by Tony Rayns
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 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 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 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.
A metaphor for exorcism and healing
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 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 anti-British 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 f
or 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 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-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 mid-1970s, 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 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.
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 film-making 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 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.