RETURN TO FIRST IMPRESSIONS RETURN TO CHA REVIEW OF BOOKS AND FILMS
Wong Kar-wai (director), In the Mood for Love, 2000. 98 min.
Wong Kar-Waiโs In the Mood for Love (2000) has become known as one of the greatest love stories of 21st-century cinema. Perhaps this is due to its English title, which prompts viewers to focus on the unfulfilled desire of its charismatic protagonists. Yet reviewers often lose sight of the fact that the affairs begin because of isolation induced by navigating a globalised world: the isolation of Chow Mo-wanโs and Su Li-zhenโs respective spouses, who work overseas, and the isolation of both Chow and Su as Shanghainese refugees in British Hong Kong.
Chow and Su are drawn together by a shared sense of isolation from the community into which they have migrated. Wong never makes the reasons for this isolation explicit. We can only speculate by comparing Suโs immaculate hair, makeup and stunning cheongsams with the landladyโs relatively plain dress and presentation. Or perhaps we may conclude that the interests of both protagonists, which involve wuxia fiction as opposed to mahjong, do not lend themselves to socialising with their new community. Notably, Chow and Su are also marked out by the gifts of their spouses (rice cooker, tie and handbag). These foreign goods, which seem to be desirably unique because of their lack of availability in Hong Kong, signify the flow of global capital. They mark Chow and Su as having access to a world that the members of the community around them does not.
We never see the two protagonistsโ spouses. But Wong pointedly has both Chow and Su attempting to reenact how their spouses may have initiated a relationship with each other. Performance blurs into filmic reality as Chow and Su fall in love with each other, drawn together by shared interests and a sense of isolation born of being in a new environment. We do not need to hear their spousesโ accounts of how their affair must have begun. We know.
The marriages of Chow and Su, broken by time and distance, haunt the unfulfilled romance depicted in Wongโs film. Both protagonists are married and hurt by the betrayal of their spousesโwe assume they were at least once deeply in love with their significant others. Thus, Wong makes us ask: would this particular romance have gone the same way if it had been allowed its fulfilment? We become deeply aware that the pain of the unfulfilled love is but the obverse of its pleasure: the โflowery yearsโ referenced in the Chinese title of the movie are bittersweet because they mark (in the words of Philip Larkin) the โstrength and pain of being youngโ that is โfor others undiminished elsewhereโ (144). The love affair gains an aura of inviolability for its protagonists and for us because it never had the chance to go sour. Partly this is also because Chow continues moving from place to place; he leaves Hong Kong for Singapore, effectively terminating the affair with Su, and is later seen in Cambodia at the filmโs end. ย ย
Unlike Sofia Coppolaโs Bob Harris and Charlotte in Lost in Translation (2003), Chow and Su are not tourists with seemingly infinite amounts of money parked in a fancy hotel, free to do as they please. The extreme privilege of Coppolaโs protagonists is demonstrated by the fetishising yet disdainful eye of the American otherโmost uncomfortably and memorably when Harris pokes fun at an uncomprehending sushi chef in English. Coppolaโs film revels in the sights and sounds of Japan as tourist location, as a place where the affluent can indulge in flings to mitigate their sense of alienation. But in Wongโs movie, the desaturated colours of the film, the mirrors, darkness, rain, and narrow hallways of the movie seem to be less evocative of the vibrancy of Hong Kong life than the protagonistsโ deep sense of loneliness.
The various hints about why Chow and Su seem to live a life disengaged from the Hong Kong community offer us more food for thought on globalisation than Coppolaโs evocation of what Fredric Jameson might term the postmodern sublime. Although lonely, Su repels all overtures of friendship made by her landlady. We never see the protagonists engaging in friendly chit-chat with the noodle vendor whose stall they frequent. Rather, Wongโs protagonists live in constant fear of their neighboursโ speculations about their relationship.
The movie seems to ask: what perverse joys and pains does migration bring us? How do locals like Suโs landlady react to newcomers from abroad? Do the protagonists feel so miserable because of the pressure of what Peter Preston (in his Observer review of the movie) calls the norms of โa more traditional Chinese societyโ (104)? These questions linger in the background of the movie. That they surface at all is to Wongโs credit. That relatively little attention has been paid to these questions by us movie-goers is not to ours.
Works Cited
Larkin, Philip. Collected Poems. Ed. Anthony Thwaite.ย New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux and The Marvell Press, 2003.
Preston, Peter. โThe Things We Do For Loveโฆโ. The Observer, 29 October 2000, 104.
How to cite:ย Yang, Lorraine. โLost in Translation: The Perverse Pains and Pleasures of Globalisation in Wong Kar-Waiโs In the Mood for Loveโย Cha: An Asian Literary Journal, 24 Mar. 2024,ย chajournal.blog/2024/03/24/mood-for-love.
Lorraine Yang has Bachelorโs and Masters degrees (English Literature) from the National University of Singapore. She obtained her PhD (School of English, University of Leeds, 2022) for her work on aesthetic education and campus novels. She has published articles on Jane Austen and John Williams. She is currently Post-doctoral Fellow at Leeds Arts and Humanities Institute, where she is working on a book manuscript based on her doctoral research. She is broadly interested in decolonisation as well as the relationship of affect to ethics of reading.