Sightlines · how to watch
How to watch In the Mood for Love
2000 · Wong Kar-Wai · In the Mood for Love on Sightlines
5 things to watch and listen for on a first viewing, without spoilers, and 4 more once you have seen it. Each names something you can see or hear, the pattern it belongs to, and what noticing it gives you. How these keys work.
On a first viewing
Watch how often something blocks your view of them. (camera)
Wong shoots through doorframes, beaded curtains, window bars and the shoulders of strangers. The two of them are almost never granted a clean, unobstructed space to occupy together.
Payoff: The architecture does the policing, so social restraint reaches you as something physically standing in the way.
Count Su Li-zhen's dresses and notice they keep changing. (setting)
William Chang puts Maggie Cheung in more than twenty cheongsams: floral, then geometric, then muted. The cut of the dress never changes. Only the pattern does, scene to scene.
Payoff: The high collar and fitted body hold her in place, so the costume is wearing the rule she will not break. In the reading: the gest. A posture that carries a whole social rule on the body is what the reading calls a gest.
Listen for the same waltz returning on the staircase. (sound)
Shigeru Umebayashi's Yumeji's Theme, written for another film entirely, comes in each time she goes down for noodles. Nat King Cole sings of longing in Spanish, a language neither character speaks.
Payoff: The music arrives from somewhere else, which keeps even the film's feeling at one remove from the people in it.
Watch the hands that keep not touching. (performance)
Tony Leung and Maggie Cheung play the entire romance in microgesture: a lowered gaze, a pause before a sentence, an arm adjusted so that it will not brush. Nothing is ever declared.
Payoff: The feeling stays on the face and never converts into an act, so you read the film off almost nothing. In the reading: icon of quality (qualisign). A look held for its own sake, with nowhere to discharge, is what the reading calls a qualisign.
Notice how scenes end before they reach a conclusion. (cutting)
William Chang cuts into the middle of conversations and leaves before they resolve. Dated intertitles skip weeks without warning. The staircase comes back with a different dress and a different hour.
Payoff: Time here folds rather than running forward, so you feel duration instead of following a plot.
Once you have seen it
Watch the scenes where they rehearse the other couple. (structure)
He plays her husband. She plays his wife. They practice a confrontation neither of them will ever have, and she breaks down for real inside the exercise until he reminds her it is not.
Payoff: The rehearsal builds the feeling it claims to be imitating, so the practice quietly becomes the thing itself. In the reading: crystalline description. A scene that constructs its object and then quietly takes its place is what the reading calls a crystalline description.
Watch the slow motion on the noodle run. (camera)
The world moves at speed while Su hovers inside her own time, the cheongsam flowing at a quarter pace. Wong shoots these passages on a glide rather than handheld.
Payoff: The moment is being remembered while it happens, so the film holds a past and a present in one shot.
Look at the door that stays shut all film. (setting)
The spouses are never shown. You get voices, a handbag, a tie, a phone call. Wong keeps the affair entirely off screen and builds the picture out of the space around it.
Payoff: The film gives you the negative space, so what you are watching is the shape of something absent.
Watch Chow at the wall in Angkor Wat. (structure)
He whispers into a crack in the stone and seals it over with mud. The film finishes far from the corridor, in a place old enough to keep a secret with nowhere else to go.
Payoff: What was never said gets buried instead of spoken, which is the only close this much restraint could reach.
Carry this in: Watch the doorways and the corridor. The building never gives these two a clean space to share.