In the Mood for Love [Huayang Nianhua] 9781844578740, 9781838713799, 9781844578764

Table of contents :
Cover
Series Page
Title
Copyright
Contents
Acknowledgments
1 Valse triste
2 Secret Origins
3 Oblique Strategies
4 Miscellany
Credits

Citation preview

BFI Film Classics The BFI Film Classics is a series of books that introduces, interprets and celebrates landmarks of world cinema. Each volume offers an argument for the film’s ‘classic’ status, together with discussion of its production and reception history, its place within a genre or national cinema, an account of its technical and aesthetic importance, and in many cases, the author’s personal response to the film. For a full list of titles available in the series, please visit our website: www.bloomsbury.com/bfi ‘Magnificently concentrated examples of flowing freeform critical poetry.’ Uncut ‘A formidable body of work collectively generating some fascinating insights into the evolution of cinema.’ Times Higher Education Supplement ‘The series is a landmark in film criticism.’ Quarterly Review of Film and Video ‘Possibly the most bountiful book series in the history of film criticism.’ Jonathan Rosenbaum, Film Comment

Editorial Advisory Board Geoff Andrew, British Film Institute Edward Buscombe William Germano, The Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art Lalitha Gopalan, University of Texas at Austin Lee Grieveson, University College London Nick James, Editor, Sight & Sound

Laura Mulvey, Birkbeck College, University of London Alastair Phillips, University of Warwick Dana Polan, New York University B. Ruby Rich, University of California, Santa Cruz Amy Villarejo, Cornell University

In the Mood for Love [Huayang Nianhua] Tony Rayns

THE BRITISH FILM INSTITUTE Bloomsbury Publishing Plc 50 Bedford Square, London, WC1B 3DP, UK 1385 Broadway, New York, NY 10018, USA BLOOMSBURY is a trademark of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published in Great Britain by Palgrave in 2015 Reprinted by Bloomsbury in 2018 on behalf of the British Film Institute 21 Stephen Street, London W1T 1LN www.bfi.org.uk

The BFI is the lead organisation for film in the UK and the distributor of Lottery funds for film. Our mission is to ensure that film is central to our cultural life, in particular by supporting and nurturing the next generation of filmmakers and audiences. We serve a public role which covers the cultural, creative and economic aspects of film in the UK. Copyright © Tony Rayns, 2015 Tony Rayns has asserted his/her right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as author of this work. For legal purposes the Acknowledgements on pp. 6-7 constitute an extension of this copyright page. Cover design: Jimmy Turrell Text design: ketchup/SE14 Images from In the Mood for Love (Wong Kar Wai, 2000), © Block 2 Pictures.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc does not have any control over, or responsibility for, any third-party websites referred to or in this book. All internet addresses given in this book were correct at the time of going to press. The author and publisher regret any inconvenience caused if addresses have changed or sites have ceased to exist, but can accept no responsibility for any such changes. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress.

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978-1-8445-7874-0 978-1-8445-7876-4

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Contents Acknowledgments

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1 Valse triste

8

2 Secret Origins

52

3 Oblique Strategies

68

4 Miscellany

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Credits

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Acknowledgments Primary thanks go to Wong Kar Wai and his past and present colleagues in the production company Jet Tone and its affiliated talent agency Project House: particularly line producer Jacky Pang, production designer and editor William Chang, cinematographers Christopher Doyle, Mark Lee and Kwan Pun-Leung, director’s assistant Charlotte Yu and actors Tony Leung and Maggie Cheung. This book benefits in many ways, large and small, from conversations with these people and I’m grateful to them for sharing their experiences and insights. I was first introduced to Wong Kar Wai by my friend Shu Kei during the roll-out of Days of Being Wild in 1991, and had a closerthan-average relationship with Jet Tone from 1994 (when I was invited to see one of the later cuts of Ashes of Time and to catch the world premiere in Hong Kong of Chungking Express) until 2008, when I was axed from the company’s Christmas-card list after some bad-tempered exchanges with Wong over texts in the press kit for Ashes of Time Redux. During those fifteen years, I met Wong fairly often and helped him with English subtitles and the editing of press kits – for his own films and for Jet Tone productions by Jeff Lau and Eric Kot, with both of whom I also had interesting conversations. The sometimes hair-raising tales of my experiences with Jet Tone will have to wait for another time; what’s relevant here is my aborted project to produce a book-length interview with Wong Kar Wai, which resulted in many hours of unpublished audio tapes. A couple of brief quotes in this book are taken from those tapes. I’ve also taken occasional phrases and sentences from my earlier writings about Wong. I recorded video pieces on the film and its music for Criterion’s Region-A Blu-ray edition of In the Mood for Love, and some of the observations that follow are necessarily

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recapitulations of what I said there. But time constraints kept the Criterion extras relatively short, and much here was not said there. I must thank Jerry Liu, who edited a stylish press kit for As Tears Go By, for first drawing my attention to Wong Kar Wai in 1988. Also Li Cheuk-To (artistic director of the Hong Kong International Film Festival), Simon Field (Wong’s first UK distributor), Michael Werner and the late Wouter Barendrecht of Fortissimo Film Sales (for many years Wong’s sales agents), Anurag Kashyap and Jean-Claude Carrière (fellow panellists at a seminar in Delhi), Curtis Tsui of Criterion, Norman Wang, Chua Lam, Stanley Kwan and David Bordwell for sharing opinions and providing information. This book would not have been written if James Bell (of Sight & Sound) had not urged me to knuckle down to it at short notice. It goes without saying that any mistakes in the following pages are mine alone.

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1 Valse triste

From the very beginning I knew I didn’t want to make a film about an affair. That would be too boring, too predictable, and it would have only two possible endings: either they go away together or they give each other up and go back to their own lives. What interested me was the way people behave and relate to each other in the circumstances shown in this story, the way they keep secrets and share secrets. Wong Kar Wai (19 June 2000), from an interview by Tony Rayns, published in Sight & Sound, August 2000

We’ll come to the ‘very beginning’ in Chapter 2, but let’s start with the film itself. In the Mood for Love, set mostly in the Hong Kong of 1962, is a film that luxuriates in the feeling of being in love – without actually turning into a love story. Its two central characters, Mr Chow and Mrs Chan, are surrounded by sexual promiscuity. But when they ultimately succumb to their palpable desire for each other, they do so off screen. The film hinges on their tremulous uncertainty about their own feelings and their feelings for each other. Like David Lean/Noël Coward’s Brief Encounter (1945) several decades earlier, it’s a film about desire repressed. Worries about social appearances and gossip play a significant part in stopping the nonlovers from acting on their feelings, but Mr Chow and Mrs Chan are shown to be addicted to the manoeuvring and rehearsing – actually, the foreplay – that obviates the need to commit to an affair. They are, precisely, in the mood for love. For most viewers, the bittersweet tone of the not-quite-sexual relationship crystallises in the haunting piece of music most often heard on the soundtrack, a valse triste (‘sad waltz’) composed by the Japanese musician Umebayashi Shigeru. This piece is called ‘Yumeji’s Theme’, because it was written originally for the film Yumeji (1991),

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the final part of Suzuki Seijun’s Taisho Trilogy, so called because all three films are set in the Taisho period (1912–26), the fifteen-year bridge between the Meiji and Showa periods. Meiji saw the restoration of imperial rule in Japan, and the opening-up and modernisation of the country after centuries of feudal isolation under the shoguns; Showa saw Japan turn militarist, invade China and attack the USA as it prosecuted the Pacific War. The short-lived Taisho period had much in common with Edwardian Britain and Weimar Germany. Taisho is now fondly remembered as a time of hedonism and the rise of an ero-guro culture – the term is shorthand for ‘erotic-grotesque-nonsensical’ – rooted in the pulp fiction of the day and perpetuated in, for example, Ozu Yasujiro’s student comedies and thrillers of the late 1920s and early 30s. All three films in Suzuki’s trilogy are ghost stories of a sort, exploring the era’s cultural confusions and its sexual perversity and licence. In the Mood for Love is not a ghost story, but Wong Kar Wai evidently heard something in the yearning ‘Yumeji’s Theme’ that matched his sense of the vanished manners and morals of Hong Kong in the early 1960s. He uses Umebayashi’s cue no fewer than nine In a glass darkly: Chow consoles Mrs Chan in room 2046

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times in his film – that is, even more insistently than he used The Mamas and the Papas’ ‘California Dreamin’’ in Chungking Express (1994). We need a scene breakdown of In the Mood for Love to anchor our discussion of the film, so here it comes, as readable as I can make it. It describes the film’s dramatic content and visual syntax in some detail and includes all the main music cues; it’s designed to highlight issues I’ll discuss later in the book. Since Wong and his designer/editor William Chang use music to camouflage the film’s many elisions, this description, which notes the film’s visual idiosyncrasies, may help some readers to disentangle what the film says from the way it says it. Readers who know the film closely already may prefer to skip these pages or refer to them only to verify points in the rest of the text – but if they do so, they risk missing several clarifications of the film’s cultural context. Except where noted, the film’s dialogue is in Cantonese, the ancient southern Chinese dialect spoken in Hong Kong. The film opens with a few main credits, assertively printed in white on a strong red background. Next up is a quote from the writings of Liu Yi-Chang, printed in white on a black background; another will appear just before the end caption, giving the film a literary frame. This first one reads: ‘It is a restless moment. She has kept her head lowered to give him a chance to come closer. But he cannot, for lack of courage. She turns and walks away.’ A third Liu Yi-Chang quote will appear between the film’s two 1966 codas; none of the quotes has a direct bearing on the film’s plot, but all three evoke the hesitations and regrets that dominate the story. After the opening quote, another caption, also white on black, situates the action in Hong Kong in 1962. The first scene opens with a quick fade-in from black to a tracking shot along an apartment wall hung with framed family photos from pre-communist Shanghai; it ends on Mrs Suen (seen from behind) calling her guests to dinner in Shanghainese. Cut to Mrs Chan, wearing a floral qipao, opening and gazing out of the living-

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room window; she turns and apologises (in Cantonese) to Mrs Suen for interrupting her dinner party. They sit and introduce themselves to each other. (Mrs Suen goes on speaking Shanghainese and Mrs Chan Cantonese.) It becomes clear that Mrs Chan is considering renting a room in the apartment for herself and her absent husband. A jump-cut takes us to Mrs Chan’s departure, promising to phone with her decision. Cut to Mr Chow, seen from behind, mounting the narrow stairs of the tenement building. He checks a newspaper small ad, and reaches the upper hallway just as Mrs Suen ushers Mrs Chan out with the words ‘It’s settled, then’. In response to Mr Chow’s enquiry, Mrs Suen (now speaking Cantonese) very politely explains that her vacant room has just been let (‘to that lady’) and advises him to try her neighbour Mr Koo, whose son has just married and moved out. The scene ends with a quick fade to black on Mr Chow pressing Mr Koo’s doorbell. Fade-in on Mrs Chan and Mr Chow moving into their rented rooms in the adjacent apartments. Their deliverymen have arrived at the same moment, so there is much confusion about what goes where. The shots are tightly framed, to emphasise how cramped the The first change of scene: Chow climbs the tenement stairs

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space is. Amid the chaos, Chow and Mrs Chan formally introduce themselves to each other, and it emerges that her still-absent husband reads Japanese and often visits Japan. Fade to black. A brief coda to the scene shows Mrs Chan leaving for Kaitak Airport to welcome her husband back from a trip. She passes Mrs Chow (seen from behind) on the narrow stairs and gives her a nodding greeting. Mrs Chow hurries into Mrs Suen’s apartment, where guests are settling down to snacks and beer over their mahjong game. Chatter about Mrs Chan. The group is seen from another room, through the open doorway. The camera sinks slightly (the first of several ‘unmotivated’ camera movements) as the image fades to black. Fade-in on a brief vignette; ‘Yumeji’s Theme’ is heard for the first time. The shot follows Mrs Chan at waist level as she takes a cigarette from a packet and enters the living room, where another mahjong game is in progress; Mr Chan is one of the players. Mrs Chan sits beside him. Mrs Chow enters (seen only from behind) and Chow yields the seat he has been keeping warm for her. He rises and brushes past Mrs Chan (now standing); the camera pans to follow him as he leaves the room, in slightly slowed motion. Cut back Chow returns Mr Chan’s Japanese magazines to his wife

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to the mahjong game, seen through the open doorway. Mrs Chan has her arm around her husband, taking an interest in the game. Quick fade-out. Fade-in on another vignette as Umebayashi’s music fades out: Mr Chan (only his legs are seen) finishes packing for a trip, while Mrs Chan prepares to leave for work. Cut: medium close-up of Mrs Chan in the doorway, fixing her earring and asking him to bring back two more of ‘those handbags’ for her employer Mr Ho. (The need for two handbags is the first indication that Mr Ho is keeping both a wife and a mistress; Mrs Chan makes her prissy disapproval of the arrangement obvious.) She leaves the frame (presumably to kiss him goodbye), then re-enters and leaves the apartment. Fade-out. Cut to Mr Ho’s office, a shipping agency, where Mrs Chan (seen from behind) is on the phone to Mr Ho’s wife, telling her that he is still in a meeting. New angle, with Mrs Chan out of focus in the background; a large, hanging Siemens clock fills most of the frame, showing 7.03 p.m. She ends the call as Mr Ho enters, asking if she’s called his wife. She reports an earlier phone conversation with his

Working late: the Siemens clock all but fills the frame

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mistress, Miss Yu, about their dinner date. Mr Ho leaves in a hurry, passing his office accountant on the stairs. The scene ends with a slow pan across the office, as seen from the stairs. The final composition is held for several seconds, giving us the first of three seemingly anomalous shots of decor. The image is bisected by a strong vertical line, but oddly has no focus of interest: the accountant is seen (through a hatch in a patterned wooden partition) in his room in the right half of the frame; the left half includes a pot plant, a globe, a green blind and the bottom half of the clock. Hard cut to another tiny vignette in Mrs Suen’s apartment, with the focus shifting from the kitchen in the background (where the Amah is cooking) to the hallway in the foreground. Mrs Chan is going out ‘to buy noodles’. She politely declines Mrs Suen’s invitation to join her mahjong party, saying she ‘needs some air’. The conversation ends with two reverse-angle cuts. Mrs Suen goes into the kitchen. Fade-out. Fade-in on another eccentric composition: the reception desk of a hotel, seen through an oval hatch in a side wall. Mrs Chow (first off screen, then in a second, similar shot seen from behind) speaks on the phone to her husband; she is clearly working as the hotel’s receptionist. She says that she’ll be home early. Cut to Mr Chow ending the call in the newspaper office where he works. He’s called back to the laborious task of typesetting in Chinese, using an apparatus which selects each written character in turn. He asks his colleague Ah Ming to get him time off for a holiday with his wife. The conversation is shown in a series of reverse-angle cuts. Fade-out. Fade-in on the hallway of Mr Koo’s apartment, with a babble of voices off. Mr Chow returns home to discover Mr and Mrs Koo excitedly trying out a new-fangled rice cooker, brought from Japan by Mrs Chan’s husband. Cut: Mrs Chan reads the newspaper, seen through the doorway of another room. Mrs Koo recommends Mr Chow to get a rice cooker too, ‘since your wife is so often back late’ – the first hint of her affair with Mr Chan. The Koos clamour to

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Two consecutive shots of the hotel lobby where Mrs Chow works; and laborious Chinese typesetting in the newspaper office

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sample the steamed rice. Hard cut to a moment evidently weeks or months later. An extended, fixed-angle close shot of Mr Chow thanking Mr Chan (heard, not seen) for the rice cooker he’s bought for the Chows. He hears to his surprise that his wife has already paid for it (‘Didn’t she tell you?’) and rallies by asking Chan if his wife could get him cheap tickets for a passage to Singapore, clearly for the holiday mooted in the newspaper office conversation. Cut to new angle medium shot of Chow returning to Mr Koo’s apartment along the corridor. Hard cut to the newspaper office for a scene centred on Mr Chow’s banter with his randy colleague Ah Ping, who has made a delivery to Mrs Chan in the shipping office and has deliberately left his hat there, giving him an excuse to return. Chow ridicules his hopes of seducing Mrs Chan, and his general enthusiasm for extramarital sex (‘I’m not like you’), but cannot forestall Ping’s plan to visit’s Chow’s apartment that evening. Hard cut: Mrs Chan rings the doorbell of Koo’s apartment. Chow comes to the door and twigs immediately that she wants to borrow a newspaper to keep up with a story that it’s serialising.

Chow speaks to the unseen Chan; compare with the shot on p. 12

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Chow (initially off screen) offers to find the paper for her. Cut to a new angle: Chow and Mrs Chan are seen reflected in an old, blemished mirror in Koo’s living room. Mrs Chan peers into the room from the doorway. Chow talks about loving serials so much he thought of writing one himself. ‘I couldn’t get started, so I gave up.’ He offers to lend Mrs Chan his own collection; she says, ‘Some other time.’ Their brief conversation is broken up into six shots. In the last one, Chow closes Koo’s door into the camera. Hard cut to the corridor, some days or weeks later. Mrs Chan knocks at Koo’s open door and is answered by Mrs Koo. She wants to return the serials she borrowed from Mr Chow. Mrs Koo explains that Chow is away for a few days: ‘They had a quarrel.’ Cut: Mrs Chan hands her the pile of books, seen reflected in the old mirror; Mrs Chan leaves. Close-up (with a slight crane up) on the pile of books, placed on the sideboard beside a clock. Fade-out. The hotel reception desk, seen as before through the oval hatch. Mrs Chow (not seen) tells her husband on the phone that she is stuck there late, on a replacement shift. The back of her head is briefly glimpsed as she ends the call. Hard cut to a similarly framed shot:

‘Through a dusty windowpane’: a neighbourly exchange seen in a mottled mirror

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Mr Chow is at the desk, asking for her. A man (seen from behind) tells him that she’s gone. ‘Didn’t she tell you she was off early today?’ Chow says ‘She never remembers to’ and leaves. Cut to a shot of Chow thinking dark thoughts, against an alley wall. ‘Yumeji’s Theme’ makes its second appearance on the soundtrack over the hard cut to a slowed-motion shot of Mrs Chan in a vertically striped qipao descending outdoor stone steps. She carries a thermos pail for the hot noodles she’s about to buy. Still in slowed motion, she waits in the daibaitong for her order to be prepared, then leaves, climbing the stone steps. When she exits the frame at the top of the steps, the camera lingers on an old street light and the wall beneath it, covered with scraps of old posters. Shortly afterwards, Mr Chow enters the frame and descends the stone steps, also in slowed motion. Cut: the camera tracks past a black wall to a medium shot of Mr Chow eating in the daibaitong. (The Hong Kong of the 1960s had street food everywhere, served at makeshift outdoor restaurants known as daibaitong. These disappeared from most areas in the 1980s, as Hong Kong’s Urban Council tidied them away into covered markets in the name of hygiene and public health. Some of the best daibaitong moved indoors and became famous restaurants in their own right.) Umebayashi’s music fades over the hard cut to another occasion in the same location. Mrs Chan, again carrying the thermos pail and wearing a green-maroon qipao, crosses Mr Chow on the stone steps and greets him in passing. Hard cut to the newspaper office. Ping scurries along a corridor to Chow’s office and bursts in with a demand for an urgent loan of HK$30. He gabbles out a long, crazy story involving hospital, stitches, losing his shirt on a bad racing tip, visiting a whorehouse with only HK$2 and needing money to redeem his ID card, left with the girl as a guarantee. Chow can spare him only HK$20. (The conversation is filmed and edited rather eccentrically. The two men are first shown separately, and cross-cut according to no known convention; there is only one cut based on an orthodox eyeline match. The second part of the scene is filmed in wider shots of both

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men, complete with some reverse-angle cutting.) Chow agrees to join Ping for a supper snack when he’s finished what he’s working on. Cut: camera tracks past a wall to their table in a daibaitong. As they eat a late supper, Ping hesitantly tells Chow that he saw Mrs Chow in the street the day before – with another man. Recurrent motifs: Chow looks for his wife, Mrs Chan waits for her noodles

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Hard cut to a gift-wrapped parcel on a desk in the shipping office. The short scene details Mrs Chan’s role in keeping Ho’s mistress and wife apart; it emerges that the gift box contains a birthday present for Mrs Ho, chosen and bought by Mrs Chan for her employer. Ho thanks her, tells her to keep the change for her trouble and invites her to join the birthday dinner that evening. She declines; she plans to see a movie. Ho gives her the next morning off. Cut: the big Siemens clock shows 4.23 p.m. Off-screen sound of Mrs Chan phoning her husband. Cut to black. Quick fade-in on the living room of Mr Koo’s apartment. Doorbell rings, off. Mrs Chow emerges from her room (it is too dark to see her face) to go to the door. Cut: Mrs Chow opens the door, seen reflected (from behind) in the mottled mirror. Cut: a long-held frontal close-up of Mrs Chan outside the door. She thought she heard voices and assumed the Koos were in, but Mrs Chow says she’s alone, back early because she doesn’t feel well; she declines Mrs Chan’s offer of medicine. Cut to a side angle as Mrs Chow (still unseen) closes the door. Cut to a shot of a table lamp in Koo’s apartment. No one is visible. Mrs Chow (off screen) says, ‘It was your wife.’ Cut to the now-familiar oval-framed shot of the hotel reception desk. Mrs Chow (off screen) speaks on the phone: ‘Have you spoken to your wife? … Then we shouldn’t make any move.’ Cut to a reframed version of the same view, then fade-out. Cut to a tracking shot along an interior wall to an old mirror, which reflects the empty room. Cut to a woman sobbing in the bathroom. Cut to a male hand (with a prominent wedding ring) knocking at a door. Fade to black. Cut to the shipping office. Bustle, movement. Business talk, then chatter about Mr Ho’s birthday dinner that evening: Mrs Chan reports that his wife will meet him in the restaurant, and that Miss Yu has sent over a gift. Seen framed through a doorway, Mrs Chan makes Ho another coffee, then resumes typing, commenting that his new tie looks good on him. Ho is surprised she’s noticed it. Mrs Chan: ‘You notice things if you pay attention to detail.’ Cut to the end of the afternoon: Ho is leaving. Mrs Chan notices that he has

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changed back to his old tie. Ho: ‘The new one was too showy. Don’t forget to lock up.’ Cut to black. ‘Yumeji’s Theme’ makes its third appearance over a quick fadein to another slowed-motion shot of Mrs Chow carrying the thermos pail down the stone steps and passing Mr Chow on his way up. The shot holds on the old street lamp as rain starts falling. Cross-cuts between Chow sheltering in a doorway, brushing his suit dry with a handkerchief and then smoking, and Mrs Chan sheltering in the daibaitong, looking pensive. The music fades over a tracking shot of a puddle on the street; the rainfall slows. Hard cut: Chow and Mrs Chan, both wet, climb the tenement stairs. In the corridor outside the apartments, they chat as they fumble for their keys. Each has noticed that the other’s spouse is away but both have plausible explanations for the absences. Mrs Chan enters Mrs Suen’s apartment and is greeted by the Amah, who says she thought of going out to find her with an umbrella. Mrs Suen (off screen) calls out that she could have eaten with her guests. Mrs Chan exits the frame and the camera holds on the empty doorway. We hear the chatter of the mahjong players from The full-face shot of Mrs Chan (rather than a profile) heightens the impact of the offscreen lines

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off screen: ‘I feel sorry for her, she’s so lonely, her husband is always away’ … ‘She dresses up like that to go out for noodles?’ Cut: Mrs Chan climbs the tenement stairs, wearing a horizontal-striped qipao. Outside Mrs Suen’s door, she is reaching for her key when Mr Chow opens it from inside. He explains that he was there to call Mrs Koo to the phone. He comments that she’s back late, and she replies that she went to the pictures. They go to their respective rooms. Cut: the Amah takes a call in Mrs Suen’s apartment. It’s for Mrs Chan. Cut to an oddly framed shot of a jukebox in a new location: a western-style restaurant. Nat King Cole sings ‘Aquellos ojos verdes’ on the soundtrack. Chow and Mrs Chan are seated facing each other in a banquette, she wearing a floral qipao, drinking coffee. Their conversation is filmed in profile shots, sometimes cutting from one to the other, sometimes whip-panning. They edge gingerly towards the heart of the matter, discussing the handbags and ties (gifts from their respective partners to each other’s spouses) which confirm that Chow’s wife is having an affair with Mrs Chan’s husband. Mrs Chan (voice-off, over a shot of Chow’s cigarette Edging towards disclosure: Chow and Mrs Chan explain their partners’ absences

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smoke): ‘I thought I was the only one who knew.’ Fade to black. Cut to a night street. Nat King Cole sings ‘Te quieres deijiste’ on the soundtrack as they walk in slightly slowed motion. Mrs Chan (voiceover): ‘I wonder how it began.’ Quick fade to black. Cut to their shadows on a decrepit wall. They enter the frame, now imagining and acting out what they guess their spouses said to each other when they embarked on their affair. (They are first filmed at waist height; their faces are then seen from several different angles.) This attempt to understand the mentality and behaviour of their spouses founders when Mrs Chan objects to Chow saying ‘Shall we stay out tonight?’ (He puts his hand on her arm, but she breaks away from him.) She doesn’t believe that her husband would have said such a thing, but Chow is adamant that Mr Chan must have made the first move. Cut: a tracking shot of them walking together, seen now from behind a grilled wall on the other side of the alley. They repeat the same dialogue, with Mrs Chan now behaving more coquettishly. But she can’t bring herself to imagine Mrs Chow making the first move; she walks off, bitterly asking Chow if he really knows his wife. She exits from a wide-angle shot, which holds on Chow standing alone. Cut: the western-style restaurant. Nat King Cole sings ‘Aquellos ojos verdes’. Chow and Mrs Chan are about to eat together, she wearing a grey qipao with a large yellow flower on the chest. The conversation indicates that they are still ‘role-playing’ their spouses. Hard cut to a sidelong angle on the two of them eating; he seems more used to eating western food than she is. The scene is shot in close-ups of their plates, their hands grappling with knives and forks, and their faces in profile, the camera panning back and forth between them. Chow dabs mustard on the side of Mrs Chan’s plate; she’s eating a steak. Mrs Chan: ‘Your wife likes hot dishes.’ Cut: the song continues uninterrupted on the soundtrack over a quick pan to Mrs Chan eating in the same banquette. But she’s now wearing a striped qipao, indicating that this is another occasion. The ‘role-play’ has become more sophisticated. Mrs Chan: ‘You have my husband

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down pat. He’s a real sweet-talker.’ Cut to them sitting in the back of the taxi taking them home through the night streets. In close-up, Chow inches his hand towards hers. She withdraws. Hard cut to Mrs Suen’s apartment. The Amah hands Mrs Chan a letter from her husband … but Mrs Chan tells her it’s actually for Wisps of smoke for admitting the truth; shadows on a wall for role-play

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Mr Chow next door; it was the Japanese stamp that confused the Amah. She takes it to the next-door apartment; shot holds on Mrs Chan alone in the kitchen. Cut: Chow sits in his room and angrily crumples the letter he’s just read. He reaches across to close the door. Hard cut to a close-up of the Siemens clock in the shipping office; it shows 1.10 p.m. The camera slowly starts to crane down as we hear an off-screen phone conversation between Mrs Chan and Chow. She asks about the letter and when his wife will be back. Cut to black. ‘Yumeji’s Theme’ makes its fourth appearance on the soundtrack over the film’s first flash-forward. Fade-in on a fixed angle showing an upper-floor corridor in the hotel where Chow will later rent a room to write in collaboration with Mrs Chan. Crimson drapes billow in the breeze along one side of the corridor; the image is redolent of David Lynch’s Twin Peaks (TV, 1990–1). Cut to the interior of Chow’s rented room. He is there with Mrs Chan, she wearing a bold red coat over her qipao, standing in the light from the window. Neither speaks. She crosses the room to the door, in the background of the shot. Cut: rear view of a taxi moving through a night street; they are visible through the rear window. Mrs Chan (heard in voiceover) wants it to pull up so that she can get out first – so that they don’t arrive back home together. The taxi stops, and the gentlemanly Chow gets out. The taxi drives off. Umebayashi’s music fades as it starts raining. Chow dashes for cover. Scene ends with a long shot of him sheltering. Hard cut to the same alley in daylight, seen from a nearly identical angle. Ping walks through the shot. Cut: he emerges from Koo’s apartment just as Mrs Chan gets back (she is in the foreground of the shot). She’s surprised to see Ping back in Hong Kong. He explains that he came to visit Chow, only to find that he has a bad cold and can’t taste anything. Ping will buy him some food; he says Chow has a craving for (strong-tasting) sesame syrup. Cut: inside Mrs Suen’s apartment, Mrs Suen calls for the Amah. Mrs Chan, cooking in the kitchen, tells her the Amah is hanging washing on the roof. They chat about shopping for Mrs Suen’s mother’s coming

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birthday and Mrs Suen’s new hairdo. Mrs Chan is making a big pot of sesame syrup. Very hard cut to Chow bumping into Mrs Chan in the alley near the daibaitong. He’s on his way out for noodles (‘I’m starving’), and she’s coming home from the pictures (the movie was ‘so-so’). He comments that he used to enjoy seeing movies too. They chat about married life, about making decisions as a couple and giving up the things you used to do alone. Chow says he wonders what he’d be if he hadn’t married. Mrs Chan: ‘Maybe happier?’ Chow says he doesn’t brood on his mistakes, and that he’s embarked on writing a wuxia (martial arts) serial for the newspaper. He invites her to help, as a fellow fan of the genre, and then remembers to thank her for the sesame syrup – ‘Just what I was craving that day.’ She pretends that it was a coincidence that she was making it. They go their separate ways. A quick dissolve to a short shot of Mrs Chan heading home, then another quick dissolve to another shot of her turning the corner of the alley. Cut: Chow arrives in the newspaper office at night. He’s the only one there. He sits at his desk, smoking. ‘Yumeji’s Theme’ makes its fifth appearance on the soundtrack over a slowed-motion shot of his cigarette smoke rising. Cut: tracking shot passes lace curtains to the interior where Mrs Chan sits alone, writing. Cut back to Chow, writing in the newspaper office. Cut back to apartment, where Mrs Chan is reading Chow’s manuscript as he waits in the background for her reaction; they are seen in long shot through the frame of a doorway. Umebayashi’s music cuts out as the image cuts to a white screen. The white screen turns out to be a close-up of the light in the corridor outside the apartments. Camera pans down to the commotion below, exactly echoing the shot of Chow’s first arrival in that corridor at the start of the film. Mr Koo has got drunk (‘Again!’) during one of Mrs Suen’s mahjong parties and is being helped back to his own apartment. Chow, who came out to see what was happening, returns to his room – where Mrs Chan is hiding. And since Mrs Suen has moved the mahjong party to Koo’s apartment (to accommodate

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Mrs Koo’s need to keep an eye on her husband), Mrs Chan is trapped there. Chow tries to work on his wuxia serial; Mrs Chan queries the sudden appearance of a ‘drunken master’ character. (This part of the scene will be reprised as even broader comedy in 2046 [2004], with Wang Jingwen – played by Faye Wong – replacing Mrs Chan. The joke about illogicality in wuxia plots reminds us that Wong’s last scriptwriting chore was a rewrite with Jeff Lau on the all-stops-out martial arts fantasy Saviour of the Soul [1991].) Cut: daytime in Chow’s room. The mahjong game still hasn’t ended, but player Mr Yang has to leave for work. Mrs Chan remains trapped in Chow’s room; Chow has called Mr Ho to apologise for her non-appearance at work. Mrs Chan frets that she’s been too cautious, since she’s always visiting Koo’s apartment anyway. But her innate caution prevails. Cut: a panning shot across Chow’s room. He’s asleep in a chair, Mrs Chan is on the bed. Cut: a floor-level shot of the room from under the bed. We see Chow’s slippers and Mrs Chan’s feet in high heels, and hear Chow say, ‘You can go.’ Mrs Chan dashes back to her own room next door. Later(?) she is intercepted by the Amah, who remarks that she’s back late from work and tells her that Mrs Suen is sleeping after playing all night. Cut: Chow stands smoking in Koo’s apartment. He walks off, suddenly decisive. Close-up of his slippers on the floor. Fade to black. At this point, the film goes into a suite of interconnected scenes set in its recurrent locations – now including the hotel room seen in the earlier flash-forward. First seen is the crumbling alley wall, with the shadows of Chow and Mrs Chan preceding them as they stroll; when they enter the frame, we see them at waist height as they talk. In the next shot, they are seen through the bars in the wall on the other side of the alley. He has taken her to dinner to thank her for her help with writing the serial – because she refused any share of the fee. He says he’s being asked to write more; she worries that he’s taking on too much. He says he’s thinking of renting somewhere specifically to write in, somewhere she can work with him without being seen. Chow: ‘It’ll be more convenient. There’s nothing between us, but we

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don’t want gossip.’ She thinks that would be a waste of money, and adds that he doesn’t need her help anyway. She walks away and he half turns to watch her go, Nat King Cole’s ‘Aquellos ojos verdes’ begins on the soundtrack. The song continues over a shot of Chow’s feet in the crimsondraped hotel corridor. Cut: a shot of him alone and pensive in the hotel room. Cut to black (actually, a wall in the newspaper office) and pan past the newspaper staff having lunch to Ming taking a call from Mrs Chan. Nat King Cole fades out on the soundtrack as the pan reaches Ming. He says that Chow hasn’t been in for some days. Cut to the shipping office where Mrs Chan puts down the phone. She busies herself with Mr Ho, then takes a phone call – ‘Where are you?’ Cut to Mrs Chan (now wearing the bright red coat over her patterned white qipao) in a taxi. Cut: a quick-fire montage of shots of her legs ascending and descending hotel stairs, hurrying along the hotel corridor. The montage suggests her mixed excitement and anxiety. Cut: Chow is gazing out of the window of his room, smoking, when there’s a knock at the door. Cut: the corridor with its crimson drapes A premonition of things to come: Chow’s slippers and Mrs Chan’s heels

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as Mrs Chan exits Chow’s room. They converse in the doorway. Chow asks her to call to confirm her safe return home – ‘Let it ring three times, then hang up.’ He adds that he didn’t think she’d come. Mrs Chan: ‘We won’t be like them … I’ll come again tomorrow.’ Chow closes the door of the room into the camera, and we see that Decision and indecision: Chow and Mrs Chan approach room 2046

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the room number is ‘2046’. Camera tracks backwards along the crimson-draped corridor as she walks away; ‘Yumeji’s Theme’ starts on the soundtrack (sixth appearance) at the end of the shot and continues over a montage of them writing together in the hotel room. Most of the shots are lateral tracks, which constantly reframe them – often in front of the dressing table, which has a large three-sectioned mirror. (In the dressing-table shots, they are seen from several angles at once.) Umebayashi’s music fades as they break to eat and start talking. The action resumes with more ‘role-playing’: they have reached the point where Mrs Chan asks her husband if he is having an affair. When Chow-as-Mr Chan admits it, Mrs Chan breaks down. They repeat the dialogue. The second time Chow says ‘Yes’, Mrs Chan says and does nothing, but looks emotionally overcome. Chow asks if she’s all right. Mrs Chan: ‘I didn’t think it would hurt so much.’ She sobs and moves forward to rest her face on his chest. He tries to console her: ‘This is just a rehearsal.’ Cut: a shot of the room’s red carpet with the shadow of the billowing curtain. Cut: Chow hugs Mrs Chan, seen reflected in a wall mirror. Chow:

Room 2046: writing together as a pretext for being together

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‘He won’t really admit it so readily. Don’t take it so hard.’ The camera pans to the billowing pink curtain. Hard cut to the back of Mrs Chan’s head (she’s wearing a white qipao) as she listens to advice from Mrs Suen, speaking in Shanghainese. Mrs Suen warns her about gossip and urges her to spend more time with her husband. Mrs Suen has been out of focus in the background of the shot while speaking; she comes into focus as Mrs Chan bids her goodnight and steps away. Cut: Mrs Chan’s shadow on the wall as she returns to her room. She pauses in the doorway and looks back, under a light, then enters her room. Quick fade to black. The Siemens clock in the shipping office shows a few minutes before 6 p.m. Mrs Chan (off screen) takes a call from Chow, who wants her to come to the hotel to help him write. Cut: a slow pan over out-offocus office decor to a waist-level shot of Mrs Chan saying she can’t come over any time soon. He asks ‘Why not?’ and she explains, ‘Mrs Suen lectured me last night.’ She ends the call and moves out of shot. Her movement is continued in a match-cut to a long shot (through a doorway) of Mrs Chan entering the kitchen of Mrs Room 2046: role-play as a pretext for being together

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Suen’s apartment. She tells the Amah that she’ll make herself something to eat rather than going out for noodles, and the Amah persuades her to join them for vegetable won-tons. ‘Yumeji’s Theme’ starts for the seventh time over a through-the-doorway shot of Mrs Chan watching Mrs Suen and her guests play mahjong. The camera tracks into the room as Mrs Chan, standing, says something unheard to Mrs Suen, then drifts with her drink to the window and looks out pensively. Cut to a curious shot of her from outside the window: the camera rises over some black foreground obstruction, as if watching her from an opposite window. She turns away and leaves the frame. Cut to the film’s second flash-forward. A slowed-motion tracking shot across the window of a newspaper office in Singapore. The newspaper’s name, Singapore Man Yit Pao (Daily News), is painted on the glass. Inside, the group of men includes Mr Chow, smoking. The music continues over the shot. (The implication is that this is Mrs Chan’s premonition; she knows that Ping has already decamped to Singapore.) Cut to Mrs Chan (from behind) climbing the stairs of the shipping office. It’s evidently an overcast afternoon outside; desk lights are on. Mr Ho, at his desk, tells her that ‘a Mr Chow’ just called for her. The camera pans with her as she sits at her desk and starts typing. Cut: Mr Ho looks across to see her reaction to the message. Cut: Chow smokes in his newspaper office, waiting for her to return his call. Cut to the alley in the rain. Chow runs for cover, and finds Mrs Chan already sheltering. After commenting on the unusual weather, he dashes home to fetch an umbrella – which she refuses to use, on the grounds that ‘they’ will recognise it. She prefers to wait a while; he says he’ll keep her company. Long shot of them sheltering. Cut to a side angle of their faces as conversation starts; it’s a long-held shot. She asks if he tried to call her; he wondered if she’d got the message. He wants her to book him a passage to Singapore; he plans to join Ping there.

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MRS CHAN

I didn’t think you’d fall in love with me.

CHOW

I didn’t either. I was only curious to know how it started. Now I know. Feelings can creep up just like that. I thought I was in control. But I hate to think of your husband coming home. I wish he’d stay away. I’m so bad! Will you do me one favour?

MRS CHAN

What?

CHOW

I want to be prepared.

Cut to her slightly shocked reaction. Cut to a new angle: they’re seen through the grilled bars on the other side of the alley. Cut: the naked bulb of the street light, with heavy rain falling. Cut: shot of a puddle as the rain stops. Cut back to a tracking shot (seen through the grilled bars) of Mrs Chan pacing back towards Chow. This time their ‘roleplay’ as they rehearse a break-up is indistinguishable from their own decision to stop meeting. Chow pulls his hand away from hers, walks away. She grips her arm. Camera cranes up to show Chow walking away. Cut: their dialogue resumes, the line between ‘role-play’ and actuality now non-existent. He says: ‘Don’t be serious, it’s only a rehearsal. Don’t cry. It isn’t real.’

The alley: downcast gazes in profile

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Cut to black (a wall fills the frame), then track left to show Chow embracing Mrs Chan as he consoles her. ‘Yumeji’s Theme’ makes its eighth appearance on the soundtrack. Mrs Chan sobs uncontrollably as they hold each other; there are three shots (two with foreground obstructions, the third without) before the fade-out. The preludes to off-screen sex

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Fade in a shot from behind of a taxi driving through the night streets, with Chow and Mrs Chan visible through the rear window. She speaks in voiceover: ‘I don’t want to go home tonight.’ Inside the taxi, their hands touch. She slumps her head on his shoulder. Fade to black. Mrs Suen’s apartment. Umebayashi’s music fades out as the camera tracks through the room, lingering on the 1960s radio set which is relaying a music-request show. The woman announcer reads out a dedication: ‘Mr Chan, now on business in Japan, wants to wish his wife a happy birthday. So let’s all enjoy Zhou Xuan singing “In Full Bloom”.’ The old song (in Chinese: ‘Huayang de Nianhua’) begins with a few bars of the ‘Happy Birthday’ melody. Cut to a shot of Mrs Chan sitting in the kitchen, listening. Steam gushes from the rice cooker in front of her. The camera tracks left ‘through’ the wall to find Mr Chow similarly sitting alone in his room, facing the other way, and then back to Mrs Chan in Mrs Suen’s kitchen. Sudden sound of a telephone ringing. Cut: the camera pans across out-of-focus office decor to the shipping office phone, which rings unanswered. The ringing stops, and we hear instead the sound of Mrs Chan

A poignant radio request

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typing. Cut: the Siemens clock, showing a minute past 11 a.m. The sound of typing is eclipsed by a voiceover from Mr Chow: ‘It’s me. If there’s an extra ticket, would you come with me?’ Cut to a slow track across the wall and curtains of room 2046 to Chow gazing out of the window. Nat King Cole sings ‘Quizas, quizas, quizas’ on the soundtrack. Cut: Chow turns off the light and leaves the room. He stands in the corridor with the crimson drapes; the camera tracks back from his stationary figure. Fade to black. Crash fade-in on Mrs Chan (in a green qipao) clattering down the stairs of the apartment building. Cut: Mrs Chan sits (apparently alone) in Chow’s hotel room. The song cuts out. Cut: the corridor outside, with the crimson drapes billowing. Cut: Mrs Chan cries in the room, reflected twice in the dressingtable mirror behind her. We hear her in voiceover: ‘It’s me. If there’s an extra ticket, would you come with me?’ Cut to black. Cut to a solitary palm tree against an azure sky. Quick fade-out. Caption, white on black: Singapore, 1963. Cut to the back of a hotel clerk’s head as he answers the phone. He says that Mr Chow has gone to work. Cut: Chow searches the floor of his Singapore hotel An unanswered phone

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room, increasingly agitated that something is missing. Cut: in closeup, he asks the chubby hotel pageboy if anyone has been in his room. Cut: a brief close-up of the boy saying ‘No’. Cut: a wide shot through the open door of Chow’s room of their stand-off; Chow turns and re-enters the room. Cut: a big close-up of Chow’s fingers picking up a cigarette butt from his ashtray; it was smoked by someone wearing lipstick. Cut: wide shot of a mirror, reflecting Chow’s examination of the cigarette butt. He moves out of shot. Hard cut to a lateral tracking shot across a Singapore daibaitong, where Chow is eating with Ping. Chow tells the story about a man with a secret. ‘In the old days, when someone had a secret, he’d go up a mountain and carve a hole in a tree. He’d whisper the secret into the hole and then cover it with mud … leaving it there for ever.’ Ping is unimpressed and says that he’d have sex with a hooker to get over an upset; Chow repeats his line: ‘Not everyone’s like you!’ Fade-out on shot of Ping, smoking. Cut to an ‘empty’ shot of the staircase in Chow’s Singapore hotel. It heralds a ‘flashback’ to the theft from Chow’s room. Cut: close-up of Mrs Chan’s hand (with a ring on her middle finger) Alone again or … Mrs Chan in room 2046

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on the balustrade. Sound of Cantonese opera, off. Cut: Mrs Chan lies on Chow’s hotel bed, then stirs and begins examining his possessions. She stands, looks around the room, finds a silver cigarette case on the desk. New, closer angle: she opens the case, smells the cigarettes, then takes one and lights it. New angle: shot of a cloudy mirror, reflecting Mrs Chan as she lounges in a chair. Sound, off, of a phone ringing. Cut: shot of a wall-mounted telephone with the receiver cord stretching off screen. Cut: the Singapore newspaper office. Chow is called to the phone, but no one speaks when he takes the call. Nat King Cole’s ‘Quizas, quizas, quizas’ is reprised on the soundtrack. Cut to Mrs Chan in Chow’s room, holding the phone but saying nothing. New angle: she hangs up. Cut to a curious ‘abstract’ shot of the room, bisected vertically by a brown curtain; no one is visible, but the shot is oddly reminiscent of two other ‘redundant’ shots of decor. Cut to a floor-level shot (from under the bed) as Mrs Chan in high heels ducks down to pick up Chow’s slippers. Fade to black. Caption, white on black: Hong Kong, 1966. Mrs Suen’s apartment. Mrs Chan arrives (off screen) to visit Mrs Suen; she is Telltale lipstick traces

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delivering a boat ticket and has brought a gift. Mrs Suen is packing to leave, but can’t bear to throw anything away. (As at the start, Mrs Suen speaks to Mrs Chan in Shanghainese, but the Amah uses Cantonese.) The Amah fusses over Mrs Chan and insists that she should stay to eat. Mrs Chan says her husband is fine. Mrs Suen doesn’t know how long she’ll be away; she says she might rent out the apartment, since the Koos, her mahjong partners, have left, and her daughter in the US is so worried about the riots in Hong Kong. Mrs Chan moves to the window to gaze out, close to tears, as Mrs Suen reminisces about how nice it was back when Mrs Chan was a tenant. A reprise of Nat King Cole’s ‘Quizas, quizas, quizas’ starts on the soundtrack. A brief shot of the room with no one visible, then quick fade to black. The song continues over a cut to a waist-level panning shot following Chow through the alley, carrying a gift box under his arm. Cut to an upward panning shot of him climbing the crumbling stone stairs. At the door of Mr Koo’s apartment, the new owner (unseen at first) says that he has no contact number for Mr Koo in the Philippines. Cut to a view of the living room from outside the open An unconsummated phone call

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window as Chow enters and looks around. The new owner tells him that Mrs Suen has gone too (‘She ran away, like so many’) and mentions that the next-door apartment is now occupied by a woman and her ‘cute’ son. Cut to the corridor as Chow leaves, pressing his gift box on the new owner. Chow pauses outside the door of the other apartment. New angle: he turns and starts down the stairs. The Nat King Cole song ends over a caption (white on black) with another quote from Liu Yi-Chang’s writings: ‘That era has passed. Nothing that belonged to it exists any more.’ Cut to Mrs Suen’s former apartment. Mrs Chan, the new resident, prepares to go out with her young son. They say goodbye to the maid. Cut: a shot of the empty corridor; we hear the sound of their feet on the stone stairs as they descend. Cut to black. Caption: Cambodia, 1966. Cut to shots from a colour newsreel showing General De Gaulle’s arrival at Pochentong Airport on a state visit to Norodom Sihanouk and his queen. Cut to the motorcade taking them the ten kilometres from the airport to Phnom Penh. The French commentator notes that 200,000 people line the route – ‘an unprecedented welcome in the kingdom’. Cut to black. 1966 reunion: Mrs Chan visits Mrs Suen and her Amah

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Fade-in on the ruins of Angkor Wat. A boy monk perches in a doorway, high up a wall, looking down at a visitor. The sonorous cello music composed by Michael Galasso for the film starts. Cut: big close-up of a hole in a wall, soon probed by an index finger. The finger belongs to Chow, seen in close-up as he hesitates, then leans forward to whisper something unheard into the hole. A stately wide-angle tracking shot circles Chow from a distance, showing the ruins around him. Then two close-ups (the first showing the back of his head) show the whispering continuing. Cut to a high-angle long shot of Chow at the wall, with the watching boy monk’s head out of focus in the foreground. Cut to a suite of five shots of the ruins, inexplicably alternating between day and night, the first two showing Chow leaving the site. Cut to a track-in on the hole, now ‘sealed’ with a clod of earth and grass. Cut to a backward track through the ruins, looking up at the faded paintings on the ceilings. Cut to another backward track, receding from a doorway. Cut to a lateral wide-angle track across the ruins, at the end of which Galasso’s music fades out and is replaced by the sound of crickets. Fade to black. The colonial era draws to its close: De Gaulle visits Cambodia

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Caption, white on black, with a final quote from Liu Yi-Chang: ‘He remembers those vanished years as though looking through a dusty windowpane. The past is something he can see but not touch. And everything he sees is blurred and indistinct.’ This is shown in silence. Angkor Wat: a boy monk watches; a secret is sealed away

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Caption, white on red: The End. ‘Yumeji’s Theme’ is heard for the ninth and last time as the end-credit captions appear, also white on red. The credits are timed to allow Umebayashi’s piece to be heard in extenso for the only time in the film. *** Across the story of two people whose spouses are having an affair, In the Mood for Love waltzes around the themes of fidelity and sincerity in relationships and then tries to resolve itself into a requiem for a lost (colonial) time and its values. We’ll leave the discussion of Wong Kar Wai’s aesthetic choices for our third chapter, but let’s say right off that the film is brilliantly sustained. As the scene breakdown demonstrates, it’s intricately structured but resolutely unconventional in its film grammar and framing and editing choices. It’s far more successful than most other films which create their own idiom as they go along, following – or breaking – their own rules. Some individual shots of Mrs Chan and Mr Chow, taken out of context, do evoke memories of the divas and matinee idols in Hong Kong/Shanghai melodramas of the past, but the film as a whole owes next to nothing to that genre. By the standards of ‘classical’ film language, the film is eccentrically plotted, shot and edited. It starts from the idiosyncratic idea of keeping the adulterous spouses almost entirely off screen: they are straightforwardly absent from the opening scenes, and are later heard but not seen – or briefly glimpsed, either from behind or concealed by shadows. Then they effectively disappear from the film entirely when their hapless spouses admit to each other that they know what’s going on. For a Hong Kong audience, the casting of Roy Cheung as the adulterous Mr Chan makes perfect sense: he’s known for his macho, extrovert roles in gangster movies, and is handsome but with coarser, less refined features than Tony Leung’s. Since Mr Chan is kept off screen, the viewer is left free to imagine him as an upwardly mobile chancer who seduced a good-looking Shanghainese woman into becoming his

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trophy wife; he has clearly shrugged off his working-class origins by reinventing himself as a businessman shuttling between Hong Kong and Tokyo. Probably it was he who liked his wife to dress in elegant qipao (the high-necked, form-hugging garment known in Cantonese as a cheongsam), although it was more likely her lower-middle-class taste which picked out those somewhat vulgar colours and patterns. We’ll have more to say in our fourth chapter miscellany about the idea of relegating the spouses to off-screen space, but Wong himself offers an ingenious rationale: he chose to leave the adulterers unseen, he says, ‘mostly because the central characters were going to enact what they thought their spouses were doing and saying. In other words, we were going to see both relationships – the adulterous affair and the repressed friendship – in the one couple. It’s a technique I learned from Julio Cortázar, who always has this kind of structure. It’s like a circle, the head and tail of a snake meeting.’ (That’s from my interview in 2000, as cited at the head of this chapter.) Ingenious, but specious: the real point of the ‘role-play’ scenes, in which Chow and Mrs Chan improvise what they think their spouses may have said to each other, is to explore their own desires and inhibitions. We may well find ourselves speculating why the adulterers had their affair, but only because we see how Chow and (especially) Mrs Chan think and behave. In any case, we don’t really want or need to know more about the adulterers. Of course, the ‘role-play’ scenes also add a further level of ambiguity to the plotting. There are at least three scenes in the film – in the alley, in the western restaurant and in room 2046 – where the viewer is misled into assuming that Chow and Mrs Chan are speaking frankly to each other, only to realise that they are actually role-playing each other’s spouses. The little shock of realisation produces a frisson every time: the film has caught us out, kept us intrigued. Wong did shoot Chow and Mrs Chan going to bed together, but cut the scene before going to Cannes. It’s one of the ‘deleted scenes’ available on various DVD and Blu-ray editions of the film, and it turns out to conform to the film’s ‘off-screen’ strategy; we hear more than we

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see. (Wong told me: ‘I cut the sex scene at the last moment. I suddenly felt I didn’t want to see them having sex. And when I told William Chang, he said he felt the same but hadn’t wanted to tell me!’) This discretion adds weight to the film’s many hints that they do succumb to their repressed desires. These are: the final time we see them share a taxi, with her voiceover line ‘I don’t want to go home tonight’; the montage which ends the 1962 scenes, showing each of them alone in room 2046, during which both of them speak the voiceover line ‘It’s me … if there’s an extra ticket, would you come with me?’; and the one-year-later pay-off in Singapore, with Mrs Chan (now with no ring on her wedding finger) invading Chow’s hotel room in his absence, leaving telltale lipstick on a cigarette butt and stealing his slippers. All of this, plus the brief glimpse of the apparently single Mrs Chan with a young son in the Hong Kong of 1966, relates to a cryptic motif that runs through a lot of Wong’s cinema. The film doesn’t make a big deal of it, but Mrs Chan’s maiden name is Su Lizhen (or, in Cantonese, So Lai-Chen) – a recurrent name in Wong’s films. Maggie Cheung played the first Su Lizhen in Days of Being Wild (1990): the reticent young beauty running a concession stand in the South China Athletic Association stadium who is seduced and abandoned by Leslie Cheung’s mother-fixated playboy. She forms a kind of friendship with the similarly bereft policeman played by Andy Lau; their strand of the plot also ends with a phone ringing unanswered. The woman played by Maggie Cheung in Ashes of Time (1994) isn’t given a name, but it seems clear that she’s another Su Lizhen: the film’s elaborate backstory tells us that Ouyang Feng (Leslie Cheung) decided not to marry her but came back later and raped her. She is last seen with an apparently fatherless son. (The rape, incidentally, is probably the most oblique scene in the whole of Wong’s cinema; little more is shown than a staircase pursuit in darkness and a falling candle.) Su Lizhen reappears in In the Mood for Love’s quasi-sequel, 2046, this time played by Gong Li in scenes added to the film at a

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very late stage, set in Singapore. This Su Lizhen is very different, a worldly-wise gambler who always wears a long glove on one hand and never loses at cards; she bails Mr Chow out of debt with her winnings. An affair with this Su Lizhen is not on the agenda. His encounter with her causes Chow to reminisce about the Su Lizhen he knew before – which occasions a black-and-white flashback to the intimate moment in the taxi in In the Mood for Love. There was a time – before My Blueberry Nights (2007) and The Grandmaster (2013) – when Wong Kar Wai’s legion of fanboys would have agonised through this network of cross-references in the hope of discovering some hidden truth. We’re certainly not going to embark on that foolish quest here, but we can confidently surmise that (whatever the name Su Lizhen may mean to Wong Kar Wai) unanswered phone calls, fatherless children and stolen slippers have a direct bearing on whatever Chow Mo-Wan whispers into a hole in an Angkor Wat wall. The folk tale about whispering secrets into a hole and burying them there for ever – reprised in 2046 with larger and more abstract holes – is a metaphor for exorcism and healing, just as the folk tale in Days of Being Wild about a legless bird that will die when it finally lands is a

A metaphor for exorcism and healing

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metaphor for commitment phobia. The miasma of guilts and regrets, the sense of opportunities missed and feelings unrequited, is the touchstone for all of Wong’s films, which have always been much more interested in romantic failures than successes. The talk around the Jet Tone office during the production of In the Mood for Love was of Chow Mo-Wan setting out to seduce Mrs Chan as a prelude to abandoning her: an act of wilful emotional cruelty intended as a revenge for being cuckolded himself. This inference is nowhere evident in the film as released, so Wong perhaps recycled the idea into Chow’s smiling rejection of a romance with ‘taxi-dancer’ Bai Ling (Zhang Ziyi) in 2046 – although that rejection is itself a gentler replay of the playboy’s treatment of Carina Lau’s needy hooker Lulu, also known as Mimi, in Days of Being Wild. There is a high degree of continuity between the film’s Hong Kong in 1962 and Singapore in 1963, not least because the settings directly echo each other (a newspaper office, a hotel, a daibaitong) and because the key characters in Singapore (Chow, Ping and Mrs Chan) were already central in the Hong Kong scenes. The first of the two codas, set in Hong Kong in 1966, also feels homogenous, because it returns to the familiar alley, apartments and characters. But the second coda, announced with the abrupt caption ‘Cambodia 1966’, represents a break with the film’s well-established world. It opens, startlingly, with a fragment of old French newsreel footage showing De Gaulle’s state visit to the country. The visual contrast between the film’s elegant images and the grungy, duped look of the newsreel could hardly be greater, and the sudden appearance of a real-world event in the film’s stylised, circumscribed diegesis signals an ending of some sort to the feelings the film has indulged. Wong himself has likened the effect to waking from a dream; insofar as that’s true, the effect is rather different from the otherwise similar jump to the Philippines at the end of Days of Being Wild. Wong has explained that the decision to end the film in Cambodia was fortuitous: they were filming in Bangkok’s Chinatown

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when their Thai production manager told them it would be easy and quick to secure permission to shoot at Angkor Wat. The discovery and incorporation of the newsreel came later. Wong rationalises the decision in two ways. First, the state visit gives the journalist Chow Mo-Wan a reason to be in Cambodia in 1966. Second, De Gaulle’s appearance – not long before the Khmer Rouge’s bloody overthrow of Sihanouk – reminds us that the western powers’ colonisation of South-east Asia is coming to an end. Wong relates this to the antiBritish riots on the streets of Hong Kong in 1966, which are referenced in the film as the reason for Mrs Suen and Mr and Mrs Koo to leave their apartments. (The Hong Kong riots, sparked by the start of the Cultural Revolution in China, are glimpsed in newsreel footage in 2046. However, no rioter in Hong Kong in 1966 understood that the Cultural Revolution was not the rebellion against authority that it seemed but in essence a political putsch by Mao Zedong and his supporters to regain power from the reformists Liu Shaoqi and Deng Xiaoping.) The inference behind Wong’s second rationale is that In the Mood for Love has a political dimension as a requiem for the end of the colonial period. On the face of it, this is credible: Wong’s circumscribed fictions generally do resonate with the times and places in which they’re set, and there’s no question that the world of In the Mood for Love belongs to a vanished past. This is underlined by the literary quotations from Liu Yi-Chang which bracket the film. And yet it seems wishful, almost perverse, to find political implications in a film which so resolutely focuses on quotidian routines and questions of fidelity and sincerity. Wong’s cheeky attitude to Chinese politics was announced to the world in the early 1990s, when he named his independent company ‘Jet Tone’: the English is a phonetic approximation of the Chinese name ‘Zedong’ – as in Mao Zedong. A similar cheekiness governed the naming of the finance-brokering company he founded in the late 1990s: the Chinese name of Block 2 Pictures is ‘Chunguang’, meaning ‘spring light’. He took the words from the Chinese title of Happy Together (1997), but the crucial

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thing is that the Chinese connotes something licentious or pornographic. Political resonances are conspicuously absent. Wong’s references to the year 2046 – introduced here as the number of the hotel room where Chow writes, and where it’s strongly implied that he consummates his love for Mrs Chan – have no real political meaning. He chose the year because it will mark the end of the fifty-year period promised to Hong Kong by Deng Xiaoping at the time of the colony’s reversion to Chinese sovereignty in 1997: a period in which Hong Kong can remain ‘unchanged’ and will enjoy ‘a high degree of autonomy’. The word there that Wong picked up and ran with is ‘unchanged’. For him, it prompted thoughts on what does and does not change in a society or community, not on the mechanisms or character of a postcolonial administration. His ‘2046’ is an imaginary place where nothing is lost and nothing ever changes. In this respect, though, Wong is a typical Hong Kong filmmaker. The Hong Kong film industry got going in earnest in the late 1940s, kick-started by the sudden influx of refugees from the civil war in China, which included both film industry personnel from Shanghai and the potential audience for their new films. From the 1950s onwards, the industry had two wings, one releasing films in Mandarin (with slightly higher production values and shown in slightly more upmarket theatre chains), the other in Cantonese (mostly ultra-low-budget quickies, often episodes in long-running series – in effect, television before the event). Both wings included ‘leftist’ companies (meaning pro-China), which specialised in melodramas dealing with social issues, generally focused on wealth gaps in society. But what all Hong Kong films until the 1970s had in common was the complete absence of western faces, and with them any discussion of Hong Kong’s status as a colony. You could watch one hundred Hong Kong films of the 1950s and 60s and find not one shred of evidence that they were made under a colonial administration, except perhaps the occasional sign-board in English. The same was true, incidentally, of both left- and right-

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wing films made in the 1930s in Shanghai, then carved up between six colonial powers and in its ‘international concessions’ one of the most cosmopolitan cities on earth. Western faces began to appear in Hong Kong movies in the mid1970s, initially playing senior policemen, then diplomats, gullible tourists and other peripheral figures. Relaxed censorship allowed Tsui Hark to caricature colonial officials as corrupt, grasping, pompous or simply irrelevant in his Once Upon a Time in China series in the 1990s – but safely displaced back to the China of the late Qing dynasty. Even since the 1997 handover, there has been no frank discussion in Hong Kong cinema of the colonial heritage or its problems. So it’s not surprising that In the Mood for Love in no way reflects the story’s colonial context. Wong Kar Wai is merely following suit. Still, the film is also circumscribed in other ways, which have more to do with Wong’s standard modus operandi. It contains no establishing shots of the cities of Hong Kong or Singapore, reducing both to a handful of very specific locations. In the Hong Kong scenes, that means: the two adjacent apartments in the tenement building, plus the corridor outside both and the stairs leading up to them from street level; the daibaitong and the steps and alley nearby; the newspaper office; the shipping office; the western restaurant; the reception desk of the hotel where Mrs Chow works; and the hotel with room 2046. The first hour or so of the film takes place exclusively in these settings; there is little or no sense of any surrounding community, any street life or of urban life in general. The action is similarly circumscribed. With the adulterers almost entirely off screen until they exit the film, Mrs Chan has her employer Mr Ho and is shown to spend much of her time in the office keeping his wife and his mistress apart, and Chow has his work colleague Ping, who visits a brothel every time he has money and on one occasion even when he hasn’t. Mrs Chan, who clearly understands Shanghainese even if she never speaks it, also has her landlady Mrs Suen to function as a surrogate mother and offer matronly advice about keeping up social appearances. But these are

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the only significant characters to appear on screen. The alley where Chow and Mrs Chan enact some of their role-play and twice shelter from the rain is invariably empty. Even the western restaurant has no visible staff except for the waiter who hurries through one shot. Hence the intensity of the focus on Chow and Mrs Chan, and the decision to give both of them promiscuous colleagues at work in lieu of their absent spouses. Counter-intuitively, this sumptuous, rhapsodic film goes almost as far as Dreyer’s Passion of Joan of Arc (1928) in its single-minded concentration on the faces and bodies of a small number of characters in a small number of settings. Even if he could afford to stage it, Wong wouldn’t be interested in a panoramic recreation of Hong Kong in 1962. It’s the circumscribed character of the film that makes the Cambodian coda more of a release than the Philippines coda to Days of Being Wild, where the setting fulfilled a dream of death intimated much earlier. At Angkor Wat, finally, we see wide-angle shots of unfamiliar places – still unpopulated, apart from Chow and an omniscient boy monk, and far more ‘ruined’ than the decrepit back alleys of Hong Kong, but overwhelmingly different. The film celebrates these holy relics (‘wat’ means ‘temple’) with a suite of reverse and lateral tracking shots, unlike anything seen elsewhere in the film. The boy monk is in some sense a surrogate for Mrs Chan’s fatherless son, so it’s fitting that the sequence ends, after Chow’s departure, by returning to the hole where he has whispered his guilty secrets and fears. Unsentimental to the last, Wong shows in 2046 that Chow rallies from this haunting, barely consummated passion by reinventing himself as something of a rake.

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2 Secret Origins

People say my films are about time and space, but actually they’re not. Most likely they have nothing to do with anything but me myself. That’s why my characters have such closed-off lives and can’t reveal themselves; they’re afraid to get hurt. Wong Kar Wai, from an interview by Esther Yeung and Lau Chi-Wan, published in City Entertainment no. 402, 8 September 1994 (translated from the Chinese by Tony Rayns)

Wong Kar Wai has not always been as candid about his own social inhibitions as he was in this interview in 1994, but he has always spoken freely about his aleatory methods, his habit of allowing his films to determine their own tone, shape and direction while they are being made. Ironically for a man who entered the film industry as a scriptwriter (he started by contributing ideas in the writing team at an ultra-commercial film company, then wrote scripts alone for a couple of years), Wong turned away from pre-scripted filmmaking during the production of Days of Being Wild, his second feature. His practice these days is to seclude himself in coffee shops to think through possible new storylines and scenes, and then to return to the waiting cast and crew with his ideas; it’s this method which stretches his productions out over months or even years. His chronic indecision of course tests the loyalty and commitment of his collaborators to the limit. We’ll come back to the case of Days of Being Wild in more detail, because that film has a direct bearing on In the Mood for Love, but first we should establish how Wong’s abandonment of scripts affected his films. Days of Being Wild and its successor, Ashes of Time, have many things in common, despite the first being set in the early 1960s in Hong Kong and the second in the jianghu, the mythic martial world

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of ancient China. Both centre on Leslie Cheung playing alpha males with troubled backstories, and both feature ‘packages’ of other top stars playing characters who drift in and out of his orbit. More crucially, to the frustration of the actors and crew, both films had extremely protracted shoots, because Wong was continually trying out – and then rejecting – ideas for ways that his story might move forward. And so both films were eventually constructed in the editing room, because their structures had not been planned on the page. Inevitably, this caused major grief for Wong’s financiers. Days of Being Wild was made for In-Gear Film Productions, which ended Wong’s contract after the film’s release. Wong founded his own company Jet Tone soon after, and secured finance from Taiwan to make Ashes of Time, filmed intermittently on remote locations in western China in 1992–3 but not completed and released until 1994. If Wong’s trial-and-error approach to film-making is tough for financiers to deal with, then it’s many times tougher for a director who works as his own producer. Jet Tone’s survival has often seemed precarious over the years. Wong explored many options to keep the company’s cash flow going: he marketed limited-edition collectibles at the height of his popularity; he accepted commissions to make music videos and ads; he produced films by other directors and did his utmost to hype them to success; and even, in 2001, considered subletting part of the company’s office in Hoi Ping Road, Causeway Bay. The establishment of Wong’s talent agency Project House eventually brought Jet Tone a measure of financial stability in the 2000s, and branch offices were opened in Taipei and Shanghai. Since his changes of mind during production are unfortunately matched by an equally aleatory approach to editing, frequently requiring him to reshoot scenes and re-voice lines of dialogue or voiceover, Wong has sensibly looked for ways to bring his filmmaking under better control. His default solution is to think of films as aggregations of short stories, an idea no doubt sparked by the way that Days of Being Wild and Ashes of Time resolved themselves into episodic narratives. Chungking Express comprises

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two contrasted short stories and was first envisaged as three; the third, about a hitman, was subsequently realised in Fallen Angels (1995), where it acquired another counterpoint in the shape of the story of the man who sets up businesses in shops and concession stands which have closed for the night. 2046 also began life as an aggregation of three stories; Wong thought of taking the storylines from three nineteenth-century operas and giving them a sci-fi spin. This idea, of course, was dropped when Wong found himself turning the film into a kind of sequel to In the Mood for Love, although the manager of the Oriental Hotel still plays opera discs loudly to drown out the sound of his domestic arguments. The problems tend to begin when Wong sets out to stretch a short-story idea to feature length, as in Happy Together, In the Mood for Love and The Grandmaster, all three of which strained budgets, production and post-production schedules and the morale of the crew to breaking point. Wong became acutely self-conscious about the financial and practical difficulties caused by his modus operandi soon after the one-minute-to-midnight rush to finish In the Mood for Love in time for its scheduled premiere in the Cannes competition. He told me at the time that he felt an urgent need to ‘change’, but rationalised it as a need to stay one step ahead of the world’s many Wong Kar Wai imitators. The line ‘I can change’ ran through the version of 2046 screened at Cannes in 2004 like a refrain, spoken twice in Japanese by the protagonist of Chow’s sci-fi story, and then repeated at the end of the film in Cantonese by Chow himself. In other words, Chow expresses himself through his fictional Japanese character Tak, and Wong expresses himself through his fictional Cantonese character Chow. The line survives only once in the widely released version of the film; Wong dropped the too-subtle idea of having it spoken in both Japanese and Cantonese, perhaps tacitly acknowledging that most foreign viewers wouldn’t notice the difference. Since 2046, Wong has tried to force himself to ‘change’ by undertaking a film in English and an Ip Man biopic, but he failed to reinvent his idiom, themes or working practices in either case.

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My Blueberry Nights turned out to be an over-extended remake of his short film In the Mood for Love 2001, and Natalie Portman’s gambler was very obviously Gong Li’s Su Lizhen from 2046 come again. The Grandmaster turned out to be less interested in Ip Man’s life than in his chaste, yearning romance with Gong Er (Zhang Ziyi), which of course directly echoes the central relationship in In the Mood for Love. Although the filming of My Blueberry Nights went more smoothly than In the Mood for Love and 2046 had done, production of The Grandmaster took him back to the chaos of 2046: an on-and-off shoot which stretched to nearly three years, two scheduled release dates missed, three substantially different versions released in different territories. The longest of the three cuts did very well in China, though, which may well signal a shift to more China-oriented subjects in Wong’s future. Of all Wong’s earlier films (and misadventures in production), the one most relevant to In the Mood for Love is Days of Being Wild. Wong acknowledged as much in the ‘Director’s Statement’ he wrote for the press kit published by Jet Tone when the film premiered in Cannes. This text presents a selective version of the truth, but it’s interesting enough to quote in full: Filming In the Mood for Love has been the most difficult experience of my career. We began shooting two years ago, amid the Asian economic crisis. Over the two years since then, we have been through a lot: problems with censors, the departure of some members of my crew, and the challenge of telling a story about only two people. We are physically and financially exhausted. I’m always being asked when I will make the second part of Days of Being Wild, a film I remember with great affection. Over the years, I often asked myself the same question. Time moved on, but I kept looking for an answer. In the Mood for Love happily reunites me with Maggie Cheung and Tony Leung. In a sense, this film answers the question I’ve been asking myself for so long. Wong Kar Wai (May 2000)

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While In the Mood for Love is clearly not Part Two of Days of Being Wild, the two films have an obvious kinship. Both are set in the Hong Kong of the early 1960s, both feature Maggie Cheung playing characters called Su Lizhen and Rebecca Pan playing surrogate mothers, both have vintage Latino pop music on their soundtracks, and both are somehow rooted in a Shanghainese identity. The former chanteuse Rebecca Pan speaks Shanghainese in both films, and brings to her scenes the spirit of all Shanghai ‘exiles’ in Hong Kong. Wong himself is Shanghainese by birth; his family moved to Hong Kong in 1963, when he was five years old, and his father worked as a nightclub manager. (He says, incidentally, that Nat King Cole was his mother’s favourite singer.) He would have been too young to have many clear recollections of life in Hong Kong in the early 1960s, but Days of Being Wild, In the Mood for Love and parts of 2046 are imbued with a potent nostalgia for the Shanghainese environment and ambience in which he grew up. It is no accident that Wong’s closest collaborator since he turned director has been William Chang, who was born in Hong Kong (he is five years older than Wong) to Shanghainese parents. Chang has been credited as production designer on Wong’s films since the start (As Tears Go By [1988]), and as chief editor since Chungking Express (1994), but the collaboration goes much deeper; Chang has been Wong’s indispensable advisor in every aspect of the films they’ve made together. Days of Being Wild was conceived as a touchstone for the look, mood and nihilism of the early 1960s, across the stories of two charismatic but flawed protagonists and a small group of other ‘lost’ characters who know and love or lose them. Leslie Cheung’s playboy (hideously dubbed ‘Yuddy’ by the film’s original subtitler) was the first protagonist; after the character’s death in the Philippines, his function as the figure around whom the others orbit would be inherited by Tony Leung’s equally heartless gambler. Wong took the Hong Kong release title for Nicholas Ray’s Rebel without a Cause (1955) as his own Chinese title: A Fei Zhengzhuan, meaning ‘The True Story of Ah Fei’. (Ah Fei was the generic name for a young

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tearaway/delinquent in the Hong Kong of the 1950s.) Jacky Cheung’s role as the hanger-on who idolises the playboy is directly modelled on Sal Mineo’s role in Ray’s film. Incidentally, Wong used the same ploy again seven years later when he took the Hong Kong release title of Antonioni’s Blow-up (1966) (Chunguang Zhaxie, ‘Spring Light Bursts Forth’, connoting the revelation of something indecent) as his Chinese title for Happy Together. As we’ve noted, Wong was under contract in 1990 to In-Gear, owned by the former matinee idol Alan Tang and run by his brother Rover Tang; he had already made As Tears Go By and scripted other films for them. He reportedly began filming Days of Being Wild with a storyline draft and notes on the main characters, but changed his mind about many things as the shoot progressed. After spending a reputed HK$20 million of In-Gear’s money (much more than the average budget for a Hong Kong feature at the time, justified by the roster of top stars and the pre-sales to East and South-east Asia) but with no end in sight, Wong proposed to his producers that the film be split into two parts, set a year or two apart, the first starring Leslie Cheung and the second Tony Leung. But In-Gear had pre-sold the film on the basis of its title and all its stars, so it was contractually imperative that Tony Leung should still appear in the first film. Hence the film’s much-discussed coda – a single, extended shot showing the gambler preparing for a night out, added without explanation at the end of the film. Editor Patrick Tam, an out-and-proud Godard fan, came up with this solution to the contractual problem. Of course, Part Two was never made. The film was modestly successful in Hong Kong, probably because of its cast, but came nowhere near to recouping its production cost. The clincher came when distributors in neighbouring countries begged In-Gear not to send them another film ‘like that’. So In-Gear pulled the plug and Wong left the company to go independent. We’ll never know – and Wong isn’t telling, always assuming he knows himself – what would have happened in the second part of Days of Being Wild, but it’s fair

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to assume that Tony Leung’s gambler would have been more like the hardened, hedonistic Chow Mo-Wan of 2046 than the hesitant, proper Chow Mo-Wan of In the Mood for Love. The only real sense in which In the Mood for Love answers the Days of Being Wild Part Two question is that it returns to the milieu of the earlier film and uses a broadly similar aesthetic in order to rethink Wong’s view of the 1960s. In place of a reckless indulgence in nihilistic sexual relationships and adventures, it offers a profoundly nostalgic meditation on a time and a place that have been lost. In the Mood for Love had an unusually complicated genesis. As the 1997 handover of Hong Kong approached, Wong Kar Wai came out of the worldwide triumph of Chungking Express and the respectable showing of its follow-up, Fallen Angels, with a plan to save money by making two features back to back. One of the films would be about fleeing Hong Kong; guided by his enthusiasm for Latin American writers, including Manuel Puig and Julio Cortázar, Wong chose to set it in Hong Kong’s antipodes, Buenos Aires. After another awkwardly protracted shoot in Argentina, eventually curtailed by Leslie Cheung’s contractual commitments elsewhere, this emerged as Wong’s first Cannes prizewinner, Happy Together. Before going to Argentina, though, Wong had conceived the other half of the diptych as the other side of the coin: a light-hearted movie, in the vein of Chungking Express, about embracing the motherland. Tony Leung and Maggie Cheung were set to star in it. Wong’s title for the film was Summer in Beijing; he drafted some ideas for the story and went to the communist government’s Film Bureau in Beijing to discuss it. The Film Bureau pointed out (politely, Wong says) that its regulations prohibited the production of any film in China without its pre-approval of the script. Wong’s explanation that he didn’t work like that fell on deaf ears, so the project was abandoned. It got no further than a series of poster designs, later published by Jet Tone in a limited-edition folio. Following the success of Happy Together in Cannes, Wong returned to the Summer in Beijing ideas. The project evolved into a three-episode film, with one story about a chef, one about a writer in

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the 1960s, and another about a delicatessen owner. The linking theme would be food; ‘Beijing’ became the name of a restaurant in Macau. As he began mapping out the project (with some urgency, since Maggie Cheung was expected to leave to act in a Hollywood film – which in the event went into turnaround), Wong once again changed his mind. As he told me: ‘We planned the story about the deliowner and then moved on to the one about the writer – at which point, I realised that the one about the writer was the only one I really wanted to make.’ The writer on his mind was Liu Yi-Chang (born in Shanghai in 1918), who has lived and written in Hong Kong since 1948. Wong particularly liked his short story Duidao, which has been serviceably but improvably translated by Nancy Li as Intersections. The story first appeared in Chinese in 1972, the translation in 1988 in the Chinese University of Hong Kong’s periodical Renditions. (The title Duidao is the Chinese translation for tête-bêche, a term from philately for a pair of stamps from adjacent sheets in which one is the inverse of the other.) The translation has been reprinted in the brochure that comes with the Criterion home-video editions of In the Mood for Love and appears too in Block 2 Pictures’ photo book têtebêche (2001), which also contains Joanna C. Lee’s short interview with Liu Yi-Chang about the film. Liu’s story has forty-two mini-chapters which alternate between two characters. One is Bai Chunyu, an elderly Shanghainese who has lived (like his author) in Hong Kong since the late 1940s and watched One of the poster designs for Summer in Beijing

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the city grow from a sleepy port into an overcrowded, high-rise metropolis. The other is Ah Xing, a young Cantonese woman who worries that she doesn’t yet have a boyfriend and picks up a pornographic photograph discarded in the street. Bai looks back to the time he fled Shanghai as the civil war got nearer, and also remembers a period he spent in Singapore. Ah Xing fantasises about being a popular singer, about getting married, about sex. The story traces their itineraries across one day. Independently, they witness the same events in Mongkok – the robbery of a jewellery shop, a woman knocked down by a car – and then happen to choose adjacent seats for the 5.30 screening of a movie. But they never meet or speak, and eventually go their separate ways. From quite early on, Wong felt a kinship between this story and the film that In the Mood for Love eventually became. There was never any question of directly adapting the story for the screen: Chow and Mrs Chan are about the same age, their backgrounds are at best a marginal issue, and their spatial and emotional trajectories converge from the start. Whereas Bai Chunyu and Ah Xing are virtual polar opposites, and their differences reach a crux in their reactions to the climax (a wedding) in the movie they happen to watch side by side: he laughs out loud, scornful that a marriage is presented as a happy ending, and she is disgusted by what she assumes to be his lustful thoughts. This polarised reaction to the prospect of wedded bliss – in essence, experience meets innocence – is one of several motifs that trickle down into Wong’s film. Others include nostalgia for the traces of Shanghai in old Hong Kong, the notion that a life can be sketched through close attention to its quotidian routines, and the perception that women and men can see the same things very differently. We should note in passing that Chungking Express owed comparable debts to the Japanese writer Murakami Haruki, but those were signalled only in the titling of tracks on the soundtrack CD, not in the film itself. Wong’s principal interest in Liu Yi-Chang is precisely that he is a writer. Specifically, a writer whose work reflects the perceptions of

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a Shanghainese immigrant in Hong Kong. Wong reveres writers, probably even more than he reveres some cineastes (the one most often cited is Antonioni) and some pieces of music. Much of the idiosyncrasy of Wong’s cinema springs from his wish to apply lessons learned from literature and music to film-making. In this instance, where journalist and wuxia novelist Chow is clearly not a surrogate for Liu Yi-Chang, Wong chose to express his respect for Liu by quoting him on screen. As we’ve noted, the film opens and closes with quotations from Liu’s writings (they are presented like silentmovie intertitles) and includes a third quotation between its two 1966 codas about the past being a closed chapter. The wishful intention, I think, was to give the whole film a literary cast. I recall that at the start of the long-drawn-out subtitling process, Wong gave me a dozen Liu quotations he’d selected for possible use as captions in the film, as usual allowing himself plenty of leeway to make choices later. Here’s one I translated which didn’t make the cut: At that time, he hadn’t known what love was. He had liked several women. But it was always ‘like’ rather than ‘love’. He still doesn’t know what love is. Even when he married, he didn’t know. He didn’t love his wife, and his wife didn’t love him.

When he started making In the Mood for Love in Hong Kong early in 1999, Wong had no clear sense of what the film would become. On the contrary, he was still thinking in terms of the Summer in Beijing frivolities. So he filmed sequences in room 2046 showing Chow and Mrs Chan stir-frying food in a wok; sequences showing them carrying kitchen implements and a live chicken up to the room despite management protests; sequences in which they sing (or more accurately mime) bits of Cantonese opera and even a sequence in which they perform a pastiche of John Travolta and Uma Thurman’s dance from Pulp Fiction (1994). All of this can be seen in the ‘Making of’ documentary @ In the Mood for Love, which is available on several home-video editions of the film. The documentary also

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Rejected ideas: cooking in room 2046 …

Singing Cantonese opera in room 2046 (production photo with actual singer in foreground) …

… and dancing in room 2046

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includes a rather surprising interview with Tony Leung in which he wonders aloud why these comic sequences didn’t make it into the finished film; the interview was clearly shot before he won the Best Actor prize in Cannes. @ In the Mood for Love was begun by Kwan Pun-Leung and Amos Lee, who had made a film about the shoot of Happy Together, but their names don’t appear in its credits. Wong took the documentary out of their hands and finished it himself with footage of the film’s premieres in various cities, possibly because he couldn’t afford to go on paying them. In passing, during the Hong Kong shoot in 1999, Wong hadn’t settled on the film’s title either. His sales agent Fortissimo discussed pre-sales of the film in the Berlin Film Festival market that year under the title The Mood for Love. Their flyer promises delivery in May 2000 (a promise that was more or less kept), but includes stills from scenes that would eventually disappear from the film, including one of Chow and Mrs Chan eating together in the daibaitong and another of the sex scene. By 1999, Wong Kar Wai had reformulated his 1996 plan to economise by making two films back to back. The new plan was to knock out In the Mood for Love quickly, the film being essentially a two-hander to be shot in a few recurring settings, and to then move on to the bigger 2046, still thought of as an ‘operatic’ sci-fi movie. Since 2046 was to be a large-scale production, investments were

The Fortissimo Film Sales flyer with deleted images (1999)

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sought (and found) in neighbouring countries: one concrete result was that the Japanese Kimura Takuya and the Thai Thongchai ‘Bird’ Macintyre – top singing stars in their respective countries – were contracted to appear in the film. Other stars – from China, South Korea and who knows where else – were expected to join the cast list later. Having turned singer Faye Wong into a movie star overnight in Chungking Express, Wong remained confident that his touch could turn charismatic pop stars into viable screen actors – despite his cautionary experience with the wooden Leon Lai in Fallen Angels. This confidence carried through into his casting of Norah Jones in My Blueberry Nights. The first version of In the Mood for Love was indeed shot relatively quickly in Hong Kong in 1999, including the slowedmotion trips to and from the daibaitong (filmed in old alleyways in the Sheung Wan district of Hong Kong Island) and the comic sequences. As usual, Christopher Doyle was the cameraman, although he seems to have bridled quite early on at the realisation that Wong was allowing him much less freedom to ‘dance’ with the characters than he’d had on the second part of Chungking Express

Mrs Chan buys noodles in the Sheung Wan daibaitong

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and subsequent films. (He looks distinctly unhappy whenever he’s glimpsed in the ‘Making of’ documentary.) Wong’s unit then decamped to Bangkok to begin scouting locations for 2046 … and that’s when things became even more complicated. Wong had already experienced some problems ten years earlier in finding suitably retro Hong Kong locations for Days of Being Wild. The city has changed almost beyond recognition since the 1960s, and nearly all traces of ‘old’ Hong Kong have been swept away in a frenzy of demolition and rebuilding. One reason that the exteriors in Days of Being Wild tend to be fixed-angle shots is that any movement of the camera would have risked revealing some visual anachronism. But Wong is driven by his nostalgia for the city’s vanished locales. I recall him telling me during the shoot of Fallen Angels how hard it had been to find the grungy, decrepit locations he needed for that film. He’d struck lucky in Chungking Express, because he was still able to use the rabbit-warren interior of Chungking Mansion in Tsimshatsui (it’s a labyrinth of flophouses, Indian tailors and tiny provisions shops) as a primary location for the first story and Christopher Doyle’s own shabby apartment for the second. The arrival in Bangkok was transformative, because Wong saw immediately that the back alleys of the city’s Chinatown were more like 1960s Hong Kong than anything he could find in Hong Kong itself. He did make a desultory attempt to begin shooting for 2046, and the one surviving shot of Thongchai Macintyre in the film as released (it’s there for purely contractual reasons, like Tony Leung’s appearance at the end of Days of Being Wild) dates from that time. Very soon, though, preliminary work on 2046 was abandoned in favour of reshoots for In the Mood for Love. Maggie Cheung and Tony Leung were summoned back to pose in Bangkok alleyways, endlessly repeating variations on lines of dialogue and ‘role-play’. It was during this agonisingly protracted process, Maggie Cheung says in the ‘Making of’ documentary, that she came to realise that spending fifteen months working on one film to get it right might

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mean more than lending her presence to half a dozen trivial quickies in the same period. Chris Doyle left the crew early in the reshoot, and Mark Lee (amongst many other things, Hou Hsiao-Hsien’s regular cinematographer) came from Taiwan to take his place. ‘Impossible’ and elusive points of view in the alley

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Wong subsequently took Doyle back for 2046, but when Doyle left that production too, the break became absolute. Leaving questions of ego aside, we can speculate that it actually made little difference who shot In the Mood for Love. No fewer than six cinematographers are credited on the film – Doyle and Lee as directors of photography and Yu Lik-Wai, Lai Yiu-Fai (Doyle’s former assistant), Kwan Pun-Leung and Chan Kwong-Hung as ‘additional cinematographers’ – and I would defy any viewer to guess who shot what. On earlier films, Wong had delighted in needling Doyle by asking things like ‘Is that the best you can give me, Chris?’ (We know this from Doyle’s own account of the shooting of Happy Together.) This mildly sadistic approach helped to make Doyle a world-class cinematographer, and it greatly benefited Wong by giving his films their distinctive look. On In the Mood for Love, though, Wong soon developed – for the first time in his directorial career – a clear sense of what he wanted to see and feel in the images. All he needed from his cinematographers was a skilled realisation of those images. Doyle left, I think, because he found that his creative input was no longer required. It was during the Bangkok reshoot that the film acquired its character and tone: sombre, wistful, yearning. We don’t know exactly when Wong decided to use ‘Yumeji’s Theme’ and Nat King Cole’s Spanish versions of standards on the soundtrack, but the music cues had certainly become integral to the film’s effect – crucial, even – by the time William Chang started editing it in earnest. As we’ve noted, the decision to add the coda at Angkor Wat came at the very end of the Bangkok shoot, and the adventure of filming in Cambodia added the extra days which very nearly caused the film to miss its Cannes screening slot. In the event, the near-hysterical final days of postproduction turned out to be a dress rehearsal for a very similar panic four years later when 2046, too, was ‘finished’ only just in time to be screened on schedule in Cannes. But ‘finished’ is a relative concept in Wong Kar Wai films. There was more tinkering with In the Mood for Love after its Cannes premiere, and that included rewriting and rerecording the odd line of dialogue.

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3 Oblique Strategies

It’s a classic story, slow and very romantic. But when it came to editing, I couldn’t use the same pace and had to speed it up. Still, the rhythm and speed of the cross-cutting were reduced significantly. We tried something new. It may sound like a cliché, but an old poem crossed my mind while I was editing the film. I’ve forgotten the title but it conjured a picture of two persons – or rather, the reaction Person A has when seeing Person B. Does he/she leave at once, or after a long silence? The poem worked magic and completely transformed the tempo. Editing the Angkor Wat scene was pure pleasure – a big relief that he [Chow Mo-Wan] finally extricates himself from the trivial romantic relationship to embark on a new journey. William Chang, from interviews by Li Cheuk-To, Keith Chan, Lawrence Pun and Lawrence Lau, published in William Chang, Art Director (Hong Kong: Hong Kong International Film Festival Society, 2004). Translation slightly revised by Tony Rayns

There’s a paradox at the heart of Wong Kar Wai’s films. They generally spring from pop culture ideas and sometimes have generic roots, but the ways Wong frames and stages scenes and the ways William Chang edits the shots owe little to classical film storytelling conventions. Wong shares with many other Hong Kong directors his preference for building his scenes shot by shot (rather than following the old Hollywood model, which starts with a master shot of the scene and then inserts close-ups, point-of-view shots and so on), but he tends to take his film language into areas of abstraction avoided by his contemporaries. His and William Chang’s liking for discontinuities in editing, coupled with their reliance on evocative music, produces a quite idiosyncratic film syntax. This could be thought of as Wong’s ‘art-house tendency’. The paradox is that it

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results in films which most audiences – even the mass audience in China, which took up Wong’s offer in The Grandmaster in a big way – have no trouble understanding. The mix of visual discontinuities and strong, repetitive music of course evokes the style of music videos, so it’s not a surprise that Wong is sometimes dismissed as a glorified MTV director. (That, for example, was the view taken by the late Edward Yang.) Such disrespect is not a total stretch: Wong’s music videos, such as Six Days for DJ Shadow, do look very much like sketches for episodes in features, and the same goes for his more ambitious ads too. But the features don’t have the random, disposable quality of MTV fodder, and the better music videos and ads don’t either. Wong’s films have a core of lived, felt experience which is expressed through narrative, however fractured. The tics of visual syntax that he and William Chang have developed do not amount to a coherent system in the Eisensteinian sense, but I think they do amount to a distinctive aesthetic. Time to look at the way it works. Let’s start with the film’s punctuation marks. The first thing shown by our scene breakdown in Chapter 1 is the large number of fades to black in the film. These are all quick fades, not the longdrawn-out fades characteristic of some Hollywood films of the 1930s, but they are nonetheless a somewhat archaic device. Many scenes end with a quick fade to black, occasionally followed by a quick fade-in to the start of the next scene, but equally often by a hard cut to something new. Elsewhere, the film cuts hard from one scene to the next, sometimes covering the cut with continuing music on the soundtrack. Most viewers watching the film in the normal way will barely register this punctuation, but a closer examination reveals that William Chang has made precise and careful decisions about each and every scene transition. Fades to black traditionally indicate the passage of time between one scene and the next, and that’s often one of their functions here. The film’s early scenes in the adjacent Suen and Koo apartments are mostly linked by fades out and in, and we are

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certainly expected to understand them as spanning weeks or months. (Wong was very proud of the way that he’d built another signifier of passing time into the film by having Mrs Suen’s Amah prepare seasonal Shanghainese dishes for the mahjong parties, and I remember his frustration when I had to explain that it was impossible to capture such nuances in the subtitles. He complained about this subtitling ‘failure’ in several early interviews about the film, but cut some of the month-specific references to dishes after the Cannes premiere.) But the opening scene also includes an indication of the way the film will jump-cut through time when Wong deletes the whole of Mrs Suen’s discussion of rental terms with Mrs Chan: the cut takes us directly from the two ladies sitting down to talk to Mrs Chan leaving, saying she’ll let the landlady know her decision. A further cut to Mr Chow climbing the narrow tenement stairs, newspaper ad in hand, brings us back to the corridor outside the two apartments – and to Mrs Suen’s line ‘It’s settled, then’. The cutting briskly elides inessential material like the rent negotiation and Mrs Chan’s brief hesitation about committing to the deal.

The heart of the matter: Mrs Chan’s first fleeting glance at Chow

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There’s no detectable principle behind William Chang’s decisions about how to punctuate the beginnings and endings of scenes: every possible option except a ‘wipe’ from one scene to the next is used at least once in the film. It seems to me that his decisions were generally intuitive, guided by his sense of pacing: quick fades out and in for moments when the action is ‘poignantly’ unresolved, hard cuts for moments when the film needs to power forward into the next phase of its exposition. However, we shouldn’t lose sight either of Chang’s need to ring the changes when confronted with such repetitive material. Since the number of characters and settings is so limited, Chang undoubtedly wanted to vary the ways he punctuated the film. He precisely wanted to avoid locking himself into any rigid system of visual punctuation. At one point, apparently randomly, Chang uses dissolves for the only time in the film: he mixes from one shot of Mrs Chan leaving the alley to another, and then again to another. This occurs just after Chow has invited her to spend more time with him, helping to write a wuxia serial, and the device perhaps obliquely expresses her hesitation. Again, though, it doesn’t fit into any editing schema; it’s simply a fleeting, expressive moment. The same could be said of the film’s opening fade-in – on a shot which tracks rapidly past framed photographs on a wall to the back of Mrs Suen as she calls her guests to dinner. There are probably road movies which open with a fade-in on a tracking shot, but the device is vanishingly rare in films featuring domestic storytelling. This particular shot is Wong’s shorthand way of establishing Mrs Suen’s Shanghainese world, but the way it hurries past the framed photos actually gives it no time to establish anything concrete. It does, though, lead us into the action and milieu with a speed that anticipates the velocity of trains to 2046, the place where nothing ever changes. It’s a little easier to account for what we might call the film’s ‘off-screen strategy’. Relegating the adulterers to the margins of the frame isn’t the half of it. As the scene breakdown shows, the

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adulterers effectively disappear from the plot once their affair is discovered by their spouses. But the film has a broader ‘off-screen strategy’. Minor characters – Mrs Koo, the hotel desk clerk who alternates shifts with Mrs Chow, the man who’s bought Mr Koo’s apartment in 1966 – are also disembodied voices, not recognisable faces. Even when they’re seen, we catch only brief glimpses of them, usually from behind. Wong works tirelessly to make sure that we’re always aware of being shown people and spaces selectively. He does this first by staging scenes and framing shots in ways that deliberately exclude characters from our sight. This is most arresting when he shows only one participant in a conversation, such as Mrs Chan’s doorway chat with Mrs Koo, shown as a profile shot of Mrs Chan speaking. This is followed by a brief glimpse of Mrs Koo accepting the pile of Chow’s borrowed books and placing them in his room, but this action is shown reflected in the Koo apartment’s blemished mirror – a visual analogue for Liu Yi-Chang’s ‘everything he sees is blurred and indistinct’. Wong uses the exact same strategy when Chow calls at the former Koo apartment in the 1966 coda: the camera holds on a frontal shot of Chow’s face, while the new owner The off-screen strategy in action

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is heard but not seen. And when the scene cuts to the interior of the apartment, the new owner is glimpsed no more clearly than Mrs Koo was. This kind of ostentatiously selective presentation of the action extends to many other sequences in the film. Take the scenes in Mr Ho’s shipping company office. The first two go out of their way to highlight the large Siemens clock which apparently hangs from the ceiling, although not obviously in anyone’s line of sight. Whenever the clock face fills the frame, we hear off-screen conversations and phone calls continuing on the soundtrack. On our third visit to the office, the clock is scarcely glimpsed as the chatter refers to an off-screen typhoon in the Philippines and the tie which Mr Ho has received from his mistress as a birthday gift. But in the fourth scene (a vignette featuring Mrs Chan on the phone to Chow, asking about the letter he has received from his wife in Japan), we see almost nothing but the clock. There’s an element of self-parody to the frame-filling shots of the clock, which refer back to the original Days of Being Wild poster. It showed the starry cast grouped in a retro interior with a huge clock face hanging over them; not a Dali-type clock face – it’s not melting – but flattened, distorted and patently symbolic. Of course, the clock shots here are also sucker-bait for the countless commentators who have presumed that ‘time’ is Wong’s major theme. Like close-ups of clocks in any film, these fulfil the minimal narrative function of telling us what time it is, and whether or not Mrs Chan is working late today. At a stretch, we might make a connection between them and the tricky schedule Mrs Chan has to engineer to make sure that Mr Ho’s wife and mistress never cross paths. Or maybe the clock merely symbolises the horrors of salaried office work? Whatever, the frame-filling close-ups of the clock face belong to a subset of assertively bizarre images that runs through the film, and we’ll return to that in a moment. Wong compounds his ‘off-screen strategy’ in several other ways. He limits some actions to shots of the characters’ feet: Mrs Chan’s

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hasty getaway from Chow’s room after her night hiding from the mahjong players, seen from under the bed in a shot which also highlights Chow’s slippers; Chow’s first venture along the corridor leading to room 2046; the montage of Mrs Chan’s feet on the stairs when she first goes to the hotel. He also periodically films Chow and Mrs Chan at waist height, leaving their faces temporarily off screen: this first happens when Mrs Chan enters Mrs Suen’s living room during a mahjong party in an early scene, and last happens when Chow strides along the alley with a gift box under his arm in the 1966 coda. And he presents some actions from a perspective that remains opaque to the viewer: the repeated shots of Mrs Chan looking out of Mrs Suen’s living-room window are apparently shown from another window opposite, a perspective emphasised by the inclusion of blurred foreground objects; and quite a lot of the ‘roleplay’ in the alley is shown in lateral tracking shots taken from inside one of the buildings, with its walls and barred windows frequently obscuring our view of the characters. We could extend this point into a consideration of the way Wong avoids conventional eyeline matches when he cross-cuts

Trapped by the mahjong game outside the door, with an unexplained foreground obstruction

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between the speakers in conversation scenes: for example, in two newspaper office conversations between Chow and Ping. The shots of the two speakers seem deliberately ill-matched, as if Wong wants us to feel that there’s something intangibly disquieting about the film’s syntax. But to go further down that road would be academic, and that is far beyond the scope and ambition of this slim volume. We should note in passing that some of these visual eccentricities are introduced to allow Wong to ‘rhyme’ sequences in different parts of the film. The under-the-bed shot of Mrs Chan’s getaway, for example, is much later directly echoed in the under-thebed shot of her reaching for Chow’s slippers in the Singapore hotel room. Wong assumes that we will remember the first shot when we see the second. The same goes for shots of Mrs Chan looking out of Mrs Suen’s window, first with curiosity, much later with tearful nostalgia and regret. As we’ve just suggested, the close-ups of the clock in the shipping company office appear to be related to a small group of other seemingly anomalous shots in the film. These are oddly composed images of the decors in which scenes are set, from which characters are absent or in one case marginalised. These images are bisected by strong vertical or horizontal lines (like a clock face?), and the strangeness of the compositions seems intended to link them in our minds. The first occurs at the end of the first scene in Mr Ho’s office. Mr Ho hurries down the stairs for his dinner date with his mistress, and the camera pans slightly, holding on a general view of the office. A vertical line bisects the shot; the office accountant is visible through a hatch in the wall at the right, but most of the image is filled with decor and furniture, all of it redolent of 1960s design. The shot has no narrative function; Wong is simply inviting us to observe a vanished style. The second such shot is the one that introduces the western restaurant. It’s bisected by a horizontal line. The top half of the image shows a light fitting, and the bottom a jukebox. (Wong has a thing about jukeboxes; the one in the old Wally Mat pub in Chungking

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Express was favoured with extended close-ups.) The jukebox provides a minimal narrative rationale for the appearance of Nat King Cole’s Spanish standards on the soundtrack, but the shot seems nonetheless anomalous in a film which elsewhere consistently avoids establishing shots. Slippers and heels seen from under beds in Hong Kong and Singapore

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And the third such shot appears when Mrs Chan invades Chow’s hotel room in Singapore, immediately before the under-thebed shot of her feet in high heels as she reaches for the slippers. It’s an odd view of the room’s decor, vertically bisected by a brown curtain; Mrs Chan is off screen. The throw of light from a lamp on the offLooking out of Mrs Suen’s window twice, first pensively, then with nostalgic regret

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Three narratively redundant shots of decor: Mr Ho’s office, the western restaurant and Chow’s Singapore hotel room

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white wall is distantly reminiscent of the lighting in the western restaurant. The shot occurs just after Mrs Chan has called Chow’s newspaper office but failed to speak down the phone line, and its ‘emptiness’ seems to relate to her silence. These shots of decor form a small but striking part of the film’s visual repertoire. Their sporadic appearance helps to consolidate the sense that there are ‘secret’ connections between disparate times, places and events. This sense in turn has an oblique connection with Wong’s emphasis on repression and the problem of expressing feelings face to face. There are no literal links; it’s a matter of mood and unspoken thoughts. As Wong said in the interview quoted at the start of Chapter 2, his characters are versions of himself. ‘That’s why my characters have such closed-off lives and can’t reveal themselves; they’re afraid to get hurt.’ The use of music, particularly ‘Yumeji’s Theme’, justifies the use of slowed motion in a similarly oblique way. Slightly slowing the movements of Chow and Mrs Chan makes their steps seem dancelike. It’s an assertively unrealistic tic of style, but it passes unquestioned by most viewers. Of course, slowed motion emphasises the sexiness of Mrs Chan’s steps in her constrictive qipao, but the slowing of the image also chimes with the characters’ emotional awkwardness: their hesitations and the embarrassment they feel about a nascent mutual attraction. Modern popular cinema has ‘normalised’ the use of slow motion for showing violent action and explosions to the extent that no viewer ever takes the visual effect as disruptive to the flow of events, but to slow the motion slightly as Wong does here – building on his play with relative perceptions of time in Chungking Express – is less usual. The music obliquely ‘explains’ it and suggests the unspoken feelings in play. It also makes the slowed-motion shots an integral part of Wong Kar Wai’s offer to his audience, and the pleasure viewers take in watching them is a key part of the deal. There’s more to say about the film’s elisions, particularly the way they withhold narratively significant information. In Chapter 2,

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we noted that Wong’s decision to excise the sex scene between Chow and Mrs Chan in room 2046 was taken very late in the editing, a matter of days before the premiere in Cannes. But that omission is ‘covered’ by the elaborate build-up to the ‘missing’ scene: the lengthy montage in which we hear the voiceover lines ‘I don’t want to go home tonight’ and ‘It’s me … if there’s an extra ticket, would you come with me?’ and see the couple becoming more physically intimate in the back of a taxi. The same is not true of Mrs Chan’s first visit to room 2046. After the mini-montage of shots of her feet rushing up and down the hotel’s stairs and along the Lynchian corridor with its billowing red drapes, the film cuts to a shot of Chow smoking and looking out of the window. We hear a knock at the door. Then there’s a hard cut to a wide shot of the corridor as Mrs Chan leaves at the end of their meeting, promising to return next day. Nothing at all is shown of what was said or done in the room, and the continuity implied by the edits makes us all the more conscious that we’ve been denied information. The film contains several other time-jumps within apparently integral scenes: there’s one at the end of the first visit to the daibaitong, in which we’ve seen Mrs Chan and Chow separately, when there’s a hard cut to another occasion when they pass each other on the stone steps, and another in the second scene in the western restaurant, when there’s a hard cut from one dinner to another towards the end of the scene. In both those examples, the cuts are ‘disguised’ by continuing music (‘Yumeji’s Theme’ in the first case, Nat King Cole in the second) but at the same time ‘revealed’ by Mrs Chan’s changes of qipao. In neither case, though, is there any sense that the film is withholding anything. It’s merely quickening the pace of its story development, advancing the burgeoning relationship between Chow and Mrs Chan. But other narrative elisions make the storytelling wilfully oblique. They range from the minor (Ping’s move to Singapore, Mrs Chan’s mysteriously easy access to Chow’s Singapore hotel room) to the absolutely major (Mrs Chan having a son, the marital status of

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both Chow and Mrs Chan in 1966). These elisions are designed to leave us speculating. The close-up of the hotel boy denying that anyone has been in Chow’s hotel room – the only such close-up of a supporting character in the whole film – leads us to speculate that he’s lying, that he, too, fell victim to Mrs Chan’s charm. More significantly, we can speculate that if Mrs Chan had a child that wasn’t her husband’s, that would certainly have led her to a formal separation and divorce, despite her face-saving assurance to Mrs Suen in 1966 that Mr Chan is ‘fine’. Our speculations are ultimately subsumed into the film’s closing sense that an era has passed, a chapter has ended. The film is finally all about the bittersweet memory of something lost. Psychologically, Wong’s ‘off-screen strategy’ is all about that loss. The film’s evasions, elisions, exclusions, disjunctions and enigmas – even its momentary fixations on decor – are all about the imperfect retrieval of a memory, while its evocative and insistent music is all about smiling or sobbing through the parts that time has heightened or discoloured or erased. The tenor of the ending is clear: time to move on.

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4 Miscellany

You know, what kept me working on this film for such a long time was that I became addicted to it – specifically, to the mood it conjured up. Wong Kar Wai (2000), interview by Tony Rayns You notice things if you pay attention to detail. Mrs Chan (née Su Lizhen), in In the Mood for Love

This closing chapter offers an assortment of facts and arguments, garnished with the odd speculation and piece of gossip. These paragraphs find a home here because they didn’t fit into the preceding pages. *** Wong Kar Wai traces his decision to push the adulterers off screen back to his reading of Julio Cortázar, but I suspect that the strategy

Billowing drapes in the Lynchian corridor leading to room 2046

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may have other roots too. Wong’s ‘off-screen’ treatment of the adulterers closely resembles one aspect of Zhang Yimou’s Raise the Red Lantern (Dahong Denglong Gaogao Gua [1991]). Zhang’s film is about a nineteen-year-old woman (played by Gong Li) who becomes the fourth wife of the wealthy head of a clan in feudal China; she finds herself locked in an internecine rivalry with the other wives for the master’s affections. One of the film’s more interesting visual ideas is to relegate the patriarch (played by Ma Jingwu, a Film Academy professor) to off-screen space; we occasionally see his limbs or catch sight of him from behind, but barely glimpse his face. Zhang Yimou certainly thought that Wong was in his debt, since he hired Maggie Cheung, Tony Leung and Chris Doyle for Hero (Yingxiong [2002]), his first film after the release of In the Mood for Love. Wong returned the ‘compliment’ by casting as many of Zhang Yimou’s ex-girlfriends as possible in 2046. Zhang Ziyi was his major catch, and Dong Jie (star of Zhang’s winsome Happy Times/Xingfu Shiguang [2000]) his second. Dong makes only a fleeting appearance

Zhang Yimou (centre) meets Maggie Cheung and Tony Leung at the Beijing premiere of In the Mood for Love

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in 2046 as Faye Wong’s rebellious younger sister, but her presence mattered enough to Wong for him to give her guest-star billing. Then, with the Cannes deadline rapidly approaching, Wong stopped everything to shoot additional scenes with the newly available Gong Li, giving him his third catch. The inter-film ‘dialogue’ between the two directors seemingly petered out after that, but Wong was still ready to pause the post-production of Ashes of Time Redux in 2008 to add a cello solo played by Yo-Yo Ma to the soundtrack – evidently determined not to be outdone by Zhang Yimou’s wuxia film soundtracks. *** 22 September 2000, Hong Kong Cultural Centre, Tsimshatsui, Kowloon. It’s the night of In the Mood for Love’s premiere in Hong Kong, and Wong Kar Wai has donated the proceeds to the Hong Kong Film Archive, which will move into its own purpose-built home early in 2001. The cash is specifically designated for the Archive’s fund to transfer nitrate holdings to safety film stock; a cache of long-lost nitrate prints has recently been retrieved from a dump in San Francisco. The evening is hosted by comedian (and long-term Wong Kar Wai fan) Eric Kot, and Hong Kong’s first China-approved Chief Executive Tung Chee-Hwa is in attendance alongside the film’s stars; Wong Kar Wai’s wife is also making a rare public appearance. At a time when Jet Tone was ‘financially exhausted’ by the cost of making the film, donating money to the Archive is a big gesture for Wong. The programme opens with Wong’s new film Huayang de Nianhua, a short compilation of images from vintage Hong Kong movies in the Archive’s collection. William Chang edited this short from shots selected by Wong; the film runs for two minutes and twenty seconds, and is available on some home-movie editions of In the Mood for Love. The short takes its title – and its soundtrack – from the song ‘Huayang de Nianhua’ (heard as a radio request in In

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the Mood for Love), as sung by Zhou Xuan in a movie of the late 1940s. The title is hard to translate precisely, but means something like ‘A time when flowers flourished’; in the subtitling, we settled for ‘In Full Bloom’. Of course, Wong minimally adapted this song title for use as the Chinese title of In the Mood for Love. William Chang uses flash-dissolves from one image to the next throughout, and structures the short like a mini-feature. He opens it with a blur of captions from credits sequences, then offers a glimpse of Zhou Xuan singing the song before plunging into a montage of shots organised by genre: romcom, drama, thriller, horror, war. Not surprisingly, Wong has chosen images which pre-echo shots in In the Mood for Love: shots of women’s elegantly shod feet and legs, divas going through some inner turmoil, and so on. There is even a close-up of a clock face. But there are also images of a kind conspicuously absent from In the Mood for Love: an encounter at a bus stop, shots of the trams on Des Voeux Road, bustling street life. Zhou Xuan sings ‘Huayang de Nianhua’

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Most of the images are shown in tinted monochrome, and they have the pellucid sharpness that we associate with nitrate prints. Zhou Xuan became a star in Shanghai in the 1930s (she plays the impoverished but happy waif in Yuan Muzhi’s classic Street Angel/Malu Tianshi [1937]) and chose to stay working in ‘Orphan Island’ Shanghai after much of the city fell to the Japanese army. She resumed her acting/singing career in Mandarin-language films in Hong Kong after the war, but was dead by the time ‘Huayang de Nianhua’ was requested on a radio show in In the Mood for Love. Her recorded repertoire remained an object of nostalgic affection in Hong Kong for many years; compilation CDs are still available today. *** As we’ve noted, Wong is very likely to take inspiration from literature and music as he formulates his films before and during production. But he does also have a cinephile side, and it’s reflected in some of his supporting-cast choices in In the Mood for Love. Casting Rebecca Pan to play Mrs Suen was virtually automatic and film-related only insofar as she had already played a similarly matriarchal role in Days of Being Wild. Pan was born in Shanghai and moved to Hong Kong in 1949. The communist victory in China had ended the right of men to have more than one wife, and Pan’s mother (first wife to a man who had taken ‘concubines’) chose to leave her husband and move to Hong Kong with her daughter. Pan’s recording career began in 1959, and she signed with EMI in London in 1964; she recorded her last album, A Christmas Carol, in 1975. Known for singing in both Mandarin and English, she was one of the first Chinese chanteuses to perform in the US. Pan was brought into Hong Kong films by Ann Hui, who invited her to act in Starry is the Night (Jinye Xingguang Canlan [1988]), but had appeared in only one other film before Wong cast her in Days of Being Wild, where she epitomises the spirit of

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Rebecca Pan as Mrs Suen; Lai Chin as Mr Ho; Chin Tsi-Ang as the Amah

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Shanghainese immigrants in Hong Kong. She went on to appear in Hou Hsiao-Hsien’s Flowers of Shanghai (Hai Shang Hua [1998]). She discusses her background very charmingly in Jia Zhangke’s documentary about Shanghai exiles, I Wish I Knew (Hai Shang Chuanqi [2010]). Sitting in an empty dressing room, she talks about the reason for her mother’s move to Hong Kong and her life there, her own affection for young people and her worries for their future. She also sings one of her old standards, but has forgotten some of the lyrics. Two other supporting actors do bring a specifically cinematic background to the film. Lai Chin, who plays the adulterous Mr Ho, was a star of Mandarin-language films for a good ten years, from the mid-1950s to the mid-60s; he then became a producer of wuxia films until his retirement from the industry. He made a cameo appearance in Andrew Lau’s triad-gang series Young and Dangerous (Guhuozi [1996–8]), but Mr Ho was his first significant film role in many years. And Chin Tsi-Ang, who plays Mrs Suen’s Shanghainese Amah, is a legend of Chinese cinema. Born in Shanghai in 1909 (so she was ninety when she played the Amah), she starred in a long-lost wuxia film called The Heroine of Jiangnan in 1925 and became a popular star of the genre. When the KMT government outlawed wuxia films in the early 1930s, she ran the Jinlong Film Company with her husband, director Hung Chung-Ho. Chin moved to Hong Kong when much of Shanghai fell to the Japanese in 1937, and made an acting comeback in her husband’s special-effects extravaganza God of the Animal Kingdom (Shouguo Shenmo [1948]). She continued acting in and producing films into the mid-1960s, and still accepted cameo roles in her retirement (such as in Tsui Hark’s The Blade/Dao [1995]); she joined the other stars on stage at the Hong Kong premiere of In the Mood for Love. She was the grandmother of director/actor Sammo Hung. ***

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The ‘deleted scenes’ from In the Mood for Love, which are available on some home-movie editions of the film, are quite distinct from the try-out comic sequences seen in the ‘Making of’ documentary @ In the Mood for Love. They all relate to the film in its final form, but offer a veritable garden of forking paths of alternative storylines and outcomes. None of them was ‘deleted’ in the usual sense; they were not trimmed to improve the film’s pacing but rejected because Wong changed his mind about them. Wong has grouped them in four chapters. They include three more plays of ‘Yumeji’s Theme’. The Secret of Room 2046 first shows Chow and Mrs Chan extending their role-play into a rehearsal of sex; neither can go through with it. (Wong says in a commentary that he thought at one time of starting the film with these scenes.) In the next scene, Chow is feeling ill; he returns to the room with a variety of medicines. Mrs Chan arrives (wearing the red coat over a patterned white qipao) to look after him, and asks why he’s rented room 2046 again. The third scene features the moment they have sex (almost entirely off screen), after some moody preambles involving rain and cigarettes. It contains Mrs Chan’s line ‘I don’t want to go home tonight’ – recycled as a voiceover in the final version of the film, where it’s heard over a rear view of the taxi. Days in Singapore starts with Chow eating a durian and a lengthy caption quote from Liu Yi-Chang’s Duidao; the text is Bai Chunyu’s memory of being told that anyone who develops a taste for durian in Singapore is never likely to return home. (Wong’s commentary says that this was the last material filmed in Bangkok, very early in the morning on the day of the unit’s departure for Cambodia.) The next scene is an alternative version of the radio request-show scene, set in Mrs Suen’s apartment. This time, Zhou Xuan’s song is dedicated to Mrs Chan not by her husband in Tokyo but by Mr Chow in Singapore. Mrs Chan isn’t listening, and the Amah calls her to hear it. The song plays over a languorous shot of the radio set. The third scene shows Mr Ho

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Deleted scene: Chow and Mrs Chan awkwardly rehearse sex in room 2046

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giving Mrs Chan a ticket for a cruise to Singapore, urging her to take a break. The fourth scene shows her meeting Ping in Singapore (there is no clue to Chow’s whereabouts) and discussing his romantic disappointments rather than hers. Mrs Chan is distracted, and struggles to show interest. In the Seventies features scenes shot in Hong Kong before the unit decamped to Bangkok. In 1972, Mrs Chan is still married, and preparing to emigrate to join her husband and son overseas. She is getting ready to sell the apartment she bought from Mrs Suen, and arrives back to find a potential buyer chatting with her maid. The would-be buyer calls herself Lulu (she is apparently a singer from Singapore), but seems more interested in talking about her ‘husband’ Mr Chow and in finding out about Mrs Chan than she is in the apartment. The next scene shows Lulu’s bitter row with Chow in the alley near the building. She has brought him there because she knows (from Ping) that he used to live in the apartment nearby and had feelings for the woman who lives there now. She blames him for never telling her anything himself; he angrily pushes her out of his life, saying he never asked her to follow him. The third scene shows Mrs Chan, in slowed motion, going to the daibaitong for noodles – and still overdressing for the occasion, this time in a scarlet dress with a large fur collar. In the daibaitong, she finds Chow eating. The final scene starts with Mrs Chan on the phone to her husband (‘It’s very cold in Hong Kong’) and ends with her asleep on her sofa. And The Secret Reunion in Angkor Wat features a chance encounter in the ruins between Chow and Mrs Chan, both there as tourists with groups. He says that he’s now working in Vietnam. She says her husband is in Phnom Penh, discussing a new business venture, and not worried about the threat of war in the country. She mentions that Ping is about to marry a Miss Singapore. They part with a handshake, but he calls after her with one last question: did she ever try to call him? She says she doesn’t remember. Chow is then seen placing a red, heart-shaped locket (seen once before in these ‘deleted scenes’) in the Angkor Wat wall before he whispers into it.

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Wong doesn’t offer any commentary over these scenes but he told me in 2000 that he shot them only because Maggie Cheung was so eager to join the unit in Angkor Wat: ‘She even volunteered to come along as the stills photographer … since she was there, we thought we might as well do something with her.’ *** Wong Kar Wai has always had a liking for colourful supporting characters, and Chow’s hard-drinking, hard-gambling, hard-whoring colleague Ping is one of his best. The character is played by Siu PingLam, in real life one of the film’s props men. Wong created the character for him midway through the original Hong Kong shoot, liking his ‘Sixties look’. Ping tells Chow in the finished film that he’s an ordinary guy and doesn’t have secrets, but his conversation with Mrs Chan in the deleted scenes starts with him telling her secrets about his chequered love life. Siu entered the Hong Kong film industry in the 1980s as a props man and had worked for Wong on Days of Being Wild, Ashes of Time, Fallen Angels and Happy

Siu Ping-Lam as Ah Ping

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Together, as well as such films as A Chinese Ghost Story (1987) for Ching Siu-Tung and Green Snake (1993) for Tsui Hark. He had never acted before, but reprised his role as Ping in 2046. Wong had form with this kind of casting. The manager of the Midnight Express snack counter in Chungking Express was played by ‘Piggy’ Chan, the film’s stills photographer. *** Cannes Film Festival, May 2001. One year on from his success with In the Mood for Love, Wong is invited back to give what the festival calls a ‘Leçon de cinéma’ but what you or I would call a sit-down Q&A with Gilles Ciment. The text of their conversation is usefully printed in Peter Brunette’s book Wong Kar-wai (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2005). Before the session, Wong screens a previously unseen short film: In the Mood for Love 2001, again starring Maggie Cheung and Tony Leung. He says that it was shot before he made the feature, over two days and nights in Hong Kong, and was based on one of the original ideas for Summer in Beijing. I saw this short only once, some fifteen years ago, and didn’t take notes – so I don’t remember it that clearly. It has never been released on DVD or Blu-ray, possibly because Wong didn’t clear the rights to use Bryan Ferry’s version of the Jimmy McHugh–Dorothy Fields song ‘I’m in the Mood for Love’ on the soundtrack. (However, there is a music video for the Bryan Ferry cover version on YouTube which uses shots and out-takes from In the Mood for Love and is credited to Wong and Jet Tone.) I recall that the short was set entirely in a 7/11 convenience store, that its plot hinged on a bet of some sort about food, and that it was very amusing. Most likely it will never be shown again, although its slim storyline was inflated to become the basis for Wong’s My Blueberry Nights.

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Credits Huayang Nianhua/In the Mood for Love Hong Kong/France 2000 Directed by Wong Kar Wai Produced by Wong Kar Wai Executive Producer Chan Ye-Cheng Associate Producer Jacky Pang [Pang Yee-Wah] ©2000, Block 2 Pictures Production Company Block 2 Pictures [Chunguang Yinghua] and Paradis Films present a Jet Tone Films production Production Manager Law Kam-Chuen Production Supervisor Wong Lai-Tak Assistant Producer Chan Wai-Si Screenplay Wong Kar Wai Quoted Writer Liu Yi-Chang Directors of Photography Christopher Doyle Mark Lee [Li Pingbin] Additional Cinematography Kwan Pun-Leung Yu Lik-Wai Lai Yiu-Fai

Chan Kwong-Hung Camera Assistant Lai Yiu-Fai Lighting Assistant Kwan Wing-Cheung Camera Crew Ho Kin-Kwong Ho Ka-Fai Lau Tin-Wah Chief Editor William Chang [Chang Suk-Ping] Editor Chan Kei-Hap Production Designer William Chang [Chang Suk-Ping] Art Director Man Lim-Chung Assistant Art Director Lui Fung-Saan Props Master Wong Chi-On Props Men Tang Nau-Wah Chan Ching-Nau Siu Ping-Lam Make-up Kwan Kei-Noh Assistant Make-up Lui Si-Wing Hair Design Wong Kwok-Hung Hairdresser Luk Ha-Fong Gaffer Wong Chi-Ming Electricians Chan Hon-Sung Kwan Wing-Kin

Assistant Directors Siu Wai-Keung Kong Yeuk-Sing Continuity Yu Haw-Yan Sound Design Tu Duu-Chih [Du Duzhi] Pong Asvinikul Sound Recordists Kuo Li-Chi Tang Shiang-Chu Liang Chi-Da Original Music Michael Galasso Other Music ‘Yumeji’s Theme’ by Umebayashi Shigeru ‘Aquellos ojos verdes’ by L. W. Gilbert and N. Menendez, sung by Nat King Cole ‘Te quiero dijiste’ by Marie Grever, sung by Nat King Cole ‘Quizas, quizas, quizas’ by Osvaldo Ferres, sung by Nat King Cole ‘Huayang de Nianhua’ by Chen Minxin, sung by Zhou Xuan The film’s end credits also list several other vintage Chinese songs and excerpts from traditional Chinese operas, but (with the exception of a short percussive clip from a Cantonese opera) none of them is actually heard in the finished film.

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Some do appear in the ‘Making of’ documentary @ In the Mood for Love, which, incidentally, reveals how Wong Kar Wai at some stage thought of using them. Visual Consultant (Post-production) Calmen Lui Stills Photographer Wing Shya Video Documentation Kwan Pun-Leung Amos Lee English Subtitles Tony Rayns James Tsim Thailand Crew: Production Co-ordinator William Lim Heong Production Manager Parichart Khumrod

Assistant Producer Rattana Pulsawan Production Assistant Samerjai Bhoukird Assistant Location Manager Satt Thepsawad Props Master Narong Osaypan Props Man Aunnop Wungbon Interpreters Alice Chan Shirley Chan Choi Yu-Yuk CAST Maggie Cheung [Cheung Man-Yuk] Mrs Chan, née Su Lizhen Tony Leung [Leung Chiu-Wai] Chow Mo-Wan Rebecca Pan Mrs Suen

Lai Chin Mr Ho Siu Ping-Lam Ping Chin Tsi-Ang the Amah Chan Man-Lui Mr Koo Koo Kam-Wah Mrs Koo Sun Jia-Jun (voice appearance) Mrs Chow Roy Cheung (voice appearance) Mr Chan Cheung Tung-Joe New owner of Mr Koo’s apartment Screen ratio: 1.66:1 Running time: 97 minutes 58 seconds Colour, stereo

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