In the Mood for Mood

Much of In the Mood for Love is made up of interludes between conversations: We get long scenes -- many using Wong's favorite trick, the jerky, slow-motion "step printing" process -- of the characters walking to the noodle joint; of rain hitting the cobbled streets; of cigarette smoke spiraling above the scene; of our protagonists posed in frozen, unreal moments, lit in swaths of gorgeous, unnatural colors. It is all accompanied by a repetitive string motif or Nat King Cole singing romantic ballads in Spanish. In the Mood for Love doesn't move like most films. It seems to drift; one could imagine shuffling certain scenes without distorting the progression of the narrative. One might say that it's moving without ever moving.

To some degree, this may be the result of Wong's working method: He shoots endlessly, often without a real script and without telling the actors how and where any given scene may fit into the whole. Essentially, he feels his way along during the shoot and then figures out how to assemble the entire thing later. This method sounds like a recipe for disaster, but Wong has the chops to pull it off. Despite it -- or perhaps on account of it -- he manages once again to get performances from Leung and Cheung that are extraordinary, even by their own high standards.

At the same time, Wong's particular brand of cinema may not be for everyone. To an action-oriented sensibility, In the Mood for Love may not be engaging enough; it tries one's patience with its pace and the ultimate aimlessness of the story. But on a second viewing the movie's virtues hugely overwhelmed its vices. In fact, it revealed them not to be vices at all but rather the necessary elements from which Wong weaves a spell that no other director alive could create.