In the Mood for Love, a Lush Yet Spare Melodrama; Alex Winter’s Fever

Though his
characters’ feelings are complex and sometimes opaque, his style is brazen,
showy. He switches film stocks, whips the camera around, shifts into slow and
fast motion to draw out a feeling, stages whole sequences as dialogue-free music
videos; you can’t help being aware of the storyteller’s hand because
it’s always gripping the top of your head and swiveling it in whatever
direction he thinks you should look. He jacks up your adrenaline level from
frame one and keeps it there. Even wordless, music-free scenes where the camera
is nailed to the floor somehow feel show-offy, as if he’s saying, "Now
watch me be quiet–didn’t think I could do it, did you?" He’s
not always on the top of his game; for every two good ideas, there’s one
that backfires or just lies there on the screen like a drugged-out vamp begging
for attention. And yet, inexplicably, when you watch Wong’s films, you
don’t feel as though you’re being jerked around for no good reason.
He lets his actors act, and he sincerely cares about his characters. They’re
people to him, not pawns, even though the worlds he constructs often treats
them as pawns.

With In
the Mood for Love, a lush yet spare melodrama set in early 1960s Hong Kong,
you can clearly see Wong building a body of work in the way that a serious novelist
builds a body of work. By this stage of his career, his home video distributor,
Kino, could probably release his last three or four movies in a boxed set, with
a title like Love for Sale. His theme is the romantic ideal and the real-world
obstacles that prevent real people from achieving it. Like his other movies–most
notably Chungking Express and Happy Together–this one has
a couple of good-looking yet touchingly ordinary lovers at its center: Mr. Chow
(Tony Leung), a married journalist, and Mrs. Chan (Maggie Cheung), a married
secretary.

They rent rooms
next door to each other in a crowded boarding house. Their landlords and their
landlords’ families play extended games of mahjongg, which necessitates
opening doors that separate the two apartments–and the symbolic doors that
separate Chow and Chan. They’re powerfully attracted to each other, but
they flirt the way cool people flirt–with tremendous control and attention
to the rules of etiquette. The sexual protocol of middle-class, pre-sexual-revolution
Hong Kong serves as an additional constraint; adultery happens here, just as
it happens everywhere, and everyone knows it; Mrs. Chan even makes dinner reservations
for her boss and his mistress without passing judgment. Still, a dignified,
independent young professional doesn’t gossip about adultery, doesn’t
encourage it and certainly doesn’t indulge in it.

The film is
about an act of adultery that’s more emotional than physical. Mrs. Chan
barely sees her importer husband, who’s always out of the country on business.
Mr. Chow rarely sees his wife because–well, she always has some cockamamie
excuse. It takes a while–probably too long a while–for them to discover
that their spouses are having an affair. But rather than causing them to fall
directly into bed, the revelation prompts introspection, hesitancy and quite
a few uncomfortable dinners. Neither Chan nor Chow is much of a talker; the
director treats them primarily as educated, classy yet inarticulate vessels
of desire. He feasts on their beauty–droll, reactive Leung in his sharp
suits, cigarette smoldering; prim, guitar-backed Cheung in her high-necked,
sleeveless, Audrey Hepburn-style dresses. In the scene where they pass each
other in the stairwell of a noodle shop and have to twist to avoid colliding
with each other, I gasped–not because of the image’s sexual energy
(the cinematography, by longtime Wong collaborator Christopher Doyle, shimmers
with coiled carnal heat), but out of fear that these two fine pieces of living
sculpture might be damaged.

In the Mood
for Love is the perfect title for this story, because it describes a state
of emotional preparation that doesn’t necessarily guarantee action. Then
again, perhaps "story" is too concrete a word. To paraphrase the description
of Peter Fonda’s character in The Limey, this film doesn’t
really have a story as much as a vibe. The relative absence of dialogue, the
reserved nature of two main characters, the frequent substitution of music montages
for dramatic exchanges, the genuinely baffling and pretentious ending, all underline
the extremely elliptical style Wong has chosen for this feature. In fact, In
the Mood for Love is so elliptical that at times it’s frustrating;
there are several points during the movie where you find yourself wishing for
more nouns and verbs, and asking yourself questions that Wong isn’t prepared
to answer because he doesn’t make question-answering movies. Questions
like, "What do these two people see in each other? Is it merely chemical
attraction, or the attraction of geographical proximity?"

The elliptical
style doesn’t just keep character information to a minimum; it forcibly–and
therefore unfairly–prevents moral judgments from being considered. To give
just one obvious example, we never see the faces of Chow and Chan’s spouses;
when they interact with the hero and heroine, we usually hear a disembodied
voice from somewhere offscreen. It’s like a grown-up, sexualized version
of Peanuts. One could be charitable and say that Wong is just trying
to tell an old story of cheating spouses in a reasonably fresh way; but it seems
more likely that he’s trying to enforce sympathy for his two beautiful
leads by preventing us from seeing their spouses as people.

As is always
the case with this director, the film’s faults and virtues are intertwined,
at times fused, and you have to either accept and embrace the whole package
or be condemned to 90 minutes of coughing, watch-glancing and eye-rolling. Wong
falls into that subclass of contemporary directors whose works are as much about
movies (and the director’s love of moviemaking) as they are about plot,
characterization or theme. On the fine end of the scale, that subclass includes
Martin Scorsese, the Coen brothers and Brian DePalma (when they’re honoring
and improving their material instead of smugly riffing on it). On the more problematic
end, you have directors like Spike Lee, Quentin Tarantino, Wes Anderson (Rushmore),
Kathryn Bigelow (Strange Days), Paul Thomas Anderson (Boogie Nights),
John Woo and, on the lowest rungs, the Madison Avenue/MTV brats like Michael
Bay (Armageddon) and Antoine Fuqua (The Replacement Killers) who
are so concerned with paying homage to their favorite movies, and buffing every
frame to a ready-for-prime-time sheen, that they overlook narrative sense, spatial
logic and the fact that their characters have the depth and charm of audio-animatronic
puppets. The great-grandfather of all these directors is, of course, Jean-Luc
Godard, who has spent his entire career turning movies into playful theoretical
experiments; for better or worse, that tradition has gone beyond provocation,
becoming received wisdom.

In a wonderful
review of In the Mood for Love published by The Independent of
London, Gilbert Adair described the aforementioned school of directors as a
deeply troublesome breed. They are, he wrote, artists who don’t create
images based on the world, but images based on images of the world. "The
films they make tend to be peculiarly appealing to the kind of fanatical buffs
whose secret craving is to enter the screen and become participants in, not
mere spectators of, the action; the kind of buffs who actually wish the world
were a movie." There are days when I fit this definition; I saw In the
Mood for Love on one of those days, which explains as well as anything why
I enjoyed it. A different kind of viewer in a different frame of mind–a
viewer who prefers movies that are about life, rather than movies that reimagine
life as movies–will find nothing of interest here.

His latest,
about a disturbed young painter (Henry Thomas) who fears his tenement apartment
building may house a murderer, is much darker and more serious, yet unmistakably
pop. The deep-green and dark gray color scheme suggests a Franz Kafka story
illustrated by Edward Hopper; but the story line fits squarely into the proud
tradition of "Is the hero crazy or isn’t he?" movies.

As with Panic,
another fine, small movie, you don’t go to Fever hoping to see big
production values; you go to see a superficially familiar story told in an unexpected,
sometimes very successful way–and to see talented actors stretch themselves.
Thomas is one of them. As Nick the painter, the emotionally damaged son of a
rich Brooklyn Heights family, he seems too young somehow, even though he’s
just about the right age. Yet his unaffected performance, showcased in nearly
every scene, grounds this highly stylized movie in psychological reality. He
truly does seem like a man who could be losing his mind without knowing it.
He gets fine backup from Bill Duke as a detective investigating the murder of
Nick’s landlord, Teri Hatcher as Nick’s gallery owner sister and Scottish
actor David O’Hara as a nihilist dockhand neighbor who lives beneath the
authorities’ radar.

The film is
ultimately too emotionally slight to support the arsenal of technical devices
laid on top of it, but as a virtuoso display of how big ambitions can be realized
on a tiny budget, Fever is damned hard to beat. Joe DeSalvo’s photography,
Mark Ricker’s production design, Azan Kung’s costumes and Coll Anderson’s
sound effects work in eerily perfect accord, creating a world that seems to
be breaking down in fear, paranoia and disgust as we watch. It was said of Kafka
that only a man who lived in apartments his whole life could have written stories
so uniquely disturbing. Winter has clearly done his share of renting.