In the Mood for Love

Fa yeung nin wa (In the Mood for Love, 2000) represents a moment that separates two distinct periods in the artistic creation of Wong Kar-Wai.

The movies made before In the Mood for Love offer kaleidoscopic images of today's urban life (with a notable exception, Ashes of Time); all of them (Ashes of Time included) are splendid post-modern works.

With In the Mood for Love the focus is passing on a single dimension of life, eros. It's not the mechanic of sex, it's the mechanic of desire and dream: reality and imagination blur their borders, feelings burn everything and move the compass back and forth between what it is and what it should be.

I think In the Mood for Love should be watched together with 2046: they are somehow symmetric. The feelings burn everything up to explosion in 2046, and time is no more, there is not a succession of love stories, because each love story in 2046 exists on its own and doesn't care about the rest. In the Mood for Love offers another outcome: feelings burn everything down to implosion, the whole becomes so dense that it vanishes in a black hole.

And maybe it's not only about eros in these movies. Maybe it's about time as an illusion; or maybe it's more than that, about reality (our reality as we feel it) as an illusion. And, at this level of understanding, the two periods in Wong Kar-Wai creation are only apparently distinct.

And coming back to In the Mood for Love, when does the action take place? In the sixties, or later in the seventies, when the personages remember their past (or just imagine a past that wasn't)? Or is 2046 already present?

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I found some time ago the whole movie on youTube, along with some extras (deleted scenes, alternate ending). Unfortunately those videos are no longer available. I will post here instead two videos:  Yumanji's theme (which is sort of trailer, with music composed by Shigeru Umebayashi), and Angkor Vat finale (with music composed by Michael Galasso)

Fa yeung nin wa (In the Mood for Love): Yumeji's Theme
(music by Shigeru Umebayashi)
(video by EdD1EgJiNaJ)

Fa yeung nin wa (In the Mood for Love): Angkor Wat Finale
(music by Michael Galasso)
(video by semektet)

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Speaking about the finale (Angkor Vat), I meditated on it a lot. At the beginning it seemed without connection with the rest of the movie. Actually, it offers a resolution to a story of love that proved impossible. Only this resolution is on a superior plan. The image of the ancient temples is telling us that our dramas have always happened and will always happen, while not having the importance we think. Life transcends our dramas. The Angkor Vat finale called the movies of Ozu in my mind.


(Wong Kar-Way & Chris Doyle)

(Michael Galasso)