It is one of my favourite films, and one of the best to have come out of China in recent times.
I’m not much of a romantic in fact, you could say that I’m an anti-Romantic, protesting flowers, fancy dinners, and rehearsed pleas of love. Fake romance. our culture is rife with commercialized ways to express love, which makes it even more nauseating to begin with.
In the Mood for Love, though this is a real love story, with no predictable outcome. It makes my icy heart go a flutter.
On the surface, it’s about two people living in Hong Kong in the 60s, running into each other, twisting and winding their lives around each other. Simple things, like bowls of noodles and cigarettes seem so pleasurable taken slowly, and as romance fills the screen, you can’t help but slide along.
Director Wong Kar-Wai recreated the look and feel of Hong Kong in the 60s, down to the last detail the saturated colours, the overwhelming darkness, the fashions. You could almost reach your hand through the screen and touch Maggie Cheung’s shapely rear.
Mon Dieu, Maggie Cheung! I’ve never been so enraptured by an on-screen actresss before dressed in traditional Chinese dresses, Qipao, Maggie Cheung fills the entire screen with her presence.
Often, the scene is just her walking, looking pensive and sad, her luscious hips swaying as she walks down the hall. She moves through the film like an ethereal reincarnation of Nefertiti, ‘the perfect woman’.
I’m actually just THINKING about the movie.
Hey, the male lead is no skank either. Tony Leung is unbelievably charming and smooth in this film Robert DeNiro called him ‘China’s answer to Clark Gable’, and it fits.
Together, Maggie Cheung and Tony Leung walk through a dance of sorts, wandering around each other. The plot isn’t fed to us it has to be extracted from events in the story, and for that, it’s satisfying. As the two actors are drawn close to each other, we see the burning lust behind their facades, behind their cool exteriors.
There’s no on-screen sex in this film. There’s no flesh. No token nudity. And it’s riveting how much sexual energy penetrates this film.
My libido is boiling, just THINKING about this film.
I say: Watch it on Wednesday night at 10 on SBS, or rent it on video. Then do as I do: close your eyes and imagine your hands running down Maggie Cheung’s waist to her hips. Yeah, like that.
Watch it for: Maggie Cheung wears many, many Chinese dresses in this film it’s a device used to show the passage of time, but us, the red-blooded audience can love it for what it is.
Also, Tony Leung smokes cigarettes and eats noodles like an Asian Sean Connery. How can he be so cool? When I smoke, I cough and wheeze, and when I eat noodles, I get soup all over my face.
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