in the doorway and looks back, under a light, then enters her
room. Quick fade to black.
The Siemens clock in the shipping office shows a few minutes before 6
p.m. Mrs Chan (off screen) takes a call from Chow, who wants her to come
to the hotel to help him write. Cut: a slow pan over out-of-focus office
decor to a waist-level shot of Mrs Chan saying she can’t come over any
time soon. He asks ‘Why not?’ and she explains, ‘Mrs Suen lectured me last
night.’ She ends the call and moves out of shot.
Her movement is continued in a match-cut to a long shot (through a
doorway) of Mrs Chan entering the kitchen of Mrs Suen’s apartment. She
tells the Amah that she’ll make herself something to eat rather than going
out for noodles, and the Amah persuades her to join them for vegetable
won-tons. ‘Yumeji’s Theme’ starts for the seventh time over a through-the-
doorway shot of Mrs Chan watching Mrs Suen and her guests play
mahjong. The camera tracks into the room as Mrs Chan, standing, says
something unheard to Mrs Suen, then drifts with her drink to the window
and looks out pensively. Cut to a curious shot of her from outside the
window: the camera rises over some black foreground obstruction, as if
watching her from an opposite window. She turns away and leaves the
frame.
Cut to the film’s second flash-forward. A slowed-motion tracking shot
across the window of a newspaper office in Singapore. The newspaper’s
name, Singapore Man Yit Pao (Daily News), is painted on the glass. Inside,
the group of men includes Mr Chow, smoking. The music continues over
the shot. (The implication is that this is Mrs Chan’s premonition; she knows
that Ping has already decamped to Singapore.)
Cut to Mrs Chan (from behind) climbing the stairs of the shipping
office. It’s evidently an overcast afternoon outside; desk lights are on. Mr
Ho, at his desk, tells her that ‘a Mr Chow’ just called for her. The camera
pans with her as she sits at her desk and starts typing. Cut: Mr Ho looks
across to see her reaction to the message. Cut: Chow smokes in his
newspaper office, waiting for her to return his call.
Cut to the alley in the rain. Chow runs for cover, and finds Mrs Chan
already sheltering. After commenting on the unusual weather, he dashes
home to fetch an umbrella – which she refuses to use, on the grounds that
‘they’ will recognise it. She prefers to wait a while; he says he’ll keep her
company. Long shot of them sheltering. Cut to a side angle of their faces as
conversation starts; it’s a long-held shot. She asks if he tried to call her; he
wondered if she’d got the message. He wants her to book him a passage to
Singapore; he plans to join Ping there.
Cut to her slightly shocked reaction. Cut to a new angle: they’re seen
through the grilled bars on the other side of the alley. Cut: the naked bulb of
the street light, with heavy rain falling. Cut: shot of a puddle as the rain
stops. Cut back to a tracking shot (seen through the grilled bars) of Mrs
Chan pacing back towards Chow. This time their ‘role-play’ as they
rehearse a break-up is indistinguishable from their own decision to stop
meeting. Chow pulls his hand away from hers, walks away. She grips her
arm. Camera cranes up to show Chow walking away. Cut: their dialogue
resumes, the line between ‘role-play’ and actuality now non-existent. He
says: ‘Don’t be serious, it’s only a rehearsal. Don’t cry. It isn’t real.’
Cut to black (a wall fills the frame), then track left to show Chow
embracing Mrs Chan as he consoles her. ‘Yumeji’s Theme’ makes its eighth
appearance on the soundtrack. Mrs Chan sobs uncontrollably as they hold
each other; there are three shots (two with foreground obstructions, the third
without) before the fade-out. Fade in a shot from behind of a taxi driving
through the night streets, with Chow and Mrs Chan visible through the rear
window. She speaks in voiceover: ‘I don’t want to go home tonight.’ Inside
the taxi, their hands touch. She slumps her head on his shoulder. Fade to
black.
Mrs Suen’s apartment. Umebayashi’s music fades out as the camera
tracks through the room, lingering on the 1960s radio set which is relaying
a music-request show. The woman announcer reads out a dedication: ‘Mr
Chan, now on business in Japan, wants to wish his wife a happy birthday.
So let’s all enjoy Zhou Xuan singing “In Full Bloom”.’ The old song (in
Chinese: ‘Huayang de Nianhua’) begins with a few bars of the ‘Happy
Birthday’ melody. Cut to a shot of Mrs Chan sitting in the kitchen,
listening. Steam gushes from the rice cooker in front of her. The camera
tracks left ‘through’ the wall to find Mr Chow similarly sitting alone in his
room, facing the other way, and then back to Mrs Chan in Mrs Suen’s
kitchen. Sudden sound of a telephone ringing. Cut: the camera pans across
out-of-focus office decor to the shipping office phone, which rings
unanswered. The ringing stops, and we hear instead the sound of Mrs Chan
typing. Cut: the Siemens clock, showing a minute past 11 a.m. The sound of
typing is eclipsed by a voiceover from Mr Chow: ‘It’s me. If there’s an
extra ticket, would you come with me?’
An unanswered phone
Cut to a slow track across the wall and curtains of room 2046 to Chow
gazing out of the window. Nat King Cole sings ‘Quizas, quizas, quizas’ on
the soundtrack. Cut: Chow turns off the light and leaves the room. He
stands in the corridor with the crimson drapes; the camera tracks back from
his stationary figure. Fade to black. Crash fade-in on Mrs Chan (in a green
qipao) clattering down the stairs of the apartment building. Cut: Mrs Chan
sits (apparently alone) in Chow’s hotel room. The song cuts out. Cut: the
corridor outside, with the crimson drapes billowing. Cut: Mrs Chan cries in
the room, reflected twice in the dressing-table mirror behind her. We hear
her in voiceover: ‘It’s me. If there’s an extra ticket, would you come with
me?’ Cut to black.
Cut to a solitary palm tree against an azure sky. Quick fade-out.
Caption, white on black: Singapore, 1963. Cut to the back of a hotel clerk’s
head as he answers the phone. He says that Mr Chow has gone to work.
Cut: Chow searches the floor of his Singapore hotel room, increasingly
agitated that something is missing. Cut: in closeup, he asks the chubby hotel
pageboy if anyone has been in his room. Cut: a brief close-up of the boy
saying ‘No’. Cut: a wide shot through the open door of Chow’s room of
their stand-off; Chow turns and re-enters the room. Cut: a big close-up of
Chow’s fingers picking up a cigarette butt from his ashtray; it was smoked
by someone wearing lipstick. Cut: wide shot of a mirror, reflecting Chow’s
examination of the cigarette butt. He moves out of shot.
Cut: the Singapore newspaper office. Chow is called to the phone, but
no one speaks when he takes the call. Nat King Cole’s ‘Quizas, quizas,
quizas’ is reprised on the soundtrack. Cut to Mrs Chan in Chow’s room,
holding the phone but saying nothing. New angle: she hangs up. Cut to a
curious ‘abstract’ shot of the room, bisected vertically by a brown curtain;
no one is visible, but the shot is oddly reminiscent of two other ‘redundant’
shots of decor. Cut to a floor-level shot (from under the bed) as Mrs Chan in
high heels ducks down to pick up Chow’s slippers. Fade to black.
Caption, white on black: Hong Kong, 1966. Mrs Suen’s apartment. Mrs
Chan arrives (off screen) to visit Mrs Suen; she is delivering a boat ticket
and has brought a gift. Mrs Suen is packing to leave, but can’t bear to throw
anything away. (As at the start, Mrs Suen speaks to Mrs Chan in
Shanghainese, but the Amah uses Cantonese.) The Amah fusses over Mrs
Chan and insists that she should stay to eat. Mrs Chan says her husband is
fine. Mrs Suen doesn’t know how long she’ll be away; she says she might
rent out the apartment, since the Koos, her mahjong partners, have left, and
her daughter in the US is so worried about the riots in Hong Kong. Mrs
Chan moves to the window to gaze out, close to tears, as Mrs Suen
reminisces about how nice it was back when Mrs Chan was a tenant. A
reprise of Nat King Cole’s ‘Quizas, quizas, quizas’ starts on the soundtrack.
A brief shot of the room with no one visible, then quick fade to black.
Caption, white on black, with a final quote from Liu Yi-Chang: ‘He
remembers those vanished years as though looking through a dusty
windowpane. The past is something he can see but not touch. And
everything he sees is blurred and indistinct.’ This is shown in silence.
Caption, white on red: The End. ‘Yumeji’s Theme’ is heard for the ninth
and last time as the end-credit captions appear, also white on red. The
credits are timed to allow Umebayashi’s piece to be heard in extenso for the
only time in the film.
***
Across the story of two people whose spouses are having an affair, In the
Mood for Love waltzes around the themes of fidelity and sincerity in
relationships and then tries to resolve itself into a requiem for a lost
(colonial) time and its values. We’ll leave the discussion of Wong Kar Wai’s
aesthetic choices for our third chapter, but let’s say right off that the film is
brilliantly sustained. As the scene breakdown demonstrates, it’s intricately
structured but resolutely unconventional in its film grammar and framing
and editing choices. It’s far more successful than most other films which
create their own idiom as they go along, following – or breaking – their
own rules. Some individual shots of Mrs Chan and Mr Chow, taken out of
context, do evoke memories of the divas and matinee idols in Hong
Kong/Shanghai melodramas of the past, but the film as a whole owes next
to nothing to that genre. By the standards of ‘classical’ film language, the
film is eccentrically plotted, shot and edited.
It starts from the idiosyncratic idea of keeping the adulterous spouses
almost entirely off screen: they are straightforwardly absent from the
opening scenes, and are later heard but not seen – or briefly glimpsed, either
from behind or concealed by shadows. Then they effectively disappear from
the film entirely when their hapless spouses admit to each other that they
know what’s going on. For a Hong Kong audience, the casting of Roy
Cheung as the adulterous Mr Chan makes perfect sense: he’s known for his
macho, extrovert roles in gangster movies, and is handsome but with
coarser, less refined features than Tony Leung’s. Since Mr Chan is kept off
screen, the viewer is left free to imagine him as an upwardly mobile
chancer who seduced a good-looking Shanghainese woman into becoming
his trophy wife; he has clearly shrugged off his working-class origins by
reinventing himself as a businessman shuttling between Hong Kong and
Tokyo. Probably it was he who liked his wife to dress in elegant qipao (the
high-necked, form-hugging garment known in Cantonese as a cheongsam),
although it was more likely her lower-middle-class taste which picked out
those somewhat vulgar colours and patterns.
We’ll have more to say in our fourth chapter miscellany about the idea
of relegating the spouses to off-screen space, but Wong himself offers an
ingenious rationale: he chose to leave the adulterers unseen, he says,
‘mostly because the central characters were going to enact what they
thought their spouses were doing and saying. In other words, we were going
to see both relationships – the adulterous affair and the repressed friendship
– in the one couple. It’s a technique I learned from Julio Cortázar, who
always has this kind of structure. It’s like a circle, the head and tail of a
snake meeting.’ (That’s from my interview in 2000, as cited at the head of
this chapter.)
Ingenious, but specious: the real point of the ‘role-play’ scenes, in
which Chow and Mrs Chan improvise what they think their spouses may
have said to each other, is to explore their own desires and inhibitions. We
may well find ourselves speculating why the adulterers had their affair, but
only because we see how Chow and (especially) Mrs Chan think and
behave. In any case, we don’t really want or need to know more about the
adulterers. Of course, the ‘role-play’ scenes also add a further level of
ambiguity to the plotting. There are at least three scenes in the film – in the
alley, in the western restaurant and in room 2046 – where the viewer is
misled into assuming that Chow and Mrs Chan are speaking frankly to each
other, only to realise that they are actually role-playing each other’s
spouses. The little shock of realisation produces a frisson every time: the
film has caught us out, kept us intrigued.
Wong did shoot Chow and Mrs Chan going to bed together, but cut the
scene before going to Cannes. It’s one of the ‘deleted scenes’ available on
various DVD and Blu-ray editions of the film, and it turns out to conform to
the film’s ‘off-screen’ strategy; we hear more than we see. (Wong told me:
‘I cut the sex scene at the last moment. I suddenly felt I didn’t want to see
them having sex. And when I told William Chang, he said he felt the same
but hadn’t wanted to tell me!’) This discretion adds weight to the film’s
many hints that they do succumb to their repressed desires. These are: the
final time we see them share a taxi, with her voiceover line ‘I don’t want to
go home tonight’; the montage which ends the 1962 scenes, showing each
of them alone in room 2046, during which both of them speak the voiceover
line ‘It’s me … if there’s an extra ticket, would you come with me?’; and
the one-year-later pay-off in Singapore, with Mrs Chan (now with no ring
on her wedding finger) invading Chow’s hotel room in his absence, leaving
telltale lipstick on a cigarette butt and stealing his slippers.
All of this, plus the brief glimpse of the apparently single Mrs Chan
with a young son in the Hong Kong of 1966, relates to a cryptic motif that
runs through a lot of Wong’s cinema. The film doesn’t make a big deal of it,
but Mrs Chan’s maiden name is Su Lizhen (or, in Cantonese, So Lai-Chen)
– a recurrent name in Wong’s films. Maggie Cheung played the first Su
Lizhen in Days of Being Wild (1990): the reticent young beauty running a
concession stand in the South China Athletic Association stadium who is
seduced and abandoned by Leslie Cheung’s mother-fixated playboy. She
forms a kind of friendship with the similarly bereft policeman played by
Andy Lau; their strand of the plot also ends with a phone ringing
unanswered. The woman played by Maggie Cheung in Ashes of Time
(1994) isn’t given a name, but it seems clear that she’s another Su Lizhen:
the film’s elaborate backstory tells us that Ouyang Feng (Leslie Cheung)
decided not to marry her but came back later and raped her. She is last seen
with an apparently fatherless son. (The rape, incidentally, is probably the
most oblique scene in the whole of Wong’s cinema; little more is shown
than a staircase pursuit in darkness and a falling candle.)
Su Lizhen reappears in In the Mood for Love’s quasi-sequel, 2046, this
time played by Gong Li in scenes added to the film at a very late stage, set
in Singapore. This Su Lizhen is very different, a worldly-wise gambler who
always wears a long glove on one hand and never loses at cards; she bails
Mr Chow out of debt with her winnings. An affair with this Su Lizhen is not
on the agenda. His encounter with her causes Chow to reminisce about the
Su Lizhen he knew before – which occasions a black-and-white flashback
to the intimate moment in the taxi in In the Mood for Love.
There was a time – before My Blueberry Nights (2007) and The
Grandmaster (2013) – when Wong Kar Wai’s legion of fanboys would have
agonised through this network of cross-references in the hope of
discovering some hidden truth. We’re certainly not going to embark on that
foolish quest here, but we can confidently surmise that (whatever the name
Su Lizhen may mean to Wong Kar Wai) unanswered phone calls, fatherless
children and stolen slippers have a direct bearing on whatever Chow Mo-
Wan whispers into a hole in an Angkor Wat wall. The folk tale about
whispering secrets into a hole and burying them there for ever – reprised in
2046 with larger and more abstract holes – is a metaphor for exorcism and
healing, just as the folk tale in Days of Being Wild about a legless bird that
will die when it finally lands is a metaphor for commitment phobia. The
miasma of guilts and regrets, the sense of opportunities missed and feelings
unrequited, is the touchstone for all of Wong’s films, which have always
been much more interested in romantic failures than successes.
The talk around the Jet Tone office during the production of In the
Mood for Love was of Chow Mo-Wan setting out to seduce Mrs Chan as a
prelude to abandoning her: an act of wilful emotional cruelty intended as a
revenge for being cuckolded himself. This inference is nowhere evident in
the film as released, so Wong perhaps recycled the idea into Chow’s smiling
rejection of a romance with ‘taxi-dancer’ Bai Ling (Zhang Ziyi) in 2046 –
although that rejection is itself a gentler replay of the playboy’s treatment of
Carina Lau’s needy hooker Lulu, also known as Mimi, in Days of Being
Wild.
There is a high degree of continuity between the film’s Hong Kong in
1962 and Singapore in 1963, not least because the settings directly echo
each other (a newspaper office, a hotel, a daibaitong) and because the key
characters in Singapore (Chow, Ping and Mrs Chan) were already central in
the Hong Kong scenes. The first of the two codas, set in Hong Kong in
1966, also feels homogenous, because it returns to the familiar alley,
apartments and characters. But the second coda, announced with the abrupt
caption ‘Cambodia 1966’, represents a break with the film’s well-
established world. It opens, startlingly, with a fragment of old French
newsreel footage showing De Gaulle’s state visit to the country. The visual
contrast between the film’s elegant images and the grungy, duped look of
the newsreel could hardly be greater, and the sudden appearance of a real-
world event in the film’s stylised, circumscribed diegesis signals an ending
of some sort to the feelings the film has indulged. Wong himself has likened
the effect to waking from a dream; insofar as that’s true, the effect is rather
different from the otherwise similar jump to the Philippines at the end of
Days of Being Wild.
Wong has explained that the decision to end the film in Cambodia was
fortuitous: they were filming in Bangkok’s Chinatown when their Thai
production manager told them it would be easy and quick to secure
permission to shoot at Angkor Wat. The discovery and incorporation of the
newsreel came later. Wong rationalises the decision in two ways. First, the
state visit gives the journalist Chow Mo-Wan a reason to be in Cambodia in
1966. Second, De Gaulle’s appearance – not long before the Khmer
Rouge’s bloody overthrow of Sihanouk – reminds us that the western
powers’ colonisation of South-east Asia is coming to an end. Wong relates
this to the anti-British riots on the streets of Hong Kong in 1966, which are
referenced in the film as the reason for Mrs Suen and Mr and Mrs Koo to
leave their apartments. (The Hong Kong riots, sparked by the start of the
Cultural Revolution in China, are glimpsed in newsreel footage in 2046.
However, no rioter in Hong Kong in 1966 understood that the Cultural
Revolution was not the rebellion against authority that it seemed but in
essence a political putsch by Mao Zedong and his supporters to regain
power from the reformists Liu Shaoqi and Deng Xiaoping.) The inference
behind Wong’s second rationale is that In the Mood for Love has a political
dimension as a requiem for the end of the colonial period.
On the face of it, this is credible: Wong’s circumscribed fictions
generally do resonate with the times and places in which they’re set, and
there’s no question that the world of In the Mood for Love belongs to a
vanished past. This is underlined by the literary quotations from Liu Yi-
Chang which bracket the film. And yet it seems wishful, almost perverse, to
find political implications in a film which so resolutely focuses on quotidian
routines and questions of fidelity and sincerity. Wong’s cheeky attitude to
Chinese politics was announced to the world in the early 1990s, when he
named his independent company ‘Jet Tone’: the English is a phonetic
approximation of the Chinese name ‘Zedong’ – as in Mao Zedong. A
similar cheekiness governed the naming of the finance-brokering company
he founded in the late 1990s: the Chinese name of Block 2 Pictures is
‘Chunguang’, meaning ‘spring light’. He took the words from the Chinese
title of Happy Together (1997), but the crucial thing is that the Chinese
connotes something licentious or pornographic. Political resonances are
conspicuously absent.
Wong’s references to the year 2046 – introduced here as the number of
the hotel room where Chow writes, and where it’s strongly implied that he
consummates his love for Mrs Chan – have no real political meaning. He
chose the year because it will mark the end of the fifty-year period
promised to Hong Kong by Deng Xiaoping at the time of the colony’s
reversion to Chinese sovereignty in 1997: a period in which Hong Kong can
remain ‘unchanged’ and will enjoy ‘a high degree of autonomy’. The word
there that Wong picked up and ran with is ‘unchanged’. For him, it
prompted thoughts on what does and does not change in a society or
community, not on the mechanisms or character of a postcolonial
administration. His ‘2046’ is an imaginary place where nothing is lost and
nothing ever changes.
In this respect, though, Wong is a typical Hong Kong filmmaker. The
Hong Kong film industry got going in earnest in the late 1940s, kick-started
by the sudden influx of refugees from the civil war in China, which
included both film industry personnel from Shanghai and the potential
audience for their new films. From the 1950s onwards, the industry had two
wings, one releasing films in Mandarin (with slightly higher production
values and shown in slightly more upmarket theatre chains), the other in
Cantonese (mostly ultra-low-budget quickies, often episodes in long-
running series – in effect, television before the event). Both wings included
‘leftist’ companies (meaning pro-China), which specialised in melodramas
dealing with social issues, generally focused on wealth gaps in society. But
what all Hong Kong films until the 1970s had in common was the complete
absence of western faces, and with them any discussion of Hong Kong’s
status as a colony. You could watch one hundred Hong Kong films of the
1950s and 60s and find not one shred of evidence that they were made
under a colonial administration, except perhaps the occasional sign-board in
English. The same was true, incidentally, of both left- and right-wing films
made in the 1930s in Shanghai, then carved up between six colonial powers
and in its ‘international concessions’ one of the most cosmopolitan cities on
earth.
Western faces began to appear in Hong Kong movies in the mid-1970s,
initially playing senior policemen, then diplomats, gullible tourists and
other peripheral figures. Relaxed censorship allowed Tsui Hark to caricature
colonial officials as corrupt, grasping, pompous or simply irrelevant in his
Once Upon a Time in China series in the 1990s – but safely displaced back
to the China of the late Qing dynasty. Even since the 1997 handover, there
has been no frank discussion in Hong Kong cinema of the colonial heritage
or its problems. So it’s not surprising that In the Mood for Love in no way
reflects the story’s colonial context. Wong Kar Wai is merely following suit.
Still, the film is also circumscribed in other ways, which have more to
do with Wong’s standard modus operandi. It contains no establishing shots
of the cities of Hong Kong or Singapore, reducing both to a handful of very
specific locations. In the Hong Kong scenes, that means: the two adjacent
apartments in the tenement building, plus the corridor outside both and the
stairs leading up to them from street level; the daibaitong and the steps and
alley nearby; the newspaper office; the shipping office; the western
restaurant; the reception desk of the hotel where Mrs Chow works; and the
hotel with room 2046. The first hour or so of the film takes place
exclusively in these settings; there is little or no sense of any surrounding
community, any street life or of urban life in general.
The action is similarly circumscribed. With the adulterers almost
entirely off screen until they exit the film, Mrs Chan has her employer Mr
Ho and is shown to spend much of her time in the office keeping his wife
and his mistress apart, and Chow has his work colleague Ping, who visits a
brothel every time he has money and on one occasion even when he hasn’t.
Mrs Chan, who clearly understands Shanghainese even if she never speaks
it, also has her landlady Mrs Suen to function as a surrogate mother and
offer matronly advice about keeping up social appearances. But these are
the only significant characters to appear on screen. The alley where Chow
and Mrs Chan enact some of their role-play and twice shelter from the rain
is invariably empty. Even the western restaurant has no visible staff except
for the waiter who hurries through one shot. Hence the intensity of the
focus on Chow and Mrs Chan, and the decision to give both of them
promiscuous colleagues at work in lieu of their absent spouses. Counter-
intuitively, this sumptuous, rhapsodic film goes almost as far as Dreyer’s
Passion of Joan of Arc (1928) in its single-minded concentration on the
faces and bodies of a small number of characters in a small number of
settings. Even if he could afford to stage it, Wong wouldn’t be interested in
a panoramic recreation of Hong Kong in 1962.
It’s the circumscribed character of the film that makes the Cambodian
coda more of a release than the Philippines coda to Days of Being Wild,
where the setting fulfilled a dream of death intimated much earlier. At
Angkor Wat, finally, we see wide-angle shots of unfamiliar places – still
unpopulated, apart from Chow and an omniscient boy monk, and far more
‘ruined’ than the decrepit back alleys of Hong Kong, but overwhelmingly
different. The film celebrates these holy relics (‘wat’ means ‘temple’) with a
suite of reverse and lateral tracking shots, unlike anything seen elsewhere in
the film. The boy monk is in some sense a surrogate for Mrs Chan’s
fatherless son, so it’s fitting that the sequence ends, after Chow’s departure,
by returning to the hole where he has whispered his guilty secrets and fears.
Unsentimental to the last, Wong shows in 2046 that Chow rallies from this
haunting, barely consummated passion by reinventing himself as something
of a rake.
2 Secret Origins
People say my films are about time and space, but actually they’re not. Most likely they have nothing
to do with anything but me myself. That’s why my characters have such closed-off lives and can’t
reveal themselves; they’re afraid to get hurt.
Wong Kar Wai, from an interview by Esther Yeung and Lau Chi-Wan, published in City
Entertainment no. 402, 8 September 1994 (translated from the Chinese by Tony Rayns)
Wong Kar Wai has not always been as candid about his own social
inhibitions as he was in this interview in 1994, but he has always spoken
freely about his aleatory methods, his habit of allowing his films to
determine their own tone, shape and direction while they are being made.
Ironically for a man who entered the film industry as a scriptwriter (he
started by contributing ideas in the writing team at an ultra-commercial film
company, then wrote scripts alone for a couple of years), Wong turned away
from pre-scripted film-making during the production of Days of Being Wild,
his second feature. His practice these days is to seclude himself in coffee
shops to think through possible new storylines and scenes, and then to
return to the waiting cast and crew with his ideas; it’s this method which
stretches his productions out over months or even years. His chronic
indecision of course tests the loyalty and commitment of his collaborators
to the limit. We’ll come back to the case of Days of Being Wild in more
detail, because that film has a direct bearing on In the Mood for Love, but
first we should establish how Wong’s abandonment of scripts affected his
films.
Days of Being Wild and its successor, Ashes of Time, have many things
in common, despite the first being set in the early 1960s in Hong Kong and
the second in the jianghu, the mythic martial world of ancient China. Both
centre on Leslie Cheung playing alpha males with troubled backstories, and
both feature ‘packages’ of other top stars playing characters who drift in
and out of his orbit. More crucially, to the frustration of the actors and crew,
both films had extremely protracted shoots, because Wong was continually
trying out – and then rejecting – ideas for ways that his story might move
forward. And so both films were eventually constructed in the editing room,
because their structures had not been planned on the page. Inevitably, this
caused major grief for Wong’s financiers. Days of Being Wild was made for
In-Gear Film Productions, which ended Wong’s contract after the film’s
release. Wong founded his own company Jet Tone soon after, and secured
finance from Taiwan to make Ashes of Time, filmed intermittently on
remote locations in western China in 1992–3 but not completed and
released until 1994.
If Wong’s trial-and-error approach to film-making is tough for
financiers to deal with, then it’s many times tougher for a director who
works as his own producer. Jet Tone’s survival has often seemed precarious
over the years. Wong explored many options to keep the company’s cash
flow going: he marketed limited-edition collectibles at the height of his
popularity; he accepted commissions to make music videos and ads; he
produced films by other directors and did his utmost to hype them to
success; and even, in 2001, considered subletting part of the company’s
office in Hoi Ping Road, Causeway Bay. The establishment of Wong’s
talent agency Project House eventually brought Jet Tone a measure of
financial stability in the 2000s, and branch offices were opened in Taipei
and Shanghai.
Since his changes of mind during production are unfortunately matched
by an equally aleatory approach to editing, frequently requiring him to
reshoot scenes and re-voice lines of dialogue or voiceover, Wong has
sensibly looked for ways to bring his film-making under better control. His
default solution is to think of films as aggregations of short stories, an idea
no doubt sparked by the way that Days of Being Wild and Ashes of Time
resolved themselves into episodic narratives. Chungking Express comprises
two contrasted short stories and was first envisaged as three; the third, about
a hitman, was subsequently realised in Fallen Angels (1995), where it
acquired another counterpoint in the shape of the story of the man who sets
up businesses in shops and concession stands which have closed for the
night. 2046 also began life as an aggregation of three stories; Wong thought
of taking the storylines from three nineteenth-century operas and giving
them a sci-fi spin. This idea, of course, was dropped when Wong found
himself turning the film into a kind of sequel to In the Mood for Love,
although the manager of the Oriental Hotel still plays opera discs loudly to
drown out the sound of his domestic arguments.
The problems tend to begin when Wong sets out to stretch a short-story
idea to feature length, as in Happy Together, In the Mood for Love and The
Grandmaster, all three of which strained budgets, production and post-
production schedules and the morale of the crew to breaking point. Wong
became acutely self-conscious about the financial and practical difficulties
caused by his modus operandi soon after the one-minute-to-midnight rush
to finish In the Mood for Love in time for its scheduled premiere in the
Cannes competition. He told me at the time that he felt an urgent need to
‘change’, but rationalised it as a need to stay one step ahead of the world’s
many Wong Kar Wai imitators. The line ‘I can change’ ran through the
version of 2046 screened at Cannes in 2004 like a refrain, spoken twice in
Japanese by the protagonist of Chow’s sci-fi story, and then repeated at the
end of the film in Cantonese by Chow himself. In other words, Chow
expresses himself through his fictional Japanese character Tak, and Wong
expresses himself through his fictional Cantonese character Chow. The line
survives only once in the widely released version of the film; Wong
dropped the too-subtle idea of having it spoken in both Japanese and
Cantonese, perhaps tacitly acknowledging that most foreign viewers
wouldn’t notice the difference.
Since 2046, Wong has tried to force himself to ‘change’ by undertaking
a film in English and an Ip Man biopic, but he failed to reinvent his idiom,
themes or working practices in either case. My Blueberry Nights turned out
to be an over-extended remake of his short film In the Mood for Love 2001,
and Natalie Portman’s gambler was very obviously Gong Li’s Su Lizhen
from 2046 come again. The Grandmaster turned out to be less interested in
Ip Man’s life than in his chaste, yearning romance with Gong Er (Zhang
Ziyi), which of course directly echoes the central relationship in In the
Mood for Love. Although the filming of My Blueberry Nights went more
smoothly than In the Mood for Love and 2046 had done, production of The
Grandmaster took him back to the chaos of 2046: an on-and-off shoot
which stretched to nearly three years, two scheduled release dates missed,
three substantially different versions released in different territories. The
longest of the three cuts did very well in China, though, which may well
signal a shift to more China-oriented subjects in Wong’s future.
Of all Wong’s earlier films (and misadventures in production), the one
most relevant to In the Mood for Love is Days of Being Wild. Wong
acknowledged as much in the ‘Director’s Statement’ he wrote for the press
kit published by Jet Tone when the film premiered in Cannes. This text
presents a selective version of the truth, but it’s interesting enough to quote
in full:
Filming In the Mood for Love has been the most difficult experience of my career. We began
shooting two years ago, amid the Asian economic crisis. Over the two years since then, we have been
through a lot: problems with censors, the departure of some members of my crew, and the challenge
of telling a story about only two people. We are physically and financially exhausted.
I’m always being asked when I will make the second part of Days of Being Wild, a film I
remember with great affection. Over the years, I often asked myself the same question. Time moved
on, but I kept looking for an answer.
In the Mood for Love happily reunites me with Maggie Cheung and Tony Leung. In a sense, this
film answers the question I’ve been asking myself for so long.
Wong Kar Wai (May 2000)
While In the Mood for Love is clearly not Part Two of Days of Being Wild,
the two films have an obvious kinship. Both are set in the Hong Kong of the
early 1960s, both feature Maggie Cheung playing characters called Su
Lizhen and Rebecca Pan playing surrogate mothers, both have vintage
Latino pop music on their soundtracks, and both are somehow rooted in a
Shanghainese identity. The former chanteuse Rebecca Pan speaks
Shanghainese in both films, and brings to her scenes the spirit of all
Shanghai ‘exiles’ in Hong Kong.
Wong himself is Shanghainese by birth; his family moved to Hong
Kong in 1963, when he was five years old, and his father worked as a
nightclub manager. (He says, incidentally, that Nat King Cole was his
mother’s favourite singer.) He would have been too young to have many
clear recollections of life in Hong Kong in the early 1960s, but Days of
Being Wild, In the Mood for Love and parts of 2046 are imbued with a
potent nostalgia for the Shanghainese environment and ambience in which
he grew up. It is no accident that Wong’s closest collaborator since he
turned director has been William Chang, who was born in Hong Kong (he is
five years older than Wong) to Shanghainese parents. Chang has been
credited as production designer on Wong’s films since the start (As Tears
Go By [1988]), and as chief editor since Chungking Express (1994), but the
collaboration goes much deeper; Chang has been Wong’s indispensable
advisor in every aspect of the films they’ve made together.
Days of Being Wild was conceived as a touchstone for the look, mood
and nihilism of the early 1960s, across the stories of two charismatic but
flawed protagonists and a small group of other ‘lost’ characters who know
and love or lose them. Leslie Cheung’s playboy (hideously dubbed ‘Yuddy’
by the film’s original subtitler) was the first protagonist; after the
character’s death in the Philippines, his function as the figure around whom
the others orbit would be inherited by Tony Leung’s equally heartless
gambler. Wong took the Hong Kong release title for Nicholas Ray’s Rebel
without a Cause (1955) as his own Chinese title: A Fei Zhengzhuan,
meaning ‘The True Story of Ah Fei’. (Ah Fei was the generic name for a
young tearaway/delinquent in the Hong Kong of the 1950s.) Jacky
Cheung’s role as the hanger-on who idolises the playboy is directly
modelled on Sal Mineo’s role in Ray’s film. Incidentally, Wong used the
same ploy again seven years later when he took the Hong Kong release title
of Antonioni’s Blow-up (1966) (Chunguang Zhaxie, ‘Spring Light Bursts
Forth’, connoting the revelation of something indecent) as his Chinese title
for Happy Together.
As we’ve noted, Wong was under contract in 1990 to In-Gear, owned by
the former matinee idol Alan Tang and run by his brother Rover Tang; he
had already made As Tears Go By and scripted other films for them. He
reportedly began filming Days of Being Wild with a storyline draft and
notes on the main characters, but changed his mind about many things as
the shoot progressed. After spending a reputed HK$20 million of In-Gear’s
money (much more than the average budget for a Hong Kong feature at the
time, justified by the roster of top stars and the pre-sales to East and South-
east Asia) but with no end in sight, Wong proposed to his producers that the
film be split into two parts, set a year or two apart, the first starring Leslie
Cheung and the second Tony Leung. But In-Gear had pre-sold the film on
the basis of its title and all its stars, so it was contractually imperative that
Tony Leung should still appear in the first film. Hence the film’s much-
discussed coda – a single, extended shot showing the gambler preparing for
a night out, added without explanation at the end of the film. Editor Patrick
Tam, an out-and-proud Godard fan, came up with this solution to the
contractual problem.
Of course, Part Two was never made. The film was modestly successful
in Hong Kong, probably because of its cast, but came nowhere near to
recouping its production cost. The clincher came when distributors in
neighbouring countries begged In-Gear not to send them another film ‘like
that’. So In-Gear pulled the plug and Wong left the company to go
independent. We’ll never know – and Wong isn’t telling, always assuming
he knows himself – what would have happened in the second part of Days
of Being Wild, but it’s fair to assume that Tony Leung’s gambler would have
been more like the hardened, hedonistic Chow Mo-Wan of 2046 than the
hesitant, proper Chow Mo-Wan of In the Mood for Love. The only real
sense in which In the Mood for Love answers the Days of Being Wild Part
Two question is that it returns to the milieu of the earlier film and uses a
broadly similar aesthetic in order to rethink Wong’s view of the 1960s. In
place of a reckless indulgence in nihilistic sexual relationships and
adventures, it offers a profoundly nostalgic meditation on a time and a place
that have been lost.
In the Mood for Love had an unusually complicated genesis. As the
1997 handover of Hong Kong approached, Wong Kar Wai came out of the
worldwide triumph of Chungking Express and the respectable showing of
its follow-up, Fallen Angels, with a plan to save money by making two
features back to back. One of the films would be about fleeing Hong Kong;
guided by his enthusiasm for Latin American writers, including Manuel
Puig and Julio Cortázar, Wong chose to set it in Hong Kong’s antipodes,
Buenos Aires. After another awkwardly protracted shoot in Argentina,
eventually curtailed by Leslie Cheung’s contractual commitments
elsewhere, this emerged as Wong’s first Cannes prizewinner, Happy
Together. Before going to Argentina, though, Wong had conceived the other
half of the diptych as the other side of the coin: a light-hearted movie, in the
vein of Chungking Express, about embracing the motherland. Tony Leung
and Maggie Cheung were set to star in it. Wong’s title for the film was
Summer in Beijing; he drafted some ideas for the story and went to the
communist government’s Film Bureau in Beijing to discuss it. The Film
Bureau pointed out (politely, Wong says) that its regulations prohibited the
production of any film in China without its pre-approval of the script.
Wong’s explanation that he didn’t work like that fell on deaf ears, so the
project was abandoned. It got no further than a series of poster designs, later
published by Jet Tone in a limited-edition folio.
Following the success of Happy Together in Cannes, Wong returned to
the Summer in Beijing ideas. The project evolved into a three-episode film,
with one story about a chef, one about a writer in the 1960s, and another
about a delicatessen owner. The linking theme would be food; ‘Beijing’
became the name of a restaurant in Macau. As he began mapping out the
project (with some urgency, since Maggie Cheung was expected to leave to
act in a Hollywood film – which in the event went into turnaround), Wong
once again changed his mind. As he told me: ‘We planned the story about
the deliowner and then moved on to the one about the writer – at which
point, I realised that the one about the writer was the only one I really
wanted to make.’
The writer on his mind was Liu Yi-Chang (born in Shanghai in 1918),
who has lived and written in Hong Kong since 1948. Wong particularly
liked his short story Duidao, which has been serviceably but improvably
translated by Nancy Li as Intersections. The story first appeared in Chinese
in 1972, the translation in 1988 in the Chinese University of Hong Kong’s
periodical Renditions. (The title Duidao is the Chinese translation for tête-
bêche, a term from philately for a pair of stamps from adjacent sheets in
which one is the inverse of the other.) The translation has been reprinted in
the brochure that comes with the Criterion home-video editions of In the
Mood for Love and appears too in Block 2 Pictures’ photo book tête-bêche
(2001), which also contains Joanna C. Lee’s short interview with Liu Yi-
Chang about the film.
Liu’s story has forty-two mini-chapters which alternate between two
characters. One is Bai Chunyu, an elderly Shanghainese who has lived (like
his author) in Hong Kong since the late 1940s and watched the city grow
from a sleepy port into an overcrowded, high-rise metropolis. The other is
Ah Xing, a young Cantonese woman who worries that she doesn’t yet have
a boyfriend and picks up a pornographic photograph discarded in the street.
Bai looks back to the time he fled Shanghai as the civil war got nearer, and
also remembers a period he spent in Singapore. Ah Xing fantasises about
being a popular singer, about getting married, about sex. The story traces
their itineraries across one day. Independently, they witness the same events
in Mongkok – the robbery of a jewellery shop, a woman knocked down by
a car – and then happen to choose adjacent seats for the 5.30 screening of a
movie. But they never meet or speak, and eventually go their separate ways.
From quite early on, Wong felt a kinship between this story and the film
that In the Mood for Love eventually became. There was never any question
of directly adapting the story for the screen: Chow and Mrs Chan are about
the same age, their backgrounds are at best a marginal issue, and their
spatial and emotional trajectories converge from the start. Whereas Bai
Chunyu and Ah Xing are virtual polar opposites, and their differences reach
a crux in their reactions to the climax (a wedding) in the movie they happen
to watch side by side: he laughs out loud, scornful that a marriage is
presented as a happy ending, and she is disgusted by what she assumes to
be his lustful thoughts. This polarised reaction to the prospect of wedded
bliss – in essence, experience meets innocence – is one of several motifs
that trickle down into Wong’s film. Others include nostalgia for the traces
of Shanghai in old Hong Kong, the notion that a life can be sketched
through close attention to its quotidian routines, and the perception that
women and men can see the same things very differently. We should note in
passing that Chungking Express owed comparable debts to the Japanese
writer Murakami Haruki, but those were signalled only in the titling of
tracks on the soundtrack CD, not in the film itself.
Wong’s principal interest in Liu Yi-Chang is precisely that he is a writer.
Specifically, a writer whose work reflects the perceptions of a Shanghainese
immigrant in Hong Kong. Wong reveres writers, probably even more than
he reveres some cineastes (the one most often cited is Antonioni) and some
pieces of music. Much of the idiosyncrasy of Wong’s cinema springs from
his wish to apply lessons learned from literature and music to film-making.
In this instance, where journalist and wuxia novelist Chow is clearly not a
surrogate for Liu Yi-Chang, Wong chose to express his respect for Liu by
quoting him on screen. As we’ve noted, the film opens and closes with
quotations from Liu’s writings (they are presented like silentmovie
intertitles) and includes a third quotation between its two 1966 codas about
the past being a closed chapter. The wishful intention, I think, was to give
the whole film a literary cast. I recall that at the start of the long-drawn-out
subtitling process, Wong gave me a dozen Liu quotations he’d selected for
possible use as captions in the film, as usual allowing himself plenty of
leeway to make choices later. Here’s one I translated which didn’t make the
cut:
At that time, he hadn’t known what love was. He had liked several women. But it was always ‘like’
rather than ‘love’. He still doesn’t know what love is. Even when he married, he didn’t know. He
didn’t love his wife, and his wife didn’t love him.
When he started making In the Mood for Love in Hong Kong early in 1999,
Wong had no clear sense of what the film would become. On the contrary,
he was still thinking in terms of the Summer in Beijing frivolities. So he
filmed sequences in room 2046 showing Chow and Mrs Chan stir-frying
food in a wok; sequences showing them carrying kitchen implements and a
live chicken up to the room despite management protests; sequences in
which they sing (or more accurately mime) bits of Cantonese opera and
even a sequence in which they perform a pastiche of John Travolta and
Uma Thurman’s dance from Pulp Fiction (1994). All of this can be seen in
the ‘Making of’ documentary @ In the Mood for Love, which is available
on several home-video editions of the film. The documentary also includes
a rather surprising interview with Tony Leung in which he wonders aloud
why these comic sequences didn’t make it into the finished film; the
interview was clearly shot before he won the Best Actor prize in Cannes. @
In the Mood for Love was begun by Kwan Pun-Leung and Amos Lee, who
had made a film about the shoot of Happy Together, but their names don’t
appear in its credits.
Wong took the documentary out of their hands and finished it himself
with footage of the film’s premieres in various cities, possibly because he
couldn’t afford to go on paying them.
In passing, during the Hong Kong shoot in 1999, Wong hadn’t settled
on the film’s title either. His sales agent Fortissimo discussed pre-sales of
the film in the Berlin Film Festival market that year under the title The
Mood for Love. Their flyer promises delivery in May 2000 (a promise that
was more or less kept), but includes stills from scenes that would eventually
disappear from the film, including one of Chow and Mrs Chan eating
together in the daibaitong and another of the sex scene.
By 1999, Wong Kar Wai had reformulated his 1996 plan to economise
by making two films back to back. The new plan was to knock out In the
Mood for Love quickly, the film being essentially a two-hander to be shot in
a few recurring settings, and to then move on to the bigger 2046, still
thought of as an ‘operatic’ sci-fi movie. Since 2046 was to be a large-scale
production, investments were sought (and found) in neighbouring countries:
one concrete result was that the Japanese Kimura Takuya and the Thai
Thongchai ‘Bird’ Macintyre – top singing stars in their respective countries
– were contracted to appear in the film. Other stars – from China, South
Korea and who knows where else – were expected to join the cast list later.
Having turned singer Faye Wong into a movie star overnight in Chungking
Express, Wong remained confident that his touch could turn charismatic
pop stars into viable screen actors – despite his cautionary experience with
the wooden Leon Lai in Fallen Angels. This confidence carried through into
his casting of Norah Jones in My Blueberry Nights.
The first version of In the Mood for Love was indeed shot relatively
quickly in Hong Kong in 1999, including the slowed-motion trips to and
from the daibaitong (filmed in old alleyways in the Sheung Wan district of
Hong Kong Island) and the comic sequences. As usual, Christopher Doyle
was the cameraman, although he seems to have bridled quite early on at the
realisation that Wong was allowing him much less freedom to ‘dance’ with
the characters than he’d had on the second part of Chungking Express and
subsequent films. (He looks distinctly unhappy whenever he’s glimpsed in
the ‘Making of’ documentary.) Wong’s unit then decamped to Bangkok to
begin scouting locations for 2046 … and that’s when things became even
more complicated.
Mrs Chan buys noodles in the Sheung Wan daibaitong
Chris Doyle left the crew early in the reshoot, and Mark Lee (amongst
many other things, Hou Hsiao-Hsien’s regular cinematographer) came from
Taiwan to take his place. Wong subsequently took Doyle back for 2046, but
when Doyle left that production too, the break became absolute. Leaving
questions of ego aside, we can speculate that it actually made little
difference who shot In the Mood for Love. No fewer than six
cinematographers are credited on the film – Doyle and Lee as directors of
photography and Yu Lik-Wai, Lai Yiu-Fai (Doyle’s former assistant), Kwan
Pun-Leung and Chan Kwong-Hung as ‘additional cinematographers’ – and
I would defy any viewer to guess who shot what. On earlier films, Wong
had delighted in needling Doyle by asking things like ‘Is that the best you
can give me, Chris?’ (We know this from Doyle’s own account of the
shooting of Happy Together.) This mildly sadistic approach helped to make
Doyle a world-class cinematographer, and it greatly benefited Wong by
giving his films their distinctive look. On In the Mood for Love, though,
Wong soon developed – for the first time in his directorial career – a clear
sense of what he wanted to see and feel in the images. All he needed from
his cinematographers was a skilled realisation of those images. Doyle left, I
think, because he found that his creative input was no longer required.
It was during the Bangkok reshoot that the film acquired its character
and tone: sombre, wistful, yearning. We don’t know exactly when Wong
decided to use ‘Yumeji’s Theme’ and Nat King Cole’s Spanish versions of
standards on the soundtrack, but the music cues had certainly become
integral to the film’s effect – crucial, even – by the time William Chang
started editing it in earnest. As we’ve noted, the decision to add the coda at
Angkor Wat came at the very end of the Bangkok shoot, and the adventure
of filming in Cambodia added the extra days which very nearly caused the
film to miss its Cannes screening slot. In the event, the near-hysterical final
days of post-production turned out to be a dress rehearsal for a very similar
panic four years later when 2046, too, was ‘finished’ only just in time to be
screened on schedule in Cannes. But ‘finished’ is a relative concept in
Wong Kar Wai films. There was more tinkering with In the Mood for Love
after its Cannes premiere, and that included rewriting and rerecording the
odd line of dialogue.
3 Oblique Strategies
It’s a classic story, slow and very romantic. But when it came to editing, I couldn’t use the same pace
and had to speed it up. Still, the rhythm and speed of the cross-cutting were reduced significantly. We
tried something new. It may sound like a cliché, but an old poem crossed my mind while I was
editing the film. I’ve forgotten the title but it conjured a picture of two persons – or rather, the
reaction Person A has when seeing Person B. Does he/she leave at once, or after a long silence? The
poem worked magic and completely transformed the tempo.
Editing the Angkor Wat scene was pure pleasure – a big relief that he [Chow Mo-Wan] finally
extricates himself from the trivial romantic relationship to embark on a new journey.
William Chang, from interviews by Li Cheuk-To, Keith Chan, Lawrence Pun and Lawrence
Lau, published in William Chang, Art Director (Hong Kong: Hong Kong International Film
Festival Society, 2004). Translation slightly revised by Tony Rayns
There’s a paradox at the heart of Wong Kar Wai’s films. They generally
spring from pop culture ideas and sometimes have generic roots, but the
ways Wong frames and stages scenes and the ways William Chang edits the
shots owe little to classical film storytelling conventions. Wong shares with
many other Hong Kong directors his preference for building his scenes shot
by shot (rather than following the old Hollywood model, which starts with a
master shot of the scene and then inserts close-ups, point-of-view shots and
so on), but he tends to take his film language into areas of abstraction
avoided by his contemporaries. His and William Chang’s liking for
discontinuities in editing, coupled with their reliance on evocative music,
produces a quite idiosyncratic film syntax. This could be thought of as
Wong’s ‘art-house tendency’. The paradox is that it results in films which
most audiences – even the mass audience in China, which took up Wong’s
offer in The Grandmaster in a big way – have no trouble understanding.
The mix of visual discontinuities and strong, repetitive music of course
evokes the style of music videos, so it’s not a surprise that Wong is
sometimes dismissed as a glorified MTV director. (That, for example, was
the view taken by the late Edward Yang.) Such disrespect is not a total
stretch: Wong’s music videos, such as Six Days for DJ Shadow, do look
very much like sketches for episodes in features, and the same goes for his
more ambitious ads too. But the features don’t have the random, disposable
quality of MTV fodder, and the better music videos and ads don’t either.
Wong’s films have a core of lived, felt experience which is expressed
through narrative, however fractured. The tics of visual syntax that he and
William Chang have developed do not amount to a coherent system in the
Eisensteinian sense, but I think they do amount to a distinctive aesthetic.
Time to look at the way it works.
Let’s start with the film’s punctuation marks. The first thing shown by
our scene breakdown in Chapter 1 is the large number of fades to black in
the film. These are all quick fades, not the long-drawn-out fades
characteristic of some Hollywood films of the 1930s, but they are
nonetheless a somewhat archaic device. Many scenes end with a quick fade
to black, occasionally followed by a quick fade-in to the start of the next
scene, but equally often by a hard cut to something new. Elsewhere, the
film cuts hard from one scene to the next, sometimes covering the cut with
continuing music on the soundtrack. Most viewers watching the film in the
normal way will barely register this punctuation, but a closer examination
reveals that William Chang has made precise and careful decisions about
each and every scene transition.
Fades to black traditionally indicate the passage of time between one
scene and the next, and that’s often one of their functions here. The film’s
early scenes in the adjacent Suen and Koo apartments are mostly linked by
fades out and in, and we are certainly expected to understand them as
spanning weeks or months. (Wong was very proud of the way that he’d
built another signifier of passing time into the film by having Mrs Suen’s
Amah prepare seasonal Shanghainese dishes for the mahjong parties, and I
remember his frustration when I had to explain that it was impossible to
capture such nuances in the subtitles. He complained about this subtitling
‘failure’ in several early interviews about the film, but cut some of the
month-specific references to dishes after the Cannes premiere.) But the
opening scene also includes an indication of the way the film will jump-cut
through time when Wong deletes the whole of Mrs Suen’s discussion of
rental terms with Mrs Chan: the cut takes us directly from the two ladies
sitting down to talk to Mrs Chan leaving, saying she’ll let the landlady
know her decision. A further cut to Mr Chow climbing the narrow tenement
stairs, newspaper ad in hand, brings us back to the corridor outside the two
apartments – and to Mrs Suen’s line ‘It’s settled, then’. The cutting briskly
elides inessential material like the rent negotiation and Mrs Chan’s brief
hesitation about committing to the deal.
The heart of the matter: Mrs Chan’s first fleeting glance at Chow
He does this first by staging scenes and framing shots in ways that
deliberately exclude characters from our sight. This is most arresting when
he shows only one participant in a conversation, such as Mrs Chan’s
doorway chat with Mrs Koo, shown as a profile shot of Mrs Chan speaking.
This is followed by a brief glimpse of Mrs Koo accepting the pile of
Chow’s borrowed books and placing them in his room, but this action is
shown reflected in the Koo apartment’s blemished mirror – a visual
analogue for Liu Yi-Chang’s ‘everything he sees is blurred and indistinct’.
Wong uses the exact same strategy when Chow calls at the former Koo
apartment in the 1966 coda: the camera holds on a frontal shot of Chow’s
face, while the new owner is heard but not seen. And when the scene cuts to
the interior of the apartment, the new owner is glimpsed no more clearly
than Mrs Koo was.
This kind of ostentatiously selective presentation of the action extends
to many other sequences in the film. Take the scenes in Mr Ho’s shipping
company office. The first two go out of their way to highlight the large
Siemens clock which apparently hangs from the ceiling, although not
obviously in anyone’s line of sight. Whenever the clock face fills the frame,
we hear off-screen conversations and phone calls continuing on the
soundtrack. On our third visit to the office, the clock is scarcely glimpsed as
the chatter refers to an off-screen typhoon in the Philippines and the tie
which Mr Ho has received from his mistress as a birthday gift. But in the
fourth scene (a vignette featuring Mrs Chan on the phone to Chow, asking
about the letter he has received from his wife in Japan), we see almost
nothing but the clock.
There’s an element of self-parody to the frame-filling shots of the clock,
which refer back to the original Days of Being Wild poster. It showed the
starry cast grouped in a retro interior with a huge clock face hanging over
them; not a Dali-type clock face – it’s not melting – but flattened, distorted
and patently symbolic. Of course, the clock shots here are also sucker-bait
for the countless commentators who have presumed that ‘time’ is Wong’s
major theme. Like close-ups of clocks in any film, these fulfil the minimal
narrative function of telling us what time it is, and whether or not Mrs Chan
is working late today. At a stretch, we might make a connection between
them and the tricky schedule Mrs Chan has to engineer to make sure that
Mr Ho’s wife and mistress never cross paths. Or maybe the clock merely
symbolises the horrors of salaried office work? Whatever, the frame-filling
close-ups of the clock face belong to a subset of assertively bizarre images
that runs through the film, and we’ll return to that in a moment.
Wong compounds his ‘off-screen strategy’ in several other ways. He
limits some actions to shots of the characters’ feet: Mrs Chan’s hasty
getaway from Chow’s room after her night hiding from the mahjong
players, seen from under the bed in a shot which also highlights Chow’s
slippers; Chow’s first venture along the corridor leading to room 2046; the
montage of Mrs Chan’s feet on the stairs when she first goes to the hotel.
He also periodically films Chow and Mrs Chan at waist height, leaving their
faces temporarily off screen: this first happens when Mrs Chan enters Mrs
Suen’s living room during a mahjong party in an early scene, and last
happens when Chow strides along the alley with a gift box under his arm in
the 1966 coda. And he presents some actions from a perspective that
remains opaque to the viewer: the repeated shots of Mrs Chan looking out
of Mrs Suen’s living-room window are apparently shown from another
window opposite, a perspective emphasised by the inclusion of blurred
foreground objects; and quite a lot of the ‘role-play’ in the alley is shown in
lateral tracking shots taken from inside one of the buildings, with its walls
and barred windows frequently obscuring our view of the characters.
We could extend this point into a consideration of the way Wong avoids
conventional eyeline matches when he cross-cuts between the speakers in
conversation scenes: for example, in two newspaper office conversations
between Chow and Ping. The shots of the two speakers seem deliberately
ill-matched, as if Wong wants us to feel that there’s something intangibly
disquieting about the film’s syntax. But to go further down that road would
be academic, and that is far beyond the scope and ambition of this slim
volume.
Trapped by the mahjong game outside the door, with an unexplained foreground obstruction
And the third such shot appears when Mrs Chan invades Chow’s hotel
room in Singapore, immediately before the under-the-bed shot of her feet in
high heels as she reaches for the slippers. It’s an odd view of the room’s
decor, vertically bisected by a brown curtain; Mrs Chan is off screen. The
throw of light from a lamp on the off-white wall is distantly reminiscent of
the lighting in the western restaurant. The shot occurs just after Mrs Chan
has called Chow’s newspaper office but failed to speak down the phone
line, and its ‘emptiness’ seems to relate to her silence.
Three narratively redundant shots of decor: Mr Ho’s office, the western restaurant and Chow’s
Singapore hotel room
These shots of decor form a small but striking part of the film’s visual
repertoire. Their sporadic appearance helps to consolidate the sense that
there are ‘secret’ connections between disparate times, places and events.
This sense in turn has an oblique connection with Wong’s emphasis on
repression and the problem of expressing feelings face to face. There are no
literal links; it’s a matter of mood and unspoken thoughts. As Wong said in
the interview quoted at the start of Chapter 2, his characters are versions of
himself. ‘That’s why my characters have such closed-off lives and can’t
reveal themselves; they’re afraid to get hurt.’
The use of music, particularly ‘Yumeji’s Theme’, justifies the use of
slowed motion in a similarly oblique way. Slightly slowing the movements
of Chow and Mrs Chan makes their steps seem dancelike. It’s an assertively
unrealistic tic of style, but it passes unquestioned by most viewers. Of
course, slowed motion emphasises the sexiness of Mrs Chan’s steps in her
constrictive qipao, but the slowing of the image also chimes with the
characters’ emotional awkwardness: their hesitations and the
embarrassment they feel about a nascent mutual attraction. Modern popular
cinema has ‘normalised’ the use of slow motion for showing violent action
and explosions to the extent that no viewer ever takes the visual effect as
disruptive to the flow of events, but to slow the motion slightly as Wong
does here – building on his play with relative perceptions of time in
Chungking Express – is less usual. The music obliquely ‘explains’ it and
suggests the unspoken feelings in play. It also makes the slowed-motion
shots an integral part of Wong Kar Wai’s offer to his audience, and the
pleasure viewers take in watching them is a key part of the deal.
There’s more to say about the film’s elisions, particularly the way they
withhold narratively significant information. In Chapter 2, we noted that
Wong’s decision to excise the sex scene between Chow and Mrs Chan in
room 2046 was taken very late in the editing, a matter of days before the
premiere in Cannes. But that omission is ‘covered’ by the elaborate build-
up to the ‘missing’ scene: the lengthy montage in which we hear the
voiceover lines ‘I don’t want to go home tonight’ and ‘It’s me … if there’s
an extra ticket, would you come with me?’ and see the couple becoming
more physically intimate in the back of a taxi. The same is not true of Mrs
Chan’s first visit to room 2046. After the mini-montage of shots of her feet
rushing up and down the hotel’s stairs and along the Lynchian corridor with
its billowing red drapes, the film cuts to a shot of Chow smoking and
looking out of the window. We hear a knock at the door. Then there’s a hard
cut to a wide shot of the corridor as Mrs Chan leaves at the end of their
meeting, promising to return next day. Nothing at all is shown of what was
said or done in the room, and the continuity implied by the edits makes us
all the more conscious that we’ve been denied information.
The film contains several other time-jumps within apparently integral
scenes: there’s one at the end of the first visit to the daibaitong, in which
we’ve seen Mrs Chan and Chow separately, when there’s a hard cut to
another occasion when they pass each other on the stone steps, and another
in the second scene in the western restaurant, when there’s a hard cut from
one dinner to another towards the end of the scene. In both those examples,
the cuts are ‘disguised’ by continuing music (‘Yumeji’s Theme’ in the first
case, Nat King Cole in the second) but at the same time ‘revealed’ by Mrs
Chan’s changes of qipao. In neither case, though, is there any sense that the
film is withholding anything. It’s merely quickening the pace of its story
development, advancing the burgeoning relationship between Chow and
Mrs Chan.
But other narrative elisions make the storytelling wilfully oblique. They
range from the minor (Ping’s move to Singapore, Mrs Chan’s mysteriously
easy access to Chow’s Singapore hotel room) to the absolutely major (Mrs
Chan having a son, the marital status of both Chow and Mrs Chan in 1966).
These elisions are designed to leave us speculating. The close-up of the
hotel boy denying that anyone has been in Chow’s hotel room – the only
such close-up of a supporting character in the whole film – leads us to
speculate that he’s lying, that he, too, fell victim to Mrs Chan’s charm.
More significantly, we can speculate that if Mrs Chan had a child that
wasn’t her husband’s, that would certainly have led her to a formal
separation and divorce, despite her face-saving assurance to Mrs Suen in
1966 that Mr Chan is ‘fine’.
Our speculations are ultimately subsumed into the film’s closing sense
that an era has passed, a chapter has ended. The film is finally all about the
bittersweet memory of something lost. Psychologically, Wong’s ‘off-screen
strategy’ is all about that loss. The film’s evasions, elisions, exclusions,
disjunctions and enigmas – even its momentary fixations on decor – are all
about the imperfect retrieval of a memory, while its evocative and insistent
music is all about smiling or sobbing through the parts that time has
heightened or discoloured or erased. The tenor of the ending is clear: time
to move on.
4 Miscellany
You know, what kept me working on this film for such a long time was that I became addicted to it –
specifically, to the mood it conjured up.
Wong Kar Wai (2000), interview by Tony Rayns
Wong Kar Wai traces his decision to push the adulterers off screen back to
his reading of Julio Cortázar, but I suspect that the strategy may have other
roots too. Wong’s ‘off-screen’ treatment of the adulterers closely resembles
one aspect of Zhang Yimou’s Raise the Red Lantern (Dahong Denglong
Gaogao Gua [1991]). Zhang’s film is about a nineteen-year-old woman
(played by Gong Li) who becomes the fourth wife of the wealthy head of a
clan in feudal China; she finds herself locked in an internecine rivalry with
the other wives for the master’s affections. One of the film’s more
interesting visual ideas is to relegate the patriarch (played by Ma Jingwu, a
Film Academy professor) to off-screen space; we occasionally see his limbs
or catch sight of him from behind, but barely glimpse his face. Zhang
Yimou certainly thought that Wong was in his debt, since he hired Maggie
Cheung, Tony Leung and Chris Doyle for Hero (Yingxiong [2002]), his first
film after the release of In the Mood for Love.
Billowing drapes in the Lynchian corridor leading to room 2046
Zhang Yimou (centre) meets Maggie Cheung and Tony Leung at the Beijing premiere of In the Mood
for Love
The ‘deleted scenes’ from In the Mood for Love, which are available on
some home-movie editions of the film, are quite distinct from the try-out
comic sequences seen in the ‘Making of’ documentary @ In the Mood for
Love. They all relate to the film in its final form, but offer a veritable garden
of forking paths of alternative storylines and outcomes. None of them was
‘deleted’ in the usual sense; they were not trimmed to improve the film’s
pacing but rejected because Wong changed his mind about them. Wong has
grouped them in four chapters. They include three more plays of ‘Yumeji’s
Theme’.
The Secret of Room 2046 first shows Chow and Mrs Chan extending
their role-play into a rehearsal of sex; neither can go through with it. (Wong
says in a commentary that he thought at one time of starting the film with
these scenes.) In the next scene, Chow is feeling ill; he returns to the room
with a variety of medicines. Mrs Chan arrives (wearing the red coat over a
patterned white qipao) to look after him, and asks why he’s rented room
2046 again. The third scene features the moment they have sex (almost
entirely off screen), after some moody preambles involving rain and
cigarettes. It contains Mrs Chan’s line ‘I don’t want to go home tonight’ –
recycled as a voiceover in the final version of the film, where it’s heard over
a rear view of the taxi.
Days in Singapore starts with Chow eating a durian and a lengthy
caption quote from Liu Yi-Chang’s Duidao; the text is Bai Chunyu’s
memory of being told that anyone who develops a taste for durian in
Singapore is never likely to return home. (Wong’s commentary says that
this was the last material filmed in Bangkok, very early in the morning on
the day of the unit’s departure for Cambodia.) The next scene is an
alternative version of the radio request-show scene, set in Mrs Suen’s
apartment. This time, Zhou Xuan’s song is dedicated to Mrs Chan not by
her husband in Tokyo but by Mr Chow in Singapore. Mrs Chan isn’t
listening, and the Amah calls her to hear it. The song plays over a
languorous shot of the radio set. The third scene shows Mr Ho giving Mrs
Chan a ticket for a cruise to Singapore, urging her to take a break. The
fourth scene shows her meeting Ping in Singapore (there is no clue to
Chow’s whereabouts) and discussing his romantic disappointments rather
than hers. Mrs Chan is distracted, and struggles to show interest.
Deleted scene: Chow and Mrs Chan awkwardly rehearse sex in room 2046
In the Seventies features scenes shot in Hong Kong before the unit
decamped to Bangkok. In 1972, Mrs Chan is still married, and preparing to
emigrate to join her husband and son overseas. She is getting ready to sell
the apartment she bought from Mrs Suen, and arrives back to find a
potential buyer chatting with her maid. The would-be buyer calls herself
Lulu (she is apparently a singer from Singapore), but seems more interested
in talking about her ‘husband’ Mr Chow and in finding out about Mrs Chan
than she is in the apartment. The next scene shows Lulu’s bitter row with
Chow in the alley near the building. She has brought him there because she
knows (from Ping) that he used to live in the apartment nearby and had
feelings for the woman who lives there now. She blames him for never
telling her anything himself; he angrily pushes her out of his life, saying he
never asked her to follow him. The third scene shows Mrs Chan, in slowed
motion, going to the daibaitong for noodles – and still overdressing for the
occasion, this time in a scarlet dress with a large fur collar. In the
daibaitong, she finds Chow eating. The final scene starts with Mrs Chan on
the phone to her husband (‘It’s very cold in Hong Kong’) and ends with her
asleep on her sofa.
And The Secret Reunion in Angkor Wat features a chance encounter in
the ruins between Chow and Mrs Chan, both there as tourists with groups.
He says that he’s now working in Vietnam. She says her husband is in
Phnom Penh, discussing a new business venture, and not worried about the
threat of war in the country. She mentions that Ping is about to marry a
Miss Singapore. They part with a handshake, but he calls after her with one
last question: did she ever try to call him? She says she doesn’t remember.
Chow is then seen placing a red, heart-shaped locket (seen once before in
these ‘deleted scenes’) in the Angkor Wat wall before he whispers into it.
Wong doesn’t offer any commentary over these scenes but he told me in
2000 that he shot them only because Maggie Cheung was so eager to join
the unit in Angkor Wat: ‘She even volunteered to come along as the stills
photographer … since she was there, we thought we might as well do
something with her.’
***
Wong Kar Wai has always had a liking for colourful supporting characters,
and Chow’s hard-drinking, hard-gambling, hard-whoring colleague Ping is
one of his best. The character is played by Siu Ping-Lam, in real life one of
the film’s props men. Wong created the character for him midway through
the original Hong Kong shoot, liking his ‘Sixties look’. Ping tells Chow in
the finished film that he’s an ordinary guy and doesn’t have secrets, but his
conversation with Mrs Chan in the deleted scenes starts with him telling her
secrets about his chequered love life. Siu entered the Hong Kong film
industry in the 1980s as a props man and had worked for Wong on Days of
Being Wild, Ashes of Time, Fallen Angels and Happy Together, as well as
such films as A Chinese Ghost Story (1987) for Ching Siu-Tung and Green
Snake (1993) for Tsui Hark. He had never acted before, but reprised his role
as Ping in 2046.
Wong had form with this kind of casting. The manager of the Midnight
Express snack counter in Chungking Express was played by ‘Piggy’ Chan,
the film’s stills photographer.
***
Cannes Film Festival, May 2001. One year on from his success with In the
Mood for Love, Wong is invited back to give what the festival calls a
‘Leçon de cinéma’ but what you or I would call a sit-down Q&A with
Gilles Ciment. The text of their conversation is usefully printed in Peter
Brunette’s book Wong Kar-wai (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois
Press, 2005). Before the session, Wong screens a previously unseen short
film: In the Mood for Love 2001, again starring Maggie Cheung and Tony
Leung. He says that it was shot before he made the feature, over two days
and nights in Hong Kong, and was based on one of the original ideas for
Summer in Beijing.
I saw this short only once, some fifteen years ago, and didn’t take notes
– so I don’t remember it that clearly. It has never been released on DVD or
Blu-ray, possibly because Wong didn’t clear the rights to use Bryan Ferry’s
version of the Jimmy McHugh–Dorothy Fields song ‘I’m in the Mood for
Love’ on the soundtrack. (However, there is a music video for the Bryan
Ferry cover version on YouTube which uses shots and out-takes from In the
Mood for Love and is credited to Wong and Jet Tone.) I recall that the short
was set entirely in a 7/11 convenience store, that its plot hinged on a bet of
some sort about food, and that it was very amusing. Most likely it will
never be shown again, although its slim storyline was inflated to become
the basis for Wong’s My Blueberry Nights.
Credits
Huayang Nianhua/In
the Mood for Love
Hong Kong/France 2000
Directed by
Wong Kar Wai
Produced by
Wong Kar Wai
Executive Producer
Chan Ye-Cheng
Associate Producer
Jacky Pang
[Pang Yee-Wah]
Production Manager
Law Kam-Chuen
Production Supervisor
Wong Lai-Tak
Assistant Producer
Chan Wai-Si
Screenplay
Wong Kar Wai
Quoted Writer
Liu Yi-Chang
Directors of
Photography
Christopher Doyle
Mark Lee [Li Pingbin]
Additional
Cinematography
Kwan Pun-Leung
Yu Lik-Wai
Lai Yiu-Fai
Chan Kwong-Hung
Camera Assistant
Lai Yiu-Fai
Lighting Assistant
Kwan Wing-Cheung
Camera Crew
Ho Kin-Kwong
Ho Ka-Fai
Lau Tin-Wah
Chief Editor
William Chang
[Chang Suk-Ping]
Editor
Chan Kei-Hap
Production Designer
William Chang
[Chang Suk-Ping]
Art Director
Man Lim-Chung
Assistant Art Director
Lui Fung-Saan
Props Master
Wong Chi-On
Props Men
Tang Nau-Wah
Chan Ching-Nau
Siu Ping-Lam
Make-up
Kwan Kei-Noh
Assistant Make-up
Lui Si-Wing
Hair Design
Wong Kwok-Hung
Hairdresser
Luk Ha-Fong
Gaffer
Wong Chi-Ming
Electricians
Chan Hon-Sung
Kwan Wing-Kin
Assistant Directors
Siu Wai-Keung
Kong Yeuk-Sing
Continuity
Yu Haw-Yan
Sound Design
Tu Duu-Chih [Du Duzhi]
Pong Asvinikul
Sound Recordists
Kuo Li-Chi
Tang Shiang-Chu
Liang Chi-Da
Original Music
Michael Galasso
Other Music
‘Yumeji’s Theme’ by Umebayashi Shigeru ‘Aquellos ojos verdes’ by L. W. Gilbert and N.
Menendez, sung by Nat King Cole ‘Te quiero dijiste’ by Marie Grever, sung by Nat King Cole
‘Quizas, quizas, quizas’ by Osvaldo Ferres, sung by Nat King Cole ‘Huayang de Nianhua’ by Chen
Minxin, sung by Zhou Xuan The film’s end credits also list several other vintage Chinese songs and
excerpts from traditional Chinese operas, but (with the exception of a short percussive clip from a
Cantonese opera) none of them is actually heard in the finished film.
Some do appear in the ‘Making of’ documentary @ In the Mood for Love, which, incidentally,
reveals how Wong Kar Wai at some stage thought of using them.
Visual Consultant
(Post-production)
Calmen Lui
Stills Photographer
Wing Shya
Video Documentation
Kwan Pun-Leung
Amos Lee
English Subtitles
Tony Rayns
James Tsim
Z-Access
https://wikipedia.org/wiki/Z-Library
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