| In the Mood for Love | |
|---|---|
| Directed by | Wong Kar-wai |
| Produced by | Wong Kar-wai |
| Written by | Wong Kar-wai |
| Starring | Tony Leung Maggie Cheung |
| Music by | Michael Galasso Shigeru Umebayashi |
| Cinematography | Christopher Doyle Pin Bing Lee |
| Editing by | William Chang |
| Distributed by | USA Films (US) |
| Release date(s) | September 29, 2000 (HK) February 2, 2001 (US) |
| Running time | 98 minutes 94 minutes (Poland) |
| Country | Hong Kong |
| Language | Cantonese Shanghainese French |
| Box office | $12,854,953 (worldwide) |
In the Mood for Love (Traditional Chinese: 花樣年華; Simplified Chinese: 花样年华; Pinyin: Huāyàng niánhuá; Yale: Fa yeung nin wa (Fā yeuhng nìhn wàh), literally "the age of blossoms" or "the flowery years", which is a Chinese metaphor for the fleeting time of youth, beauty and love) is a 2000 Hong Kong film directed by Wong Kar-wai, starring Maggie Cheung and Tony Leung. The film premiered on May 20, 2000, at the 2000 Cannes Film Festival,[1][2] where it was nominated for the Palme d'Or.
The film's original Chinese title derives from a song of the same name by Zhou Xuan from a 1946 film. The English title derives from a Bryan Ferry cover of the song "I'm in the Mood for Love" that is also used in the film. The film forms the second part of an informal trilogy, together with the first part Days of Being Wild[3] (released in 1991) and the last part 2046 (released in 2004).
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The film takes place in Hong Kong, 1962. Chow Mo-wan (Tony Leung), a journalist, rents a room in an apartment of a building on the same day as Su Li-zhen (Maggie Cheung), a secretary from a shipping company. They become next-door neighbors. Each has a spouse who works and often leaves them alone on overtime shifts. Despite the presence of a friendly Shanghainese landlady, Mrs. Suen, and bustling, mahjong-playing neighbors, Chow and Su often find themselves alone in their rooms. Their lives continue to intersect in everyday situations: a recurring motif in this film is the loneliness of eating alone, and the film documents the leads' chance encounters, each making their individual trek to the street noodle stall.
Chow and Su each nurse suspicions about their own spouse's fidelity; each comes to the conclusion that their spouses have been seeing each other. Su wonders aloud how their spouse's affair might have began, and together, Su and Chow re-enact what they imagine might have happened.
Chow soon invites Su to help him write a martial arts serial for the papers. As their relationship develops, their neighbors begin to take notice. In the context of a socially conservative 1960s' Hong Kong, friendships between men and women bear scrutiny. Chow rents a hotel room away from the apartment where he and Su can work together without attracting attention. The relationship between Chow and Su is platonic, and defiantly so, as there is the suggestion that they would be degraded if they stooped to the level of their spouses. As time passes, however, they acknowledge that they have developed feelings for each other. Chow leaves Hong Kong for a job in Singapore. He asks Su to go with him; Chow waits for her at the hotel room for a time, and then leaves. She can be seen rushing down the stairs of her apartment, only to arrive at the empty hotel room, too late to join Chow.
The next year, Su goes to Singapore and visits Chow's apartment where she calls Chow, who is working for a Singaporean newspaper, but she remains silent on the phone when Chow picks up. Later, Chow realizes she has visited his apartment after seeing a lipstick-stained cigarette butt in his ashtray. While dining with a friend, Chow relays a story about how in older times, when a person had a secret that could not be shared, he would instead go atop a mountain, make a hollow in a tree, whisper the secret into that hollow and cover it with mud.
Three years later, Su visits with her former landlady, Mrs. Suen. Mrs. Suen is about to emigrate to the United States, and Su inquires about whether the apartment is available for rent. Some time later, Chow returns to visit his landlords, the Koos. He finds they have emigrated to the Philippines. He asks about the Suen family next door, and the new owner tells him a woman and her son are now living next door. He leaves without realizing Su is the lady living next door.
The film ends at Siem Reap, Cambodia, where Chow is seen visiting the Angkor Wat. At the site of a ruined monastery, he whispers for some time into a hollow in a ruined wall, before plugging the hollow with mud.
While set in Hong Kong, a portion of the filming (like outdoor and hotel scenes) was shot in Bangkok, Thailand. The film also incorporates footage of Angkor Wat, Cambodia. The film took 15 months to shoot.[2] The cinematographer Christopher Doyle, for whom the film was the sixth collaboration with Wong Kar-wai,[4] had to leave the film when production went over schedule and was replaced by Mark Lee Ping Bin.[2]
Wong states he was very influenced by Hitchcock's Vertigo while making this film, and compares Tony Leung's film character to James Stewart's:
The title track Hua Yang De Nian Hua is a song by famous singer Zhou Xuan from the Solitary Island period. The 1946 song, used in Wong's film, is a paean to a happy past and an oblique metaphor for the darkness of Japanese-occupied Shanghai. Wong also set the song to his 2000 short film, named Hua Yang De Nian Hua after the track.
In the Mood for Love made HK$8,663,227 during its Hong Kong run.
On February 2, 2001, the film opened in six North American theatres, earning $113,280 ($18,880 per screen) in its first weekend. It finished its North American run with a gross of $2,738,980.[7]
The film's total worldwide box office gross was US$12,854,953.[7]
They Shoot Pictures, Don't They?, the review aggregator of critical opinion, best-of lists, and reviews, lists In the Mood for Love as the most acclaimed film of the 21st century.[8] In 2000, Empire ranked the film #42 in its "The 100 Best Films Of World Cinema" list.[9] It was ranked 95th on "100 Best Films from 1983 to 2008" by Entertainment Weekly.[10] In November 2009, Time Out New York ranked the film as the fifth-best of the decade, calling it the "consummate unconsummated love story of the new millennium."[11]
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