Review of In the Mood for Love (2000) by Ben L — 23 May 2015

In the Mood for Love is a film about 2 neighbors who discover that their spouses are having an affair with one another. It shows how they try to deal with this information, and seek to be better than their spouses by not falling into the same adulterous relstionship. The film moves at a very slow pace, and is loaded with repetitive scenes perhaps to reinforce the monotony of the characters' lives. Despite the glacial pace the visuals in this film are amazing. The set designers made some extremely colorful and distinctive locations for them to shoot. The costumers absolutely nailed it, particularly in the gorgeous dresses worn by Maggie Cheung. But the real magic was in the creative shot selection by the cinematographers and Wong Kar Wai. I just love how they never give you a look at the cheating spouses, and also choose to obscure the stars of the film at times for dramatic effect. If I graded a film entirely on visuals then In the Mood for Love would be a perfect 10. The problem is the story gets in the way.

There are aspects of this plot that do work exceptionally well. I love when Mr. Chow and Mrs. Chan play act things they think their spouses might say. They make those scenes really creative and sometimes trick us into thinking what we are witnessing is real before revealing it is essentially a rehearsal. The difficulty I have with the story is that frankly there isn't enough story in it. I did enjoy the slow development of their relationship, but it started to drag so much that I was constantly at risk of falling asleep. Also the end became really confusing for me. Everything started to fall apart in the final scenes and just about made me want to scream. It was a flash of one scene, then a jump to several years in the future, then it showed another scene, and then made another jump, and so on. If they had just stopped at the moment their relationship ended it would have been more emotionally impacting. The one saving grace of this film is that it has a relatively short runtime so it's not like it drags things out that long. In the Mood for Love does seem like the kind of movie that film snobs will adore. It is an artsy film and ordinarily I'd hate that, but there's just enough good that I didn't really mind watching it.

Edit: Forgot, but had to add how oppressively repetitive the music is in this film. About the 27th time they played the same musical cue leading into a scene, I started to scream. By the 40th time I was laughing. Just AWFUL! A varied score could have really added to this film emotionally.