SpottieOttieDopalicious Reflections on Cinema : Jonathan Moody
Wong Kar-Wai’s In the Mood for Love
“…the man to love rarely coincides with the hour for loving. Nature does not often say ‘See!’ to her poor creature at a time when seeing can lead to happy doing; or reply ‘Here!’ to a body’s cry of ‘Where?’ till the hide-and-seek has become an irksome, outworn game”.
—Tess of the d’Ubervilles
In the above epigraph, Thomas Hardy’s narrator negates the legitimacy of a variable potential suitors weigh heavily: the perfect moment. So, whenever used, the phrase “missed opportunity”, then, would take on comedic proportions rather than tragic ones in that it is an oxymoron. However, for filmmaker Wong Kar-Wai, there’s nothing impractical or comical about “missed opportunity”. It’s so real and dreadful, indeed, it manifests itself as the antagonist (I will return to this idea later).
In the Mood for Love stars Tony Leung as Mo-wan and Maggie Cheung as Su Li-zhen. They play neighbors who discover that their spouses are creeping on the down-low with one another. They become “doubles” of their respective soul-mates by role-playing in an attempt to comprehend the nature of the affair. In one scene, the audience is led to believe that Li-zhen is not only confronting her husband but compelling him to confess. The man’s face is not seen. Only the back of his head is visible. He denies his wife’s accusation a few times and comes clean. But the face that’s divulged is not Li-zhen’s husband’s face but that of Mo-wan’s. The reversal induces much shock because Li-zhen’s man has remained inconspicuous (until this moment, the audience has heard only his and Mo-wan’s wife’s voice off-screen).
The very fact that Mo-wan and Li-zhen are interested in how their significant others cheated on them as opposed to why prevents Kar-Wai’s loose script from tapping into sensationalism: seeking revenge or plotting murder. By mirroring their spouses yet agreeing to never “hook-up”, Mo-wan and Li-zhen add a complexity to Mood. They channel a certain level of restraint that is both commendable and heartbreaking. As characters that’ve been betrayed by their spouses, Mo-wan and Li-zhen will automatically receive sympathy from the audience. This is another aspect of sensationalism that Kar-Wai avoids because establishing sympathy is safe. It’s a knee-jerk response. It is another thing entirely, though, to challenge the audience’s notions of morality. Tony Leung and Maggie Cheung give performances of such high caliber in which viewers will yearn for the consummation of another affair—a courtship that doesn’t occur off-screen—between the protagonists.
Even though Tony Leung and Maggie Cheung’s chemistry is nonpareil,an affair never happens. It’s not because the characters they play are religious but because they are conformists adhering to the social norms of Hong Kong’s 1960’s middle-class. The unwritten rule says, “If you’re trapped in a loveless marriage, deal with it”. And the subtext of Mo-wan and Li-zhen’s environment reiterates the aforementioned maxim. The metaphors of imprisonment, toleration, and sexual repression are signaled by the constricted city that Mo-wan and Li-zhen inhabit: the claustrophobic apartments; the narrow alleyways. With all this in mind, clearly, the sexual tension radiating between the protagonists has to be challenged somehow.
Sexual transmutation is an attempt to transform erotic energy into creative energy. And Mo-wan and Li-zhen display transmutation on a full-scale level. The two rendezvous at a hotel. Here, they collaborate on a series of martial arts stories (Mo-wan writes the material and Li-zhen proofreads). It’s not coincidental that the film’s backdrop during these scenes is red, or that Nat King Cole’s “Quizas, Quizas, Quizas” plays right on cue. Although we see Mo-wan and Li-zhen developing intimacy, the lush background and intoxicating melody are insidious reminders that Desire’s an emotion they must repress.
