Some films are about love. In the Mood for Love is about its negative space — the longing that lives in everything two people decide not to do, and the way that decision can become the truest thing about a life.
Hong Kong, 1962. Mr. Chow and Mrs. Chan are neighbors who slowly realize their respective spouses are having an affair with each other. Wounded, they begin to meet — to rehearse confrontations that will never come, to recreate the betrayal in order to understand it, and, inevitably, to fall into the very feeling they have promised each other they will never indulge. “We won’t be like them,” they insist, and the entire tragedy is contained in how badly they want to be.
Wong Kar-wai and cinematographer Christopher Doyle turn restraint into the most sensual register imaginable. Maggie Cheung glides through narrow corridors in an armory of cheongsams, each one a held breath; Tony Leung smolders in a doorway, all melancholy stillness. The camera lingers, drifts in slow motion, catches them at the edges of frames, behind curtains, in the rain — always almost touching, never quite. Shigeru Umebayashi’s waltzing theme returns like a memory you can’t stop replaying.
This is cinema as pure mood and texture: the steam off a bowl of noodles, the red of a hotel hallway, a hand that hovers and withdraws. Plot is almost an impertinence. What Wong is after is the ache of the unconsummated, the way propriety and timing and cowardice conspire to keep the right people apart, and how that absence can outlast any affair.
The ending — a secret whispered into a hole in the ruins of Angkor Wat, sealed forever — is among the most beautiful in all of film. Twenty-five years on, In the Mood for Love hasn’t dated a frame. It remains the definitive movie about the road not taken, and about how the most consuming love of your life can be the one that never officially began.
Twenty-five years on, Wong Kar-wai’s masterpiece of restraint and longing has only sharpened. The great film about the love that never happens.