In the Mood for Love

Introduction

The aim of writing this is to investigate and discuss about the Hong Kong movie “In the Mood for Love”, which is produced and directed by director Wong Kar Wai in 2000, led by Maggie Cheung and Tony Leung, by using what I’ve learnt in Film Studies lectures. For this time, I am going to separate this movie into some parts and scenes to discuss as I wish to discuss about it from those smalls parts instead of making it as a whole.

Theory

The theory that I am going to apply in this film is not going to focus only one point but different kind of perspective that I think that is suitable. Lecture scopes that I have learnt this week is about the topic surrealism, which is the kind of based on the psychology of characters and the psychology part in shooting skills of film, and about the topic German expressionism, basically about the oblique angles and high contrast of sets in the scene.

Synopsis

The story is a moody period drama about unrequited love of a pair of couple. Set in a Shanghai, Maggie Cheung as Mrs. Su Li Zhen, works as a secretary in an export company, while male lead Tony Leung as Mr. Chow, works as a newspaper editor. This story started off with Mr. Chow newly moved into the area of housing of Mrs. Su Li Zhen. Mrs. Su has a husband who his job is working as Japanese multinational that keeps acquired him to go on unlimited business trips while Mr. Chow has a wife who is also busy and out of town all the time. Neither spouse is shown in the film as I will mention again in the analysis below. They both soon find out that their spouses had an affair, out of their knowledge, they would like to know how their spouses started off the affair. Slowly, both the main characters have slowly arise the feelings within them.

Analysis

The close-up shoots in this film has very limited room for actors or sets of locations. This is to show that the actor is locked and do not have room for him or her to act much, also as to show the emotions of actors such as stressed level and nervousness of the actors.

We realised that both the husband character and the wife character are not shown even once in any scenes in this movie. This is to show that both of the characters’ absence in both their relationships is frequent.

There is one thing that all of us has noticed is that the repetition of the same music in movie. As what our lecturer had told us, this is to give the audiences the same impression or perspective as every time the actors feeling or doing the same thing. For example, when both main characters are missing each other, the same will be played again and again as to show the feelings of both and to give the audiences a perspective that both of them are missing each other sadly or depressingly when the song is being played. Songs that I have found included tracks by Nat King Cole, "Aquellos Ojos Verdes", "Te Quiero Dijiste", "Quizás, Quizás, Quizás". In between, I found "Quizás, Quizás, Quizás" caught a lot of our attention as the lyrics sounds funny as “you suck, you suck, you suck”.

To mention about the mirror scenes, the mirrors showed that the reflection of main characters, it is very narcissistic. It also shows that main characters clearly fall in love with each other They think they both are very enjoy each other's company a lot. Even though fact is like this, they still do not be to together anyhow, as it is a very socially conservative era at that time.

Even my lecture has not touch about the part of lighting yet, but I still realised the usage of different shades of lightness represent different kinds of feeling the scenes wanted to show to the audiences. My lecturer had mentioned that different layer of darkness makes each scene has different kind of negative emotions of the sets of each scene, for example the scene when Mrs. Su is in her house and waiting for her husband, the lighting of her lamp alone showed the loneliness of a lady waiting for the arrival of her husband.

The repetition of the scene after their dinner is to try to pretend each other's partner and both also try to figure out how their partner started out the affair. While doing all the actions, outing, dating, during the way of them to find out they actually make the feeling between us and their relationship come real by the moment that they knew the affair actually started simply just by feelings of both parties.

At the end, both of them are not together or even have sex as the girl respected her own culture much, so she chosen divorce and live together with a son for the rest of her life. This showed that the character Mrs. Su is a strong woman in this film. Both the parties do not want to simply give the willingness to have sex to each other based on temptation as Mrs. Su has the thought of “they're not going to be like them", which she does not want to do what their partners had done to hurt them both.

Conclusion

To be honest this movie is too artistic for me as the feelings of each scenes is too deep and emotional to be accepted. I find interesting in the complicated feelings and relationship between Maggie Cheung and Tony Leung as they wanted to be together and fate and tradition brought them separately. In short, this movie is very surreal and I like it as a new experience to me.