Amor à Flor da Pele

Whenever a serious list of the 'Greatest Films Ever Made' stretches into the the new millennium, bets are "In the Mood for Love" is included. I would personally not heap such praise upon the film, but it is hard to deny it boasts one of the most nuanced and subdued relationships in modern cinema.

The film plays like an Asian "Una giornata particolare". Our Loren and Mastroianni are Maggie Cheung and Tony Chiu-Wai Leung, known for playing action heroes and lovers, (or both, together, in the case of "Hero"). Here, they play everyday people: an editor and a secretary, both married, neighbours in a narrow Hong Kong apartment building.

Their respective spouses are never fully seen. More often than not they are absent, always at the same time. It is hard to say when they begin to suspect, but before long our leads are faced with the fact that their partners are having an affair with each other. This discovery brings the two of them together in need of consolation and, perhaps, love. They are visibly attracted to each other, but agree to keep their relationship platonic.

It is the smaller things that earn "In the Mood for Love" its place on the 'Best of All Time' lists. The acting, writing, and directing are so subtle that describing the film in terms of events renders it meaningless. The great touches of drama lie in the way a person slightly turns his head, moves weight from one leg to the other, or closes a door.

That being said, "In the Mood for Love" suffers from too much of a good thing. The film's central fifty minutes follow the same pattern over and over again: our protagonists make an appointment; they meet; they decide not to have sex; repeat. Sometimes there are minute variations -- he decides to write a newspaper serial; one time it is raining -- but the basic pattern of meet, cut, repeat does not change.

This repetition is intentional to a certain extent. Whenever characters retread locations -- the street, the stairs, the hallway -- they are always filmed from the same angle, like rhyming stanzas in a poem on mundanity. However, these scenes stop presenting new information before long. The emotions don't intensify, they just drag on. We already know the relationship between these people is not going to change, yet are put through the motions another five or six times.

It is one of the medium's great tragedies that nobody cares about one-hour films. We have accepted that novels can be 100 or 3,000 pages long, that paintings can be the size of a matchbox or The Night Watch, but motion pictures of less than eighty minutes rarely qualify as feature films. "In the Mood for Love" certainly would have benefitted from being an hour long. Its intimate filmmaking demands to be seen, but for a 98-minute film to be this long-winded is a flaw too prominent to disregard.

Two people living in the same flat complex find their partners are having an affair with each other. As they try and piece together how it happened, they also embark on an emotional journey that aches for a resolution…

Building on his previous success with Happy Together and Chungking Express, Wong Kar Wai gives us this rather old fashioned and marvellous story of reawakened passions, yearning and unrequited love.

Possibly, In the Mood for Love is not to everyone's taste. It wanders in rather lazily at 98mins: not particularly long for a film, but it appears longer because not a lot really happens. But this lazy feel conceals a quite tightly constructed film. Most of the story is cunningly woven around a series of set piece role plays, where the characters act out presumed scenarios between their respective spouses, trying to work out how the affair started. I say cunning because, of course, this makes it difficult for the audience (and the characters) to tell what is "in-role" and what is genuine.

If all this sounds rather arty and self-conscience, that's because it is. Unashamedly so. And it is played to perfection by two of Hong Kong's finest, Maggie Cheung and Leung Chui Wai, with some excellent support from Ping Lam Siu and Rebecca Pan.

It is also a virtuoso performance by Wong Kar Wai, who treats the audience to a sensory, and sensual, overload. Bringing together Christopher Doyle (who later deployed his lush, over-ripe style on Hero) and Pin Bing Lee (whose beautifully understated style can be seen on Springtime in a Small Town) was cinematographic genius. It has all the bold beauty of Doyle, without, frankly, the Athena-poster cheesiness of his work on Hero. The music, as always with Wong, is prominent. From Nat King Cole singing in Spanish, to the haunting strings of the main theme, it perfectly matches the eclectic beauty of the images.

All in all a top film, whether judged on plot, acting, cinematography or soundtrack. Similar to, but more accessible than, Wim Wenders' Wings of Desire, this is a beautiful, old fashioned story about love lost and regained.

And watch out for Tony Leung's hotel room 2046, which presaged Wong's recent film of the same name.

Beautiful film set in 1962 Hong Kong about a man (Mr. Chow) and woman (Mrs. Chan) who become close friends when they suspect their spouses are having an affair. Stylistically, the film is also beautiful. Wong Kar-Wai uses a lot of slow motion and close-ups on parts of the body (feet, hands, waist). The film itself has a reticence and properness that suggests its time period. It's sexy without showing everything. Wong Kar-Wai also doesn't allow the audience to see what the spouses look like, suggesting that Mr. Chow and Mrs. Chan should be together. Smoking is even made to look elegant with close-ups of the curls of smoke. A really lovely film. Just prepare yourself for the ending.

In 60s Hong Kong, a man and woman move in the same day into adjacent apartments with their respective spouses. Soon they suspect their ever absent spouses of having an affair with one-another. A strange bond emerges between the man and woman as they cope with their sadness by taking turns playing each other's spouse, before a more complex bond emerges...

No summary can do it justice, for Hong Kong auteur Wong Kar-Wai's "In the Mood for Love" is nothing short of a miracle. A story about sadness that manages to be touching and at times funny. A romance that never feels forced or fake. No doubt the director's method has a lot to do with that.

Directed from an inexistent screenplay (though the concept largely flows from a Japanese short story) to favor improvisation, the film is immediately set apart by the freshness of it's performances. All the film revolves around that and the rest is pure enhancement. At the core of the film are two characters that will ease into your heart and stay there long after the end credits roll: Maggie Cheung and Tony Leung are simply amazing and no language barrier undermines a single fragment of immediacy and truth they display. The additional material is also top-notch: the films is magnificent to behold (in part lensed by "Hero"'s Christopher Doyle) and the music is heartbreaking.

This is something everybody must see, if only because it is by far the most heartfelt, mature and authentic "love story" out there. Unmissable.

In Hong Kong, 1962, the editor Chow Mo-wan (Tony Leung Chiu Wai) and his wife, and the secretary Su Li-Zhen Chan (Maggie Cheung) and her husband simultaneously move to an old building. Each couple has just rented a room in apartments on the same floor. Their wife and husband stay most of the time away from home, and Chow and Li-Zhen have the same habits: they like kung-fu stories and noodles and soap from a restaurant nearby the building. Their close contact becomes friendship and a sort of platonic and repressed love. Later they realize that their mates are having an affair, Chow falls in love with Li-Zhen, but her shyness and probably repressed condition of married woman keeps her love in a platonic level. 'In the Mood for Love' is a very slow, beautiful, melancholic and romantic love story, with a wonderful photography and soundtrack and a very unusual edition. The film had not had a screenplay, and the actors were never sure about what they would be shooting. Later, the director edited his story based on the footages. When Chow moves to Singapore, there is a gap of many years in the story until 1966, when its conclusion is intentionally open and not well defined, leaving questions such as who is the boy with Li-Zhen. My vote is eight.

Title (Brazil): 'Amor À Flor da Pele' ('Love on the Surface of the Skin')