In the Mood for Love (Wong Kar Wai, 2000, Hong Kong, 98 minutes)

Maybe I've said this before, but one of the advantages of starting this course with a week or two of silent movies is that we're reminded that film is primarily a visual medium, and that often a work's most subtle, nuanced, and ambiguous meanings, its most interesting implications, are the products of its visual language, as opposed to the more literary business of its dialogue, the more musical business (broadly figured) of its diegetic and nondiegetic soundscapes, the more theatrical business of its acting, etc. Maybe not so much as we used to anymore, alas, but for a while there, we paid a sum of money—sometimes more, sometimes less—to sit in the dark for a couple of hours to watch a little gallery of photographs fly by at 24 frames per second, so fast that we forgot each image could be a little masterpiece of framing, depth, design, light, shadow, color. Maybe we remember for a moment, during that extra beat or two of a long take, just before we wonder why we're still looking at what we're looking at and why don't they cut to the next shot already. David Lynch famously disparaged the practice of watching films on smart phones, and didn't he have a point? Small screens are for stories. For chatter and types and clichés. The big screen, the silver screen, is about painting. It's the difference between the museum and the penny arcade, where film started, before it grew some big, strange wings. Wong Kar Wai's subtle, elliptical melodrama In the Mood for Love reminds us of this not-so-distant past, reminds us that we're looking at pictures, and that we should take some deep, almost illicit, pleasure in that, and that there's maybe nothing better. The film teeters on an edge between the sublime and the absurd, between an almost static visual ecstasy and tedium. It seduces us with the slow drag of its beautiful stars, the flip and powerful richness of Nat King Cole singing "Quizás, Quizás, Quizás." It teases us with the idea that something might actually happen, maybe the love we've been put in the mood for, and then we cut to a billowing red curtain or a rising cloud of cigarette smoke or some other viscerally felt signifier of longing and frustration. Whatever it is we're waiting for, it's never going to happen. And then it's starting all over again: the staircase, the rain, the soup. What I'd like you to do for this last post is reflect on In the Mood for Love's visual storytelling. What one or two images struck you as being the most powerful and why? What fragments of narrative did these images contain and what details indicated that narrative? Do you see any connections between Wong's style and the silent cinema, or is this something else, some new paradigm for filmic language? As always, looking forward to your comments. Too bad they're last ones!