in the mood for love
A movie. Set in Hong Kong in 1963 and named - in English at least* - after a Bryan Ferry song. It's a slow burn, and the environment feels so unfamiliar that it takes a little while to locate the story in it, but when the story comes out, it is almost precisely in the difficulty of identifying it that it resides.
The two next-door neighbours - she whose husband is always away on business, and he whose wife is - are thrown together out of sheer loneliness, when they realise that their respective partners are having an affair. The bond they develop is partly through circumstance and partly in negative - "We won't be like them," which only means that they have nowhere to put their growing love - and sneaks up on them in the same way that the story sneaks up on the viewer.
In any case, in a society like this one where everyone is overcrowded, there is no privacy and people are always lecturing one another about their personal lives, an affair feels impossible! How are the others managing it? Only by being in Japan, you think.
It's all interiors. The colours are amazing, saturated urban colours. It seems to be always nighttime in Hong Kong, the film is dark, and it feels much edgier even than films set in places like Paris in the same period. Interestingly, the famous "Green Girl" painting kept coming into my head while I was watching it - either that picture is far more brilliant than I'd ever realised in evoking an overwhelming atmosphere, or else the art department used it as a source. Or both.
The film's swelling, yet painfully restrained, Chinese-sounding violins, mixed with Chinese music, mixed with early sixties Western lounge music - the cultural tension between Hong Kong, China (where so many Hong Kong residents came from) and the West is palpable.
The clothes are so gorgeous you forget that the only way Maggie Cheung can look like that is that they're a size nothing.
In short, see it! I've already gone on LoveFilm and put all of Wong Kar Wai's films on my list.
One thing that's really interesting in this story, aside from the film and its qualities, is how it is created by the strictures of the society it's set in - in much the same way as, say, an EM Forster novel, though it is so different in tmany ways. And this is a truism of course. But, here and now, if these two characters found themselves living next door with partners cheating on them with each other, any crises de coeur they might have would be qualms, and strictly personal. Especially as neither has any children. It'd just be women's magazine, Saturday newspaper stuff.
Well, and that may be better. But I'm sure there are people nowadays who are just as wrecked by their life experiences as the hero of this film is, - it's just that there's as little social niche for them as there is in the film for the two crypto-lovers. And that's part of the power of the movie, that it applies itself to a little blind spot, a chink, a patch of human experience we no longer seem to recognise.
* The Chinese title is "The Age of Blossom" which must be purely figurative. There is no blossom, no outdoors and not even any natural light in this film.
4 comments:
The Chinese title is the name of the song that is requested on the radio in the film, it is sung by the really iconic Shanghaiese singer Zhou Xuan (the characters in the film, like the director are are Shanghaiese.) So both the English and Chinese titles are song references. This is personally one of my favorite movies, I consder it in a way to be a sort of Chinese "Brief Encounter."
An interesting aside is that in the movie the climax of the "affair" is writing a serialized kung fu novel together, and the classic theme of this literature, especially in the early 1960s, is unconsumated forbidden love. For example, a male and female martial artists who learn to fight together but are barred both by Confucian morality and some sort of magical prohibition from declaring love for each other.
Roy, thanks for your excellent comment. I knew that much of the music in the film had a deep significance I couldn't understand, and don't think I enjoyed that!
The music was, in fact, gorgeous. It's a whole thing I have to go learn about, now. (And I admit I was being snarky about Bryan Ferry - which is all too easy and fun at the mo, but not apropos. Nat King Cole is the much clearer reference for the film.)
Excellent point re Brief Encounter, I was thinking about that as I watched the film. And I recently rewatched Brief Encounter, too - funny thing! I hated it years ago, hugely, and this time I thought it was beautiful and true. That's another discussion.
Very interesting aside, as you say, re the martial arts stories. One thing I loved about this film is how every single element serves it, nothing extraneous or gratuitous.
Hope you'll stop back. Next up for discussion (sublime to ridick): Marie "I'm a Valley Girl" Antoinette.
Its wonderful isn't it? I've got the soundtrack which is mesmerising. She wears a different dress in every scene. Not seen the sequel, mind.
She does - except that each dress does crop up more than once, just not consecutively, as it were. And they're all the same cut, too, just with different fabric. So beautiful.
Mind you I also very much liked his wardrobe, with the narrow ties and those wonderful jackets. You blokes should dress that way even now.
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