by Tony Rayns
The Fortissimo Film Sales flyer with deleted images (1999)
The first version of In the Mood for Love was indeed shot relatively quickly in Hong Kong in 1999, including the slowed-motion 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 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.
Mrs Chan buys noodles in the Sheung Wan daibaitong
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 mean more than lending her presence to half a dozen trivial quickies in the same period.
‘Impossible’ and elusive points of view in the alley
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. 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 post-production 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.
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 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 long-drawn-out fades characteristic of some Hollywood films of the 1930s, but they are nonetheless a somewhat archai
c 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 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
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 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.
The off-screen strategy in action
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 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 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 ‘role-play’ in the alley is shown in lateral tracking shots taken from inside one of the buildings, with its walls and barr
ed 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 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.
Trapped by the mahjong game outside the door, with an unexplained foreground obstruction
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-the-bed 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.