by Tony Rayns
As we’ve just suggested, the close-ups of the clock in the shipping company office appear to be related to a small group of other seemingly anomalous shots in the film. These are oddly composed images of the decors in which scenes are set, from which characters are absent or in one case marginalised. These images are bisected by strong vertical or horizontal lines (like a clock face?), and the strangeness of the compositions seems intended to link them in our minds. The first occurs at the end of the first scene in Mr Ho’s office. Mr Ho hurries down the stairs for his dinner date with his mistress, and the camera pans slightly, holding on a general view of the office. A vertical line bisects the shot; the office accountant is visible through a hatch in the wall at the right, but most of the image is filled with decor and furniture, all of it redolent of 1960s design. The shot has no narrative function; Wong is simply inviting us to observe a vanished style.
The second such shot is the one that introduces the western restaurant. It’s bisected by a horizontal line. The top half of the image shows a light fitting, and the bottom a jukebox. (Wong has a thing about jukeboxes; the one in the old Wally Mat pub in Chungking Express was favoured with extended close-ups.) The jukebox provides a minimal narrative rationale for the appearance of Nat King Cole’s Spanish standards on the soundtrack, but the shot seems nonetheless anomalous in a film which elsewhere consistently avoids establishing shots.
Slippers and heels seen from under beds in Hong Kong and Singapore
Looking out of Mrs Suen’s window twice, first pensively, then with nostalgic regret
And the third such shot appears when Mrs Chan invades Chow’s hotel room in Singapore, immediately before the under-the-bed shot of her feet in high heels as she reaches for the slippers. It’s an odd view of the room’s decor, vertically bisected by a brown curtain; Mrs Chan is off screen. The throw of light from a lamp on the off-white wall is distantly reminiscent of the lighting in the western restaurant. The shot occurs just after Mrs Chan has called Chow’s newspaper office but failed to speak down the phone line, and its ‘emptiness’ seems to relate to her silence.
Three narratively redundant shots of decor: Mr Ho’s office, the western restaurant and Chow’s Singapore hotel room
These shots of decor form a small but striking part of the film’s visual repertoire. Their sporadic appearance helps to consolidate the sense that there are ‘secret’ connections between disparate times, places and events. This sense in turn has an oblique connection with Wong’s emphasis on repression and the problem of expressing feelings face to face. There are no literal links; it’s a matter of mood and unspoken thoughts. As Wong said in the interview quoted at the start of Chapter 2, his characters are versions of himself. ‘That’s why my characters have such closed-off lives and can’t reveal themselves; they’re afraid to get hurt.’
The use of music, particularly ‘Yumeji’s Theme’, justifies the use of slowed motion in a similarly oblique way. Slightly slowing the movements of Chow and Mrs Chan makes their steps seem dancelike. It’s an assertively unrealistic tic of style, but it passes unquestioned by most viewers. Of course, slowed motion emphasises the sexiness of Mrs Chan’s steps in her constrictive qipao, but the slowing of the image also chimes with the characters’ emotional awkwardness: their hesitations and the embarrassment they feel about a nascent mutual attraction. Modern popular cinema has ‘normalised’ the use of slow motion for showing violent action and explosions to the extent that no viewer ever takes the visual effect as disruptive to the flow of events, but to slow the motion slightly as Wong does here – building on his play with relative perceptions of time in Chungking Express – is less usual. The music obliquely ‘explains’ it and suggests the unspoken feelings in play. It also makes the slowed-motion shots an integral part of Wong Kar Wai’s offer to his audience, and the pleasure viewers take in watching them is a key part of the deal.
There’s more to say about the film’s elisions, particularly the way they withhold narratively significant information. In Chapter 2, we noted that Wong’s decision to excise the sex scene between Chow and Mrs Chan in room 2046 was taken very late in the editing, a matter of days before the premiere in Cannes. But that omission is ‘covered’ by the elaborate build-up to the ‘missing’ scene: the lengthy montage in which we hear the voiceover lines ‘I don’t want to go home tonight’ and ‘It’s me … if there’s an extra ticket, would you come with me?’ and see the couple becoming more physically intimate in the back of a taxi. The same is not true of Mrs Chan’s first visit to room 2046. After the mini-montage of shots of her feet rushing up and down the hotel’s stairs and along the Lynchian corridor with its billowing red drapes, the film cuts to a shot of Chow smoking and looking out of the window. We hear a knock at the door. Then there’s a hard cut to a wide shot of the corridor as Mrs Chan leaves at the end of their meeting, promising to return next day. Nothing at all is shown of what was said or done in the room, and the continuity implied by the edits makes us all the more conscious that we’ve been denied information.
The film contains several other time-jumps within apparently integral scenes: there’s one at the end of the first visit to the daibaitong, in which we’ve seen Mrs Chan and Chow separately, when there’s a hard cut to another occasion when they pass each other on the stone steps, and another in the second scene in the western restaurant, when there’s a hard cut from one dinner to another towards the end of the scene. In both those examples, the cuts are ‘disguised’ by continuing music (‘Yumeji’s Theme’ in the first case, Nat King Cole in the second) but at the same time ‘revealed’ by Mrs Chan’s changes of qipao. In neither case, though, is there any sense that the film is withholding anything. It’s merely quickening the pace of its story development, advancing the burgeoning relationship between Chow and Mrs Chan.
But other narrative elisions make the storytelling wilfully oblique. They range from the minor (Ping’s move to Singapore, Mrs Chan’s mysteriously easy access to Chow’s Singapore hotel room) to the absolutely major (Mrs Chan having a son, the marital status of both Chow and Mrs Chan in 1966). These elisions are designed to leave us speculating. The close-up of the hotel boy denying that anyone has been in Chow’s hotel room – the only such close-up of a supporting character in the whole film – leads us to speculate that he’s lying, that he, too, fell victim to Mrs Chan’s charm. More significantly, we can speculate that if Mrs Chan had a child that wasn’t her husband’s, that would certainly have led her to a formal separation and divorce, despite her face-saving assurance to Mrs Suen in 1966 that Mr Chan is ‘fine’.
Our speculations are ultimately subsumed into the film’s closing sense that an era has passed, a chapter has ended. The film is finally all about the bittersweet memory of something lost. Psychologically, Wong’s ‘off-screen strategy’ is all about that loss. The film’s evasions, elisions, exclusions, disjunctions and enigmas – even its momentary fixations on decor – are all about the imperfect retrieval of a memory, while its evocative and insistent music is all about smiling or sobbing through the parts that time has heightened or discoloured or erased. The tenor of the ending is clear: time to move on.
4 Miscellany
You know, what kept me working on this film for such a long time was that I became addicted to it – specifically, to the mood it conjured up.
Wong Kar Wai (2000), interview by Tony Rayns
You notice things if you pay attention to detail.
Mrs Chan (née Su Lizhen), in In the Mood for Love
This closing chapter offers an assortment of facts and arguments, garnished with the odd speculation and piece of gossip. These paragraphs find a home here because they didn’t fit into the preceding pages.
***
Wong Kar Wai traces his decision to push the adulterers off screen back to his reading of Julio Cortázar, but I suspect that the strategy may have other roots too. Wong’s ‘off-screen’ treatment of the adulterers closely resembles one aspect of Zhang Yimou’s Raise the Red Lantern (
Dahong Denglong Gaogao Gua [1991]). Zhang’s film is about a nineteen-year-old woman (played by Gong Li) who becomes the fourth wife of the wealthy head of a clan in feudal China; she finds herself locked in an internecine rivalry with the other wives for the master’s affections. One of the film’s more interesting visual ideas is to relegate the patriarch (played by Ma Jingwu, a Film Academy professor) to off-screen space; we occasionally see his limbs or catch sight of him from behind, but barely glimpse his face. Zhang Yimou certainly thought that Wong was in his debt, since he hired Maggie Cheung, Tony Leung and Chris Doyle for Hero (Yingxiong [2002]), his first film after the release of In the Mood for Love.
Billowing drapes in the Lynchian corridor leading to room 2046
Wong returned the ‘compliment’ by casting as many of Zhang Yimou’s ex-girlfriends as possible in 2046. Zhang Ziyi was his major catch, and Dong Jie (star of Zhang’s winsome Happy Times/Xingfu Shiguang [2000]) his second. Dong makes only a fleeting appearance in 2046 as Faye Wong’s rebellious younger sister, but her presence mattered enough to Wong for him to give her guest-star billing. Then, with the Cannes deadline rapidly approaching, Wong stopped everything to shoot additional scenes with the newly available Gong Li, giving him his third catch. The inter-film ‘dialogue’ between the two directors seemingly petered out after that, but Wong was still ready to pause the post-production of Ashes of Time Redux in 2008 to add a cello solo played by Yo-Yo Ma to the soundtrack – evidently determined not to be outdone by Zhang Yimou’s wuxia film soundtracks.
***
22 September 2000, Hong Kong Cultural Centre, Tsimshatsui, Kowloon. It’s the night of In the Mood for Love’s premiere in Hong Kong, and Wong Kar Wai has donated the proceeds to the Hong Kong Film Archive, which will move into its own purpose-built home early in 2001. The cash is specifically designated for the Archive’s fund to transfer nitrate holdings to safety film stock; a cache of long-lost nitrate prints has recently been retrieved from a dump in San Francisco. The evening is hosted by comedian (and long-term Wong Kar Wai fan) Eric Kot, and Hong Kong’s first China-approved Chief Executive Tung Chee-Hwa is in attendance alongside the film’s stars; Wong Kar Wai’s wife is also making a rare public appearance. At a time when Jet Tone was ‘financially exhausted’ by the cost of making the film, donating money to the Archive is a big gesture for Wong.
Zhang Yimou (centre) meets Maggie Cheung and Tony Leung at the Beijing premiere of In the Mood for Love
The programme opens with Wong’s new film Huayang de Nianhua, a short compilation of images from vintage Hong Kong movies in the Archive’s collection. William Chang edited this short from shots selected by Wong; the film runs for two minutes and twenty seconds, and is available on some home-movie editions of In the Mood for Love. The short takes its title – and its soundtrack – from the song ‘Huayang de Nianhua’ (heard as a radio request in In the Mood for Love), as sung by Zhou Xuan in a movie of the late 1940s. The title is hard to translate precisely, but means something like ‘A time when flowers flourished’; in the subtitling, we settled for ‘In Full Bloom’. Of course, Wong minimally adapted this song title for use as the Chinese title of In the Mood for Love.
Zhou Xuan sings ‘Huayang de Nianhua’
William Chang uses flash-dissolves from one image to the next throughout, and structures the short like a mini-feature. He opens it with a blur of captions from credits sequences, then offers a glimpse of Zhou Xuan singing the song before plunging into a montage of shots organised by genre: romcom, drama, thriller, horror, war. Not surprisingly, Wong has chosen images which pre-echo shots in In the Mood for Love: shots of women’s elegantly shod feet and legs, divas going through some inner turmoil, and so on. There is even a close-up of a clock face. But there are also images of a kind conspicuously absent from In the Mood for Love: an encounter at a bus stop, shots of the trams on Des Voeux Road, bustling street life. Most of the images are shown in tinted monochrome, and they have the pellucid sharpness that we associate with nitrate prints.
Zhou Xuan became a star in Shanghai in the 1930s (she plays the impoverished but happy waif in Yuan Muzhi’s classic Street Angel/Malu Tianshi [1937]) and chose to stay working in ‘Orphan Island’ Shanghai after much of the city fell to the Japanese army. She resumed her acting/singing career in Mandarin-language films in Hong Kong after the war, but was dead by the time ‘Huayang de Nianhua’ was requested on a radio show in In the Mood for Love. Her recorded repertoire remained an object of nostalgic affection in Hong Kong for many years; compilation CDs are still available today.
***
As we’ve noted, Wong is very likely to take inspiration from literature and music as he formulates his films before and during production. But he does also have a cinephile side, and it’s reflected in some of his supporting-cast choices in In the Mood for Love. Casting Rebecca Pan to play Mrs Suen was virtually automatic and film-related only insofar as she had already played a similarly matriarchal role in Days of Being Wild. Pan was born in Shanghai and moved to Hong Kong in 1949. The communist victory in China had ended the right of men to have more than one wife, and Pan’s mother (first wife to a man who had taken ‘concubines’) chose to leave her husband and move to Hong Kong with her daughter. Pan’s recording career began in 1959, and she signed with EMI in London in 1964; she recorded her last album, A Christmas Carol, in 1975. Known for singing in both Mandarin and English, she was one of the first Chinese chanteuses to perform in the US.
Pan was brought into Hong Kong films by Ann Hui, who invited her to act in Starry is the Night (Jinye Xingguang Canlan [1988]), but had appeared in only one other film before Wong cast her in Days of Being Wild, where she epitomises the spirit of Shanghainese immigrants in Hong Kong. She went on to appear in Hou Hsiao-Hsien’s Flowers of Shanghai (Hai Shang Hua [1998]). She discusses her background very charmingly in Jia Zhangke’s documentary about Shanghai exiles, I Wish I Knew (Hai Shang Chuanqi [2010]). Sitting in an empty dressing room, she talks about the reason for her mother’s move to Hong Kong and her life there, her own affection for young people and her worries for their future. She also sings one of her old standards, but has forgotten some of the lyrics.
Rebecca Pan as Mrs Suen; Lai Chin as Mr Ho; Chin Tsi-Ang as the Amah
Two other supporting actors do bring a specifically cinematic background to the film. Lai Chin, who plays the adulterous Mr Ho, was a star of Mandarin-language films for a good ten years, from the mid-1950s to the mid-60s; he then became a producer of wuxia films until his retirement from the industry. He made a cameo appearance in Andrew Lau’s triad-gang series Young and Dangerous (Guhuozi [1996–8]), but Mr Ho was his first significant film role in many years.
And Chin Tsi-Ang, who plays Mrs Suen’s Shanghainese Amah, is a legend of Chinese cinema. Born in Shanghai in 1909 (so she was ninety when she played the Amah), she starred in a long-lost wuxia film called The Heroine of Jiangnan in 1925 and became a popular star of the genre. When the KMT government outlawed wuxia films in the early 1930s, she ran the Jinlong Film Company with her husband, director Hung Chung-Ho. Chin moved to Hong Kong when much of Shanghai fell to the Japanese in 1937, and made an acting comeback in her husband’s special-effects extravaganza God of the Animal Kingdom (Shouguo Shenmo [1948]). She continued acting in and producing films into the mid-1960s, and still accepted cameo roles in her retirement (such as in Tsui Hark’s The Blade/Dao [1995]); she joined the other stars on stage at the Hong Kong premiere of In the Mood for Love. She was the grandmother of director/actor Sammo Hung.
***
The ‘deleted scenes’ from In the Mood for Love, which are available on some home-movie editions of the film, are quite distinct from the try-out comic sequences seen in the ‘Making of’ documentary @ In the Mood for Love. They all relate to the film in its final form, but offer a veritable garden of forking paths of alternative storylines and outcomes. None of them was ‘deleted’ in the usual sense; they were not trimmed to improve the film’s pacing but rejected because Wong changed hi
s mind about them. Wong has grouped them in four chapters. They include three more plays of ‘Yumeji’s Theme’.
The Secret of Room 2046 first shows Chow and Mrs Chan extending their role-play into a rehearsal of sex; neither can go through with it. (Wong says in a commentary that he thought at one time of starting the film with these scenes.) In the next scene, Chow is feeling ill; he returns to the room with a variety of medicines. Mrs Chan arrives (wearing the red coat over a patterned white qipao) to look after him, and asks why he’s rented room 2046 again. The third scene features the moment they have sex (almost entirely off screen), after some moody preambles involving rain and cigarettes. It contains Mrs Chan’s line ‘I don’t want to go home tonight’ – recycled as a voiceover in the final version of the film, where it’s heard over a rear view of the taxi.
Days in Singapore starts with Chow eating a durian and a lengthy caption quote from Liu Yi-Chang’s Duidao; the text is Bai Chunyu’s memory of being told that anyone who develops a taste for durian in Singapore is never likely to return home. (Wong’s commentary says that this was the last material filmed in Bangkok, very early in the morning on the day of the unit’s departure for Cambodia.) The next scene is an alternative version of the radio request-show scene, set in Mrs Suen’s apartment. This time, Zhou Xuan’s song is dedicated to Mrs Chan not by her husband in Tokyo but by Mr Chow in Singapore. Mrs Chan isn’t listening, and the Amah calls her to hear it. The song plays over a languorous shot of the radio set. The third scene shows Mr Ho giving Mrs Chan a ticket for a cruise to Singapore, urging her to take a break. The fourth scene shows her meeting Ping in Singapore (there is no clue to Chow’s whereabouts) and discussing his romantic disappointments rather than hers. Mrs Chan is distracted, and struggles to show interest.