Screen/Society--"In the Mood for Love" (Wong Kar-wai, 2000)

IN THE MOOD FOR LOVE
(Wong Kar-wai, 2000, 98 min, Hong Kong, Cantonese, Shanghainese, French, and Spanish w/English subtitles, DCP)

-- Q&A to follow with Giorgio Biancorosso, Professor of Music at the University of Hong Kong and author of "Remixing Wong Kar-wai: Music, Bricolage, and the Aesthetics of Oblivion"

Hong Kong, 1962: Chow Mo-Wan (Tony Leung) and Su Li-Zhen (Maggie Cheung) move into neighboring apartments on the same day. Their encounters are formal and polite-until a discovery about their spouses creates an intimate bond between them. At once delicately mannered and visually extravagant, IN THE MOOD FOR LOVE is a masterful evocation of romantic yearning and its fleeting moments. With its aching soundtrack and exquisitely abstract cinematography by Christopher Doyle and Mark Lee Ping Bing, this film has been a major stylistic influence on the past decade of cinema, and is a milestone in Wong's redoubtable career.

-- Ranked 5th in Sight & Sound's Greatest Films of All Time critics' poll (2022)

"Wong's porous, often headily non-verbal filmmaking trusts us to feel the lovers' ennui and melancholy - and further, to identify it within ourselves - via its sheer accumulation of sounds, images and sense memories: be it the damp wraiths of steam swirling from an opened noodle container, the warm, vinyl-roughened croon of Nat King Cole on the soundtrack or the impossible lobby-card beauty of Tony Leung and Maggie Cheung, both preserved here in their ravishing prime, and somehow convincing as ordinary mortals made movie-star beautiful by love." - Guy Lodge, BFI