In the Mood for Love is a 2000 Hong Kong romantic drama film written, produced, and directed by Wong Kar-wai. Its original Chinese title means “Flowery Years”.
It tells the story of a man (played by Tony Leung) and a woman (Maggie Cheung) whose spouses have an affair together and who slowly develop feelings for each other.
In the Mood for Love premiered at the 2000 Cannes Film Festival on 20 May, where it was nominated for the Palme d’Or and Tony Leung was awarded Best Actor (the first Hong Kong actor to win this award at Cannes).
It is frequently listed as one of the greatest films of all time and one of the major works of Asian cinema. In a 2016 survey by the BBC, it was voted the second-best film of the 21st century by 177 film critics from around the world.
The movie forms the second part of an informal trilogy, alongside Days of Being Wild (1990) and 2046 (2004).
Making of In the Mood for Love
Wong’s plan to make a film set primarily in Hong Kong did not simplify matters when it came to the shoot.
The city’s appearance was much changed since the 1960s, and Wong’s personal nostalgia for the time added to his desire for historical accuracy.
Wong had little taste for working in studio settings, let alone using special effects to imitate the look of past times. Christopher Doyle later discussed the necessity of filming where the streets, the buildings, and even the sight of clothes hanging on lines (as in 1960s Hong Kong) could give a real energy to the actors and the story, whose outlines were constantly open to revision as shooting progressed.
While set in Hong Kong, a portion of the filming (like outdoor and hotel scenes) was shot in less modernised neighborhoods of Bangkok, Thailand.
A brief portion later in the film is set in Singapore (one of Wong’s initial inspirations on the story had been a short story set in Hong Kong, Intersection, by the Hong Kong writer Liu Yichang).
In its final sequences, the film also incorporates footage of Angkor Wat, Cambodia, where Leung’s character is working as a journalist.
The film took 15 months to shoot. The actors found the process inspiring but demanding. They required a lot of work to understand the times, being slightly younger than Wong and having grown up in a rapidly changing Hong Kong or, in Maggie Cheung’s case, partly in the United Kingdom.
Cheung portrayed 1930s Chinese screen icon Ruan Lingyu in Stanley Kwan’s 1992 film Centre Stage, for which she wore qipao, the dresses worn by stylish Chinese women throughout much of the first half of the 20th century.
It had been Cheung’s most recognised performance to date and her hardest, partly due to the clothing, which restricted her freedom of movement.
For Wong’s film, Cheung, playing a married woman in her thirties who had carried over the elegance of her younger years in the pre-revolutionary mainland, would again wear qipao, known in Cantonese as cheongsam, and spoke of it as the way of understanding her character Su Li-zhen, whose quiet strength Cheung felt was unlike her own more spontaneous spirit.
The cinematographer Christopher Doyle, for whom the film was the sixth collaboration with Wong Kar-wai, had to leave when production went over schedule and was replaced by Mark Lee Ping Bin, renowned for his work with Taiwanese filmmaker Hou Hsiao-hsien.
Both DPs are credited equally for the final film. Some scenes in the final cut are thought to have been shot by each, with some critics noting differences between Doyle’s more kinetic style as seen in earlier Wong movies, and the more subtle long shots of Lee framing key parts of In the Mood for Love.
Critic Tony Rayns, on the other hand, noted in a commentary on another Wong film that the differing styles of the two cinematographers were blended seamlessly by Wong’s own fluid aesthetic. Like all of Wong’s previous work, this one was shot on film, not digitally.
Doyle’s departure did not result from major artistic arguments with Wong. However, despite his agreement with Wong’s spontaneous approach to scripting, he found it frustrating to reshoot many of the key moments over and over in environments throughout Southeast Asia until they felt right to the director. He had to turn down many other projects due to the total commitment, without a clear time limit, required by Wong.
The final months of production and post-production on In the Mood for Love, a submission to the Cannes Film Festival in May 2000, were notorious for their confusion. The film was barely finished in time for the festival, as would occur again four years later when Wong submitted 2046. Wong continued shooting more and more of In the Mood for Love with the cast and crew as he worked furiously to edit the massive amounts of footage he had shot over the past year.
He removed large chunks of the story to strip it down to its most basic element, the relationship between these characters in the 1960s, with brief allusions to earlier and later times. In the meantime, Wong screened brief segments before the festival for journalists and distributors.
Despite the general lack of commercial interest in Chinese cinema at the time by North American media corporations, Wong was given a distribution deal for a limited theatrical release in North America on USA Films, based only on a few minutes of footage.
Call from Cannes
By early 2000, with the deadline for Cannes approaching, Wong was contacted by the director of Cannes, who encouraged him to quickly complete a final cut, and offered a constructive criticism about the title.
Although the title in Cantonese and Mandarin is based on a Zhou Xuan song whose English title is translated “Age of Bloom”, the international title proved more complex.
After discarding Summer in Beijing and A Story of Food, Wong had provisionally settled on Secrets, but Cannes felt this title was not as distinctive as the film Wong was preparing and suggested he should change it.
Finally having completed the cut, but at a loss for titles, Wong was listening to a then-recent album by Bryan Ferry and Roxy Music titled Slave to Love: The Very Best of the Ballads, and noticed a resonance in the song “I’m in the Mood for Love”, which shared its title with a popular jazz standard of the mid-20th century. Many of Wong’s previous English-language titles had come from pop songs, so he found this title particularly appropriate.
Wong states he was very influenced by Hitchcock’s Vertigo while making this film and compares Tony Leung’s character to James Stewart’s:
“The role of Tony in the film reminds me of Jimmy Stewart’s in Vertigo. There is a dark side to this character. I think it’s very interesting that most of the audience prefers to think that this is a very innocent relationship.
These are the good guys, because their spouses are the first ones to be unfaithful and they refuse to be. Nobody sees any darkness in these characters-and yet they are meeting in secret to act out fictitious scenarios of confronting their spouses and of having an affair.
I think this happens because the face of Tony Leung is so sympathetic. Just imagine if it was John Malkovich playing this role. You would think, ‘This guy is really weird.’
It’s the same in Vertigo. Everybody thinks James Stewart is a nice guy, so nobody thinks that his character is actually very sick.”