In the mood for love

Two decades later, Wong Kar-Wai's masterpiece still gives us goosebumps, scene by scene, shot by shot, with frames that look like canvases torn from a museum. Amidst red curtains and beautiful patterned walls, to the sound of Nat King Cole's boleros and Umebayashi's hypnotic waltz, here we remain, in a Hong Kong guesthouse, ecstatic at the sway of Mrs. Chan and her collection of Chinese qipaos, crossing paths again and again with her neighbor, the exquisite Mr. Chow, pretending to ignore each other while passion devours them from within. She always waits for her husband. He for his wife. With time, they discover that both are having an affair, and there begins their particular complicit infidelity, first in glances, in touches, in arbitrary encounters, and then in intimate dates that never culminate.

The film only shows what is strictly necessary. We are in the realm of emptiness. Of absence. Of the unspoken word.

Welcome to In the Mood for Love, an enchanted ritual where nothing moves directly and nothing is said openly; where every mirror or window, every alleyway traps and condemns its characters to circle the same places, to repeat the same routines in a kind of eternal immobility, like a thousand-times-restarted rehearsal of a play that will never be performed. There is hardly any dialogue. Words are preserved. The plot flows through the lovers' bodies and the spaces they inhabit: seemingly trivial gestures, like lighting a cigarette or stroking an arm, become memorable moments. A dreamlike atmosphere envelops the settings, with reds and blacks overflowing through the rooms, from the velvet bedspread to the nightstand lamp; greens spreading over aged wallpaper; screens and porcelain vases dissolving into spectral reflections.

Images insist on capturing the ephemeral, on giving texture to the intangible, trying to make feelings visible with flashes and glints, spots of light and color, frozen acceleration effects, and unstable framing, capturing faces, movements, gestures. But we are in the realm of absence. Of painful renunciation. So the indefiniteness perpetuates, the encounter never materializes, and the relationship twists until it agonizes in memory.

Those times are gone. Everything that was there then disappeared, a sign reads in the final measures. All that will remain then is the memory of what could have been and wasn't. Of something that remained trapped in the void of existence. That only survives in the hearts of its protagonists and, from now on, in our new collection.