In the Mood for Love

Hong Kong, 1962. Mr. Chow Mo-wan, a newspaper editor, and his wife move into a small apartment in a Shanghainese tenement building. The same day, Mrs. Chan Su Li-zhen and her husband move into the next apartment. Both spouses are frequently absent. Mr. Chow's wife works late; Mrs. Chan's husband travels for business. Mr. Chow and Mrs. Chan become slightly acquainted as neighbors. They eventually realize, comparing details, that their respective spouses are having an affair with each other. They begin meeting at restaurants, then at hotel rooms, then at Mr. Chow's office. They never become physically involved. They write a martial arts serial together. Mr. Chow takes a job in Singapore. He invites Mrs. Chan to come with him. She does not. Years later — 1966 — Mr. Chow visits the old building. Mrs. Chan, now with a young son, lives in her old apartment. He does not know. He leaves. The film ends with Mr. Chow at Angkor Wat, whispering his secret into a hole in the ancient stone and sealing it with mud.

Wong Kar-Wai shot the film over fifteen months without a complete script. The actors were given small fragments of dialogue and asked to improvise extensively. Christopher Doyle and Mark Lee Ping-Bin's cinematography established a visual register — narrow corridors, slow-motion staircases, recurring rainfall, Maggie Cheung's procession of cheongsam — that has been imitated for two decades and never matched.

Most readings handle the film as the great unrequited love film of the contemporary era. The unrequited reading is a partial reading. The film is not arguing that Mr. Chow and Mrs. Chan failed to consummate something that should have been consummated. The film is arguing that the non-consummation was the consummation. The film is a defense of restraint as the higher form.

In the Mood for Love transmits a recognition that contemporary romantic culture has largely lost: not every connection requires consummation, and some connections are preserved precisely by the refusal to consummate. The film is not anti-sexual. It is not arguing for chastity as a general principle. It is arguing that the specific connection Mr. Chow and Mrs. Chan discovered was a connection whose nature would have been altered, and altered for the worse, by the form their consummation would have taken.

Wong is doing something unfashionable. He is asserting that adults can perceive what a connection actually is and what its proper form actually is, and can act in accordance with that perception even when the perception requires giving up the more obvious pleasure. The discipline is not repression. The discipline is recognition. Mr. Chow and Mrs. Chan see what they have. They see what would happen if they tried to make it the thing their spouses' affair already was. They choose to keep the seeing rather than to enact the thing the seeing has shown them.

This is the structure of certain advanced spiritual practices. The practitioner perceives an opportunity. The practitioner recognizes that the opportunity, taken, would dissolve into the same banal structure that has dissolved every previous opportunity of this kind. The practitioner refrains. The refraining is not loss. The refraining is the practice. What gets preserved by the refraining is the perception itself — the practitioner remains capable of perceiving the next opportunity at the same level of clarity, because the previous perception was not spent.

The transmission, for the viewer who has experienced this, is the validation of what the viewer may have already done. There is a person you did not sleep with. There is a job you did not take. There is a city you did not move to. The standard cultural framing treats these as failures of nerve. The film argues that some of them were achievements of perception. You preserved something by not taking the thing the world said you should have taken. The thing you preserved is still in you. It is the wall at Angkor. It is the secret in the stone. The film is its quiet acknowledgment.