In the Mood for Love

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.