Two neighbors move into adjoining Hong Kong apartments in 1962 on the same day, their furniture briefly mixed up by the movers.
Chow Mo-wan and Su Li-zhen are both married to spouses who are frequently away on business, and both slowly realize those spouses are having an affair with each other. Wong Kar-wai builds the film around what the couple choose not to do about it: they meet for noodles, rehearse imagined confrontations, and edge toward feeling without ever quite naming it.
Wong shot without a finished script, working from a loose premise and writing scenes the night before filming. The production stretched to roughly fifteen months. Cinematographer Christopher Doyle, whose tight framing and slow-motion corridor passages became the film's visual signature, left before the shoot wrapped; Mark Lee Ping-bing completed the cinematography in his style. Maggie Cheung wore more than twenty cheongsams over the course of the film, their changing patterns marking time without a single date on screen.
The film works by accumulation rather than event: repeated staircases, a recurring cue on the soundtrack, the same red curtain, each pass changing what the audience notices. Tony Leung's performance carries whole scenes on posture and the angle of a cigarette, and it won him Best Actor at the 2000 Cannes Film Festival, the first Hong Kong actor to take that prize. Two decades on, the film is routinely named among the defining works of Hong Kong cinema.
In the Mood for Love has had a long home on the Criterion Channel, which carries the restored Criterion Collection edition. Check current listings before sitting down, since a title's home platform shifts. At 99 minutes it rewards a quiet, focused watch rather than background viewing.
