IN THE MOOD FOR LOVE (2000)
Saturday, December 14 | 7 pm
Director: WONG KAR-WAI
Country of Origin: Hong Kong
Language: Cantonese and Shanghainese with subtitles
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, Wong Kar Wai’s In the Mood for Love is a masterful evocation of romantic longing and fleeting moments. With its aching soundtrack and exquisitely abstract cinematography by Christopher Doyle and Mark Lee, this film has been a major stylistic influence on the past two decades of cinema, and is a milestone in Wong’s redoubtable career.
It’s the best-looking movie with the best soundtrack and the best cinematography and the best actors with the best director…and it’s still more than the sum of its parts.
The New Yorker explained, “Wong created a cocktail of French New Wave filmmaking, American hardboiled mystery, Chinese modernist literature, and the geopolitics of his own Hong Kong-via-Shanghai upbringing, then chaneled those disparate influences into the mundane, domestic story of two not-quite-lovers. The combination is both unprecedented and somehow familiar upon watching, like a forgotten memory. The clarity of vision leaves an indelible mark on the viewer.”
Moderately acclaimed upon its release, the film’s reputation has soared in the intervening decades as its influence becomes ever-more pervasive (such as the use of the film’s set as one of the dimensional stops in the Oscar-winning Everything Everywhere All at Once). The most recent Sight & Sound poll ranked it as the 5th best film of all time, while the aggregate cinephile website They Shoot Pictures Don’t They declared it the #1 film of the 21st century (so far).