In the Mood for Love, is Wong Kar-wai’s movement into a new paradigm for film while taking from the visual awe of classic cinema. He moves away from the distractions of complex dialogue and intricate stories. Instead, the film evokes a mood, feelings of longing and a sense of restrained passion. We are enveloped into the characters’ lives by a visual rhetoric that becomes more important, perhaps, than the narrative.
Kar-wai uses the intensity of the film’s cinematography to emphasize the symbolism within the film, rather than relying on its narrative. The beautiful red curtain billowing in the wind is a powerful image, a symbol of perversity. It signifies the repressed love, restrained passion, by our two stars. It shows the separation of two destined lovers by the red curtain of their perverse marriages to someone else (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red, under Eastern and African traditions). The flowing curtain thus becomes the visual emphasis of a sense of romantic longing between our two characters. The film makes us constantly long for something to happen, some outburst of sexual passion that we are used to in romantic Hollywood films, but it never does.
The slow motion scenes that are scattered within the film are part of Kar-wai’s revisionist approach of “the romance film.” These scenes highlight Maggie’s beauty, while at the same time their slowness emphasizes a sense of longing. We become entranced every single time she walks down each step, getting closer and closer to… nothing. Perhaps the most powerful image in the entire film is when the two characters pass a glance to each other going opposite ways on this staircase. The entire film is embodied in this one shot, all the sense of longing, restraint, repression, and regret. The ultimate perversity of their association as neighbors and their marriages is that these conventions prevent them from stopping their lives to answer any questions to love, to take more than a glance.
Nicely done, Bradley. I like the focus on the scene of their passing on the stair. Yes, it does seem like the entire film is an elaboration of this momentary attraction. Obviously, the attraction is deeper than this, but the impulse itself is the kernel, in a sense, of everything.
ReplyDelete