Wong Kar Gai is a maverick Hong Kong director, much beloved by the younger set of film buffs, whose films float in a space somewhere between the experimental avant-garde and the (Tarantino) territory of pulp fiction. He has a reputation as an unconventional and undisciplined director, who shoots his films before he has resolved the narrative and only decides how they will end up at the post-production stage, at the editing table. Both Maggie Cheung and Tony Leung, the stars of his latest film, have testified to this open-ended narrative approach during shooting, but they have worked with him regularly in the past and know that his unconventional methods succeed in the end. Furthermore, Wong is not a one-man band. His habitual collaborators, expatriate Australian cinematographer Chris Doyle (another wild man) and set designer William Chang, have contributed a great deal to the moodily expressionistic visual style of his films.

In its classical rigour and restricted narrative focus, In the Mood for Love (Chinese title: Hua yang nian hua), seems to signal a shift in Wong Kar Gai’s cinema. Normally his films, like the novels of Carson McCullers, focus on a number of loners, all of whom suffer from unrequited love. A loves B who loves C who loves D who loves A; every one of them is existentially and terminally alone and disconnected. This film centres on the relationship between just two characters, a pair of potential lovers. (In his last film, Happy Together, he had already presaged this shift. In that case, it was a pair of homosexual lovers.) The visual style of In the Mood for Love too is more restrained, less disjunctive, than that of the earlier films. Chris Doyle’s characteristic flash pans and wildly distorted camera angles, that produced almost abstract expressionist streaks and flashes of colour, have been abandoned, to be replaced by a more classical use of composition and more disciplined detailing of claustrophobic spaces - congested interior (domestic and work) spaces and narrow alleyways. No doubt Doyle’s absence (due to other work commitments) and his replacement by (Taiwanese art cinema director) Hou Hsiao Hsien’s regular cinematographer, Mark Lee Ping-bin, contributed a great deal to the more classical look of the film.

However, this film is supremely romantic – or, to be more precise, the ultimate essay on the subject of romanticism. It is suffused with a mood of languorous longing, with simmering but suppressed sexuality, and with nostalgia.  Its slow motion cinematography, its haunting cello musical theme, the old romantic songs from the 40s and 50s (sung by Nat King Cole in Spanish) on the soundtrack, and the kaleidoscopic array of sumptuous silk fabrics tailored in the traditional cheongsam style, so as to caress the curves of Maggie Cheung’s seductive body, combine to produce a moody and dated aura of romanticism.

Set in the early Sixties in Hong Kong, although shot in Bangkok, the film recalls a time before the advent of high-rise apartment blocks, when accommodation was in short supply, housing cramped and privacy unavailable. Wong’s family were refugees from Shanghai who settled in Hong Kong at that time; and he has expressly attempted to recreate his memories of the Hong Kong of his childhood, living among fellow refugees from Shanghai.

Like the lovers of David Lean’s early (1945) B&W classic, Brief Encounter, the film’s lovers, Mrs Chan (Maggie Cheung) and Mr Chow (Tony Leung), are both married but in this case their spouses have been conducting an illicit affair, and they are drawn together as fellow victims of their partners’ duplicity. They feel wronged, betrayed, and morally superior. The chain of infidelity and duplicity, however, is wider: Mrs Chan’s boss divides his time between his mistress and his wife; Mrs Chan’s duties include arranging his time-table so that they are both accommodated, buying identical gifts for the two ladies, making apologies, telling lies to one when he is busy with the other. Mr Chan gives identical gifts (on his return from trips to Japan) to his wife and mistress; Mrs Chow buys the same tie for her husband and her lover. The wronged parties recognise their partners’ duplicity through this pattern. These items are not available in Hong Kong, and are give-aways in more ways than one.  The wronged couple in their turn become secretive and duplicitous; they hide their secret meetings from the neighbours, they tell lies about their whereabouts when they have been together. Eventually Mrs Chan too succumbs to adultery, apparently twice, once in HK and once in Singapore, and the child we see in a late scene may be their love child, although the facts are elusive and elided. We are invited to speculate about the range of narrative possibilities in the development of the relationship; the film is a rondo, playing variations on the theme, “in the mood for love”.

The film’s coda is set in post-colonial Cambodia, after General de Gaulle has awarded “independence” to its former colony. This not only provides an opportunity to savour the exotic ruins of Angkor Wat, where itinerant journalist Mr Chow confides his secret love into a cavity in the old stones; it is also an analogue of the recent end of British colonialism in Hong Kong, where guilty secrets are likewise buried in the soil. As the French would say, “Plus ca change, plus c’est la meme chose”. The film stresses the circularity of narrative, politics, love affairs; the eternal return of love, betrayal, guilt. In the mood of Ophuls’ delirious tracking shots, “la ronde” goes on, round and round.

Freda Freiber