Film Screening: “In the Mood for Love” (Wong Kar-wai, 2000)
Directed by Wong Kar-wai, 2000, 98 min, Hong Kong, Cantonese, Shanghainese, French, and Spanish w/English subtitles
Pre-screening introduction by Professor Giorgio Biancorossi (Music, University of Hong Kong; 2024-25 Luce East Asia Fellow in Musicology, National Humanities Center), who will speak about “Remixing Wong Kar-wai: Music, Bricolage, and the Aesthetics of Oblivion” on February 20 at 3:00PM.
About the film
Hong Kong, 1962: Chow Mo-Wan (Tony Leung) and Su Li-Zhen (Maggie Cheung) move into neighboring apartments on the same day. Their encounters are formal and polite—until a discovery about their spouses creates an intimate bond between them.
At once delicately mannered and visually extravagant, In the Mood for Love is a masterful evocation of romantic yearning and its fleeting moments.
With its aching soundtrack and exquisitely abstract cinematography by Christopher Doyle and Mark Lee Ping Bing, this film has been a major stylistic influence on the past decade of cinema, and is a milestone in Wong’s redoubtable career.
Ranked 5th in Sight & Sound's Greatest Films of All Time critics' poll (2022)
Critical views
“Wong’s porous, often headily non-verbal filmmaking trusts us to feel the lovers’ ennui and melancholy – and further, to identify it within ourselves – via its sheer accumulation of sounds, images and sense memories: be it the damp wraiths of steam swirling from an opened noodle container, the warm, vinyl-roughened croon of Nat King Cole on the soundtrack or the impossible lobby-card beauty of Tony Leung and Maggie Cheung, both preserved here in their ravishing prime, and somehow convincing as ordinary mortals made movie-star beautiful by love.” – Guy Lodge, BFI