Review of In the Mood for Love, directed by Wong Kar-Wai

In the Mood for Love has been one of those movies I’ve constantly revisited throughout the years.

I began watching Wong Kar-wai movies when I was in high school, and in college I had the chance to take a Contemporary Chinese Cinema course as a part of my honors program, and while we did not watch this movie specifically, we still watched a couple of his other movies like Happy Together and Chungking Express.

The first time I watched In the Mood for Love was a year after that, in the middle of COVID, when I purchased a Criterion subscription and watched movies to fill my time.

Anyways, I was thinking about this movie for the first time in a couple of months.

I had some spare time, so I saw it as the chance to go watch in for what would be the fourth or fifth time (it wasn’t until I started this blog that I began to track what I watch, and that was a reason why I ended up creating this blog too).

My library always has a DVD copy available, so I picked it up and decided to make a cute beef noodle soup situation to eat while watching the film. It was perfect!

Here’s my review.

Two neighbors fall in love slowly with each other after having something in common.

This Wong movie takes place in the sixties, before Hong Kong was given back to China and was a part of the United Kingdom. The male lead is Chow Mo-wan, who works at a journalist.

He rents a room with his spouse in a specific apartment complex, but there’s someone else who also is moving in adjacent to them: Su Li-zhen, who is moving in with her partner.

Both of them are often left home alone because of the fact their partners work, and when they don’t get along with the mahjong neighbors and the landlady, who seems to constantly be there, they spend a lot of time by themselves.

In the beginning, they just know each other as neighbors. They don’t interact only unless they have to, and they don’t know of the fact they are spending time alone in their respective apartments.

However, when they realize their partners are having an affair, and specifically with each other, Chow and Su decide to smash their brains together to figure out what happened here. They want to figure out the root cause of the affair.

So they begin spending more time together. Chow invites Su into his home to help out with the martial arts serial he’s working on, and the neighbors start to gossip once they spot that these two are spending time together.

He rents a hotel room where they can work, and they eventually admit they have feelings for each other.

There are a lot of sensual scenes between the two, but not in the traditional way you’re expecting when I write that. Lots of tension as they sit in a cab or walk through the streets together.

However, Chow is offered a job in Singapore. He asks Su to come with him, but when she gets at the hotel, she realizes she came too late.

The year passes, and Chow is in Singapore. Su comes to Singapore and goes to his apartment, calling him. She says nothing when he picks up, and Chow realizes it was her much too late after spotting a cigarette stain with lipstick on his ashtray.

More time goes by. Su asks their landlord if her apartment is available to rent, and Chow, when coming home to visit, asks if she’s there. The new owner tells him someone else lives there.

The film ends with Chow during the Vietnam War visiting Angkor Wat, and he says something into the hollow wall before filling the hole.

Overall Thoughts

In the Mood for Love is such a gorgeous film to watch. There’s a reason it’s considered one of the best movies ever created, and a lot of it lies in the subtext and the technical elements that go into making such a movie.

Lots of color is being played with here, and there’s something special in the way that Leung and Cheung interact in this movie—there isn’t a ton of dialogue or overt romance being expressed here, but sometimes that is the best kind.

Go and watch it if you haven’t already—you’re in for such a treat. I think this is why I constantly think about it throughout the years, and so many other people do, too.

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