In the Mood for Love - J. Miley

I feel odd about writing about In the Mood for Love, because none of the shots struck me. I want to be analytic and say something profound here, but In the Mood for Love just didn’t seem that amazing to me. For one, the relationship between Mr. Chow and Mrs. Chan seems to come out of nowhere. Thinking about it, I can’t find the point where the “affair” started. It’s just there one night when they’re standing in the street and Mr. Chow say something to the effect of it not mattering who said they had feelings first. Also, I don’t understand why the setting was so important. The story, however deeply rooted in the culture, is a universal one, one of the humanistic need for companionship. The situation that Mrs. Chan and Mr. Chow find themselves in is not unique to their time or culture. In addition to that, the movie is so claustrophobic in its environments that it could have taken place anywhere. We don’t see much of the outside world and thus it could have taken place in New York, England, Dubai or San Francisco. Also, I felt like the movie just dragged. I know that it was only 98 minutes, but there are so many long takes that it felt bloated. My greatest grievance with this picture, though, is that the bit about whispering your secrets into the knot of a tree is left until the very end. That’s so immeasurably great and interesting that it feels like a crime to have not mentioned it for so long. Finally, I just wasn’t satisfied with the ending. It’s not that I want the characters to get together (I mean, I did but I knew they wouldn’t). But I felt like the shot where Mr. Chow stops for a second in front of Mrs. Chan’s is so poignant that if the film ended there, it would have been far more satisfying form the shear disappointment you would feel for the character. Because, at this point, the audience has watch the two characters for an hour and a half gets so close to consummating this affair but never doing so that we don’t need to be shown that Mr. Chow doesn’t knock on the door. We already know that he won’t. Because that’s the nature of the film, the nature of the character, the nature of the human situation of needing others but never building up the guts to take that irreversible step and knock on the door.