The Mood For Love

The confines of true love can be heartbreaking as is. Maybe, you and your love interest have a close knit social circle, or your neighborhood or tribe are extremely small, or you’re both married and you shouldn’t be in love with each others. “In the Mood for Love” has love become confined within the idea, that they should not be seen in love due to their current commitment to their spouse, especially in a 1960s conservative Hong Kong. Wong Car-wai constructs this fantasy world surrounding the two main lovers to tell a story about forbidden love and the fight to not fully express that love no matter how strong the urge is. He takes us on a journey of self-reflection into our own urge to express love. The film’s contrasting treatment of the lover’s
He uses slow motion sporadically throughout the film as well as jumps straight through time without looking back. The slow motion in contrast with the conservative culture throughout the film seems like a statement in of itself. The culture seems to have a rigid structure to it that can probably miss instances of their taboo love. Chow and Su have moments of bubbling desire at the beginning of the film when they cross paths without much more contact then a simple hello. Wong’s use of slow motion in this instance makes the viewer speculate about the underlying tension between the two. Wong also used slow motion to imply that the state of the character at focus has their mind in another place. When Su agrees to a night for vegetable won-ton, we experience a slow-motion track in shot towards Su. This separates her from everyone else in the frame and makes her the focus and attention of the frame, even if her mind is somewhere else. We know her mind is somewhere else, according to Wong, because his next cut after looking at Su through a window, is a shot of Chow enjoying work. Wong forces us as the viewer to go into the minds of the lovers and creates a sense for the viewer that either Chow or Su, are thinking of each