In the Mood for Love (2000)

In the Mood for Love (2000). A story of pure love. Platonic, yet profound. The loneliness that runs through this tale is one many of us know intimately. That familiar refrain brings sorrow in its wake, the anguish of existence, the melancholy of unfulfillment. It is melancholy that gives birth to love. This love is not imposed but stirred from the heart’s depths. The film’s use of color and music is apt, aesthetic, sublime. The narrative flows slowly, yet remains cohesive. The story is arranged in such a way that you want to be arranged within it, to draw the plot into your own experience. The sorrow and solitude of Mr. Chow and Mrs. Chan will touch you. As the movie progresses, you too will sense within yourself a kind of unfulfilled love. The joy one feels when experiencing sculpture, painting, or poetry—that same aesthetic pleasure exists in this film. When the journey ends, you’ll think: so cinema can be made this way too! Its creator, Wong Kar-wai, is a master craftsman of life’s portrayal, who has brought life to this film as much through cinema’s laws as through life’s own canons.

People change after marriage. Marriage gives birth not so much to love as to doubt, and far more of it. Then emerge aspects of a person that, had they surfaced before marriage, might have prevented the marriage altogether. Yet social and familial obligations leave little room for alternatives. Married life is fundamentally about accepting and adjusting, about learning to live with what is. Marriage is thus a journey toward helplessness, the beginning of distance. If divorce were as simple as breaking a toy, there would be celebrations of it every day. What a person is truly like can only be properly described by their spouse. To know someone’s real face, you must look not from the outside but by entering their home. Married people, growing weary day after day of their partner’s mentality or behavior, eventually become attracted to someone else. Drawing close, friendship, affection, love, sometimes even deep love. I have seen it happen that even while loving the person at home, love blooms for someone outside. Knowing such love will never reach fulfillment, without any expectations, that love often deepens nonetheless. And that depth doesn’t always involve the body. What does this mean? Humans are creatures hungry for the soul’s nourishment. When that hunger isn’t satisfied at home, the heart will naturally turn outward. There is nothing wrong in this.

Investigate and you’ll find that even the person who married the most beautiful human in the world eventually loses that earlier interest and feeling for that beautiful person. It is human nature: what one possesses, one begins to neglect. It is also human nature: when neglected, one seeks where appreciation exists. Thus the distance created with the person at home creates intimacy with someone outside. Then, to dispel loneliness, the heart seeks someone who suits the mind. And if it happens that a person realizes their partner is attracted to someone else or involved in an affair, then they too seek alternative paths. It’s natural. The mind is an entity that needs shelter. When it receives favorable treatment from someone, the mind wants to take refuge there. This isn’t called second love—this is love. Love has no first, second, or third. Every love is first love. Every love is born from the sense of lovelessness.

People cannot be bound with rope; they must be bound with love. What kind of love binds people? Love according to my heart? No. Love according to the heart of the one I wish to bind. If they don’t find such love in me, they will run to whoever shows them such love. Most couples live by hiding their inner selves from each other. When someone doesn’t have to hide themselves from another, love for that person will come—there’s nothing surprising in this. Such love doesn’t break homes; such love comes because the home is already broken. Love begins by taking friendship’s hand. When friendship transforms into love, often people become afraid. Bearing love’s burden is among the world’s most difficult tasks. Attempting this task, people lose both friendship and love. Yet everyone wants to stay in this game of losing. Humans love to gain, but they love even more to lose what they’ve gained. Toward anything that must be lost, human attraction is irresistible. Knowing they must lose it, people still want to possess it, and after losing it, they live with that loss.

Mr. Chow and Mrs. Chan are both unhappy in their marriages. They have burned continuously in love’s fire for each other, yet some barrier maintains distance between them until the film’s end. Here lies the movie’s true beauty. Maggie Cheung’s grace and charm in Mrs. Chan’s role will captivate you throughout the entire film. Her walk, her personality, her way of speaking, her manner of dressing—they create storms in the heart! Possessors of such perfect physical grace are rare in cinema. The story’s heroine keeps the viewer’s gaze fixed upon her, awakening a constant sense of longing. That longing is the ache of not having yet losing! It’s more intense than the ache of having and losing. Before sitting down to watch a romantic film, we expect certain things—many of those expectations aren’t met in this film, yet after watching it, we think: what I saw here is exactly what should exist in romantic films. When everything is obtained, love flees. This isn’t a film of “having everything”—this is a film of “having love.” The intense desire to come close, yet remaining distant—this distance is love’s very life. Love is not the poetry of attainment but the verse of non-attainment. Love dies in union, grows in separation. Only longing keeps love alive.

Someone you can desire knowing you’ll never have them, whose dreams you can lose yourself in for a lifetime, who dwells every moment in the mind’s intimate courtyard, whose memory brings the involuntary prayer “be well,” whose very abnormalities seem normal, whom you can forgive effortlessly even when their words or actions cause a world of pain, whose memory stands beside you during deepest sorrow to chase away grief—In the Mood for Love is the honest portrayal of connection and disconnection with that eternal beloved.