In the Mood for Love 25th Anniversary Re-release

I originally planned to go to the Danish Film Festival today, but there were no tickets for the second screening of the three, so I wandered around the cinema for three hours. Right before the show started, for some reason, I just didn’t feel like going anymore. After getting my ticket, I decided to head home. I played some games for a while, then saw people chatting about In the Mood for Love in a WeChat group. I joined in the conversation, and suddenly, I found myself sinking into a feeling of melancholy. It’s rare for me to experience such emotional fluctuations before sleep these days, and now, wide awake, I started jotting down a little stream of consciousness.

This is my first time truly rewatching Wong Kar-wai. I recall watching Days of Being Wild a few years ago when it was re-released, not long after my first viewing, which was more like a way of just catching up on missing a film. I’ve always thought of Wong Kar-wai as the director I’m most familiar with, possibly because his work has been discussed so extensively, giving me the illusion that I know him well. Now, on reflection, his films feel unfamiliar, perhaps reduced to just the well-known clichés. Like many others, my early film education was largely through Wong Kar-wai, and unknowingly, I started seeing him as “the greasy old man” of cinema. Articles about him became repetitive, and when I saw new podcasts about him, I wondered what more there was to say. I remember someone once described him as the “product manager for artistic youth,” a phrase later applied to Chen Sicheng.

Looking back to my university days, when I first watched his films, the dorm didn’t even have a single hairdryer. My hair was longer back then, and after showering, I’d sit with wet hair in front of a 45% color gamut TN-screen laptop, watching one film after another. Some films I watched in the playground, sitting by the goalpost with my phone, and after finishing, it was almost time for the dorm curfew, so I’d run around campus aimlessly for a while before finally settling down.

Now, about In the Mood for Love—I have to admit, it was far more impressive than I expected. First, I hadn’t liked it as much before, and second, as I mentioned earlier, my interest in the director had waned over the years. Earlier this year, I recorded a podcast in which I talked about how movies seem to have lost their appeal. Has cinema really entered its final phase? I can’t say for sure. But my main takeaway from this rewatch is that such films are now extinct. I only intend to speak in broad terms, so I won’t delve into specifics of the movie. I’ve seen the jokes about sunglasses not being people, the passport being confiscated, or the dumpling eating until one throws up—though none of that compares to what Wong Kar-wai does with his actors, making them rehearse the same scene dozens or even hundreds of times to get it just right. He really is a genius. How else could he create so much with such confined spaces? In a podcast I recorded, I compared film to the crystal ball from The Pilot’s Wife—maybe cinema is like that trembling old water pipe in In the Mood for Love. It sounds odd, but I still have to say this movie is truly overwhelming. The pace felt much faster than I remembered. Before you know it, the same scene is another outfit.

I’ve always felt that nowadays, it’s hard to find this kind of meticulousness in films. Hong Kong cinema no longer carries this unique, intuitive editing style. Filmmakers, 25 years later, have reached the end of their artistic careers—are there only people like Li Pingbin who still have peak abilities? In In the Mood for Love (2001), Tony Leung’s character is sleazy, and his actions are vulgar, but the modernist beauty of Maggie Cheung under Wong Kar-wai’s lens is unforgettable, even though that’s about all that’s left. The fog, the sorrow, the passing of a splendid era…