Film Club No. 003

Hong Kong, 1962. Two neighbours discover that their spouses are having an affair and find themselves drawn into a relationship of their own, where growing affection collides with social convention, personal loyalty and the fear of becoming what they despise.

1. The Programme

Director: Wong Kar-wai
Screenplay: Wong Kar-wai
Starring: Tony Leung Chiu-wai, Maggie Cheung
Filmed: 1999–2000, principally in Bangkok, Thailand, with additional filming in Hong Kong and Cambodia
Released: 2000
Cinematography: Christopher Doyle, Mark Lee Ping-bin
Primary Genre: Romantic Drama
Secondary Genres: Period Drama, Art Cinema

Hong Kong, 1962. Two married strangers move into neighbouring rooms in a crowded apartment building on the same day. Chow Mo-wan (Tony Leung) is a journalist, while Su Li-zhen (Maggie Cheung), usually addressed as Mrs Chan, works as a secretary. Their spouses are frequently absent, and the two initially exchange little more than polite greetings in the corridors and stairways of their shared building.

Gradually, they discover that their respective partners are having an affair with one another. What begins as a shared experience of betrayal develops into an increasingly intimate friendship, as the two attempt to understand how their marriages have unravelled.

Directed by Wong Kar-wai, In the Mood for Love is set within Hong Kong’s Shanghainese expatriate community, where cramped accommodation, shared meals and close neighbours create a world in which private lives are rarely entirely private.

Yet despite the physical proximity of its characters, this is a film about emotional distance. Chow and Mrs Chan are drawn together by circumstances neither has chosen, while the social conventions surrounding them make expressing their feelings increasingly difficult.

Rather than following the familiar trajectory of a screen romance, Wong is interested in the moments surrounding it: chance encounters, conversations that end too soon, opportunities missed and feelings left unspoken. The result is a story in which the smallest gestures can carry enormous emotional weight.

2. Keep Your Eyes Open

A world glimpsed through doorways

One of the film’s most striking characteristics is how frequently its characters are observed through doorframes, windows, corridors and other obstructions.

Wong and his cinematographers, Christopher Doyle and Mark Lee Ping-bin, often position the camera as though it is watching from an adjoining room. Sometimes a wall or piece of furniture occupies much of the image, leaving the characters confined to a narrow portion of the frame.

This is more than an attractive visual technique. The composition reflects the restricted lives of the protagonists. They inhabit a world of shared spaces, where conversations can be overheard and even innocent encounters risk attracting suspicion.

Notice how rarely Chow and Mrs Chan appear entirely free within their surroundings. Even when alone, the architecture seems to impose boundaries upon them.

The camera also makes us conscious of our position as observers. We are frequently allowed to see only fragments of their lives, just as the neighbours around them might.

The choreography of repetition

Watch the repeated journeys to the noodle stall, particularly Mrs Chan’s movements through the narrow stairway.

These sequences are often filmed in slow motion, accompanied by Shigeru Umebayashi’s recurring waltz, Yumeji’s Theme. The combination transforms otherwise unremarkable daily routines into something almost ceremonial.

The music’s measured rhythm gives these encounters an elegance that contrasts with their mundane circumstances. A trip to buy dinner becomes an occasion filled with possibility.

Wong repeatedly returns to similar locations, gestures and movements, but subtle changes in their presentation suggest the development of the relationship.

Pay attention to how repetition alters our perception of time. We are not always watching individual, clearly defined events. Sometimes it feels as though we are witnessing memories of events, with particular details preserved while everything around them has faded.

Colour, costume and the passage of time

Maggie Cheung’s extraordinary collection of cheongsams is among the film’s most memorable visual features.

Their intricate patterns and changing colours contrast with the relatively subdued surroundings. The dresses are beautiful, but their fitted construction also suggests the formality and restraint governing Mrs Chan’s behaviour.

They perform another function: marking the passage of time.

Wong frequently avoids conventional transitions between days or weeks. Instead, a change of dress, a familiar location or a repeated action indicates that life has moved forward.

The film’s saturated reds, deep greens and warm amber lighting contribute to its atmosphere of intimacy and nostalgia. Yet these colours do not necessarily reflect happiness. The richness of the images frequently accompanies moments of loneliness or uncertainty.

Notice the contrast between the visual warmth of the environments and the emotional isolation of the people occupying them.

The people we never quite see

An unusual decision is the near-total absence of the protagonists’ spouses from our view.

Although their actions initiate the story, Wong largely denies them a conventional screen presence. We hear voices, observe the consequences of their behaviour and understand their importance, but they remain elusive.

This keeps the attention firmly on Chow and Mrs Chan, rather than inviting us to investigate the personalities or motivations of the unfaithful partners.

It also establishes a recurring idea: important events can remain beyond our sight, while their emotional consequences occupy the entire film.

The same principle applies to conversations and encounters that Wong chooses not to show directly. His omissions encourage us to reconstruct the relationships from what remains.

A soundtrack of longing

Alongside Umebayashi’s waltz, Wong repeatedly uses Nat King Cole’s Spanish-language recordings, including Quizás, Quizás, Quizás.

The lyrics, with their repeated uncertainty, complement a story in which emotional intentions remain difficult to establish.

Music frequently continues across scenes, connecting moments that may be separated by considerable periods of time. The recurring melodies create an impression of feelings that persist even as circumstances change.

Listen to the way music sometimes seems to express what the characters themselves cannot say.

SPOILERS FROM THIS POINT ON…

3. After the Credits

Playing at love

One of the film’s most revealing ideas emerges when Chow and Mrs Chan begin rehearsing imagined conversations between their spouses.

Initially, these exercises appear to be attempts to understand how the affair began. By assuming the roles of their partners, they hope to reconstruct the circumstances of the betrayal.

But the distinction between performance and genuine feeling becomes increasingly uncertain.

When Mrs Chan rehearses confronting her husband, the emotional consequences are real even though the encounter is staged. Later, the pair rehearse their own separation, and the boundary between pretending and experiencing becomes almost impossible to distinguish.

Wong repeatedly uses these scenes to destabilise our understanding of the relationship. Are the characters practising conversations they might have, or using the safety of performance to express feelings they cannot otherwise acknowledge?

Their insistence that they will not behave like their spouses becomes a defining moral boundary. Yet as their attachment deepens, the distinction between emotional intimacy and marital infidelity becomes increasingly difficult to maintain.

The film does not simply present two people prevented from being together by society. Their restraint also comes from their own understanding of who they wish to be.

The spaces between moments

Unlike many romantic dramas, In the Mood for Love offers little sense of a continuous, unfolding relationship.

Instead, it presents fragments: meals, conversations, encounters in corridors and moments of solitude.

Consider the scenes in which Chow and Mrs Chan occupy a hotel room together. The room offers an escape from the watchful environment of their apartment building, but it never feels entirely removed from the constraints of their everyday lives.

The celebrated room number, 2046, becomes a place associated with possibilities that cannot be fully realised. It is both a physical refuge and a space in which an alternative life can briefly be imagined.

Wong’s editing makes the passage of time increasingly difficult to grasp. We sense that the relationship has deepened, but much of that development occurs outside the scenes we are permitted to witness.

This is one of the film’s central achievements: it persuades us of the significance of a relationship while withholding many of the events through which a more conventional film would establish it.

The cruelty of timing

The film’s final movement takes the story beyond its original setting, following the characters into the middle of the 1960s.

Chow leaves for Singapore. Mrs Chan subsequently visits his room there, but the possibility of a reunion slips away. Later, both return separately to the Hong Kong apartment building, arriving at different times.

Their failure to reconnect is not the consequence of a dramatic confrontation or a single disastrous decision.

Instead, their lives gradually move out of alignment.

This makes the ending particularly painful. Nothing suggests that their feelings have simply disappeared. What has changed is the possibility of acting upon them.

Wong presents time not merely as the backdrop to the relationship, but as one of the forces determining its outcome. A meeting that might have changed everything becomes impossible because one person arrives too early or too late.

The film’s recurring corridors and doorways acquire a different significance here. Spaces once filled with possibility become reminders of opportunities that have passed.

A secret buried in stone

The final sequence takes Chow to Angkor Wat in Cambodia, where he whispers a secret into a cavity in the ancient stonework before sealing it with mud.

Earlier in the film, Chow describes an old custom in which people entrusted their secrets to holes in trees, covering them afterwards so that nobody else could discover what had been said.

The final scene gives physical form to that idea.

Throughout the film, the characters have struggled to articulate their feelings, even to one another. Now Chow expresses something we are deliberately prevented from hearing.

It is a fitting reversal of the usual cinematic confession. Rather than revealing a character’s innermost thoughts to the audience, Wong preserves their privacy.

The setting also changes the scale of the story. Against the ancient architecture of Angkor Wat, the brief, intensely personal relationship becomes one small moment within a much longer passage of history.

The film’s closing reflections on vanished years reinforce this sense of irretrievable time. The past remains emotionally vivid, but it cannot be recovered or altered.

The shape of a memory

Perhaps the most useful way to understand In the Mood for Love is not as a straightforward account of a romance, but as an attempt to recreate how a lost relationship survives in memory.

Memory rarely preserves events in an orderly sequence. It retains fragments: a particular song, the colour of a dress, a staircase, the way somebody turned to look at us.

Wong constructs the film from precisely these kinds of details.

Its repetitions, omissions and abrupt passages of time resemble the way we revisit significant experiences long after they have ended. Certain moments become disproportionately important, while entire periods disappear.

The camera’s obstructed views also take on another meaning. Perhaps we never possessed a complete understanding of these events in the first place.

We are left with images of two people who shared something significant but could never fully define it, even to themselves.

And, like Chow’s secret at Angkor Wat, whatever remains of that experience belongs ultimately to those who lived it.