Notes on In the Mood for Love

5.

Maggie Cheung Man Yuk as Mrs. Chan.

Standing there, waiting for noodles. Preposterous. The upswept hair, the high collar of the cheongsam. Impossibly glamorous. A woman out of place, out of tempo. Alone in the frame, people bustling around her, she waits for her noodles, dabs at her forehead. In repose, in the length of lines, the illusion of motion even as she holds still. A contradiction. Impossibly graceful.

6.

Tony Leung Chiu Wai as Mr. Chow. The sheen on his jet-black hair. The suits, hanging off his slender frame, the pocket square folded and tucked. His eyes doing all the talking. Breaking into a slow smile, a smile that takes its time, moves from lips to eyes to temples and then back to the mouth, where it seems to soften and then turn into something else. The saddest smiles.

9.

The economy of the writing. Every line working double, triple duty. Playacting as each other’s spouses at first. Inhabiting their roles, trying to imagine how it could have started, what had happened. Hiding behind their characters, talking to each other undercover.

By the way, I haven’t seen your husband lately. 

He’s abroad now on company business.

That’s why I see you at the noodle stall.

She looks up, smiles.

He pays attention. You can learn a lot if you pay attention.

I haven’t seen your wife lately either. 

Her mother’s ill. She’s at home with her.

That explains it.

Already writing a story together. Telling it to each other.

Why did you call me at the office today?

I had nothing to do. I wanted to hear your voice. 

You have my husband down pat. He’s a real sweet talker.

He snuck that one in there. Got away with it.

As they chew, Nat King Cole. The first moments of: Oh. What is this? What’s happening?

Is he in character? Is she? Lines doing double duty. Triple. The look she gives him. The look he gives back. The tentative first steps, as they inch their way into their roles. Glimmers of recognition. Something stirring.


10.

Perfect moments:

Mr. Chow putting the hot mustard on her plate. Mrs. Chan dabbing her bit of steak in it.

Do you like it hot?

Your wife likes hot dishes.

The moment she slaps him—grazes him, really—the perfect reaction from Tony Leung. Deadpan, dead serious.

13.

Again: What’s stopping them? Gossip? The eyes of the neighbors. Hence the enclosures, the frames, the rooms they’re always trapped in, the windows and bars through which we see them.

What’s stopping them? But of course, that’s the wrong question. We know the answer. We won’t be like them, they promise. Promise themselves, and each other.

14.

Colors shifting. Greens, early on. Pale green, institutional (her office) or faded. An envious green.


Red and green everywhere, occupying the same space in different arrangements, varying proportions. The taxi they share: red and green. Trapped in Mr. Chow’s room, the green curtain, Mrs. Chan wrapping herself in the red blanket on the bed. The courtyard where they first walk—greens. Green-tinged light, Mr. Chow smoking by himself, knowing his wife is lying to him. The green noodle container Mrs. Chan carries, like a weight, like a burden.

15.

Then: the realization. Their spouses in Japan together.

What do you think they’re doing right now?

Maggie Cheung in the red coat. Rushing up the stairs, breathless. She goes to the room. We don’t see, but we infer: They won’t be like their spouses. They told themselves.

But the colors tell a different story.

Green not present in this scene. Mrs. Chan in a red coat. A red of roses, of apples, of blood. Behind her, the wall covered in more red. A bright, vivid, saturated red.

The shot we’ve seen already: her looking into a doorway. But this time, she’s not alone. Mr. Chow is visible in the shot as well, halfway out. They talk softly, with care for each other. They’re shot from afar. A feeling of being watched, maybe, but also one of distance.


This moment one they’ll remember. This moment now, to be longed for in the future. To be remembered, as if through glass. If only they could grasp it.

From this distance, it’s them but also maybe not them. Another couple—the one they said they wouldn’t be.


Mrs. Chan leaves, walks down the hall. Near the end, she stops, as if frozen. Holds this moment. As if to try to grasp it, to stop time. This moment in the prime of their lives.

Their laugh together, seen through red lace curtains. Even the green of her cheongsam has changed. The green of her cheongsam, a different one. Not the green of envy but the green of shoots, the first color of spring, the bright green of new growth.

We won’t be like them.

16.

But the shot tells a different story.


Mr. Chow and Mrs. Chan on the phone, now hidden, faces offscreen, just voices, like their spouses. They have become them.


And then Mrs. Suen lectures her. Maggie Cheung in the hallway, trapped in the frame, shadows framing her. Trapped in the drab office green, red color draining away. The affair ending just as it was beginning.


The evidence was there from the start. They were never free, always boxed in. Walking through the courtyard, shot through the bars as if imprisoned. All of their spaces occluded: hallways and doorways and staircases. Frames within frames. Spaces in which secrets are kept, spaces in which secrets are revealed.


The affair doomed before it even began.

17.

Grace notes: A globe in Mrs. Chan’s office, turned in such a way, the light hitting it in such a way, that it displays a faraway continent, South America.

Across the ocean, a foreign land where a forbidden love might flourish, where a doomed couple might be happy together.


Another small globe, this one on Mr. Chow’s desk. Turned to the same continent.


A very intentional span of time: 1962–66. Reminders of the larger world out there.


Rice cookers from Japan. The future is coming; the future is here. This present moment already slipping from them.


And then a different time and place. Nineteen sixty-two has become 1966. From Hong Kong, Mr. Chow now in Cambodia, filling a hole with a secret, packing it tight with wet earth, grass, and mud. Whatever secrets, whatever chance they had, sealed off forever. Those years sealed off.

18.

Rewatching the movie, we start the song again; we can move again from the greens to the deep reds. We can be on the stairs, in the hallway, in the café, in the room. Going around the loop, pretending, but it always ends the same way, those years at a distance, beyond our grasp.

19.

For relief, we look to the outtakes.


The one of them dancing.

Maggie Cheung and Tony Leung with real smiles. Having fun.


A feeling of surprise and recognition: they’re humans. People with families and lives outside of the dream of this film. The spell breaks momentarily. And then it returns, stronger. These actors, along with editors and cinematographers and designers and hair and makeup artists and, of course, Wong Kar Wai, they made this. It didn’t drop fully formed from story heaven. It hasn’t existed for all time, a memory box, a glass box of memory on a shelf in a locked room on an island in the ocean of the past. This was constructed. Which makes it all the more impressive.

20.

Maggie Cheung and Tony Leung, under an awning, waiting for the rain to pass.