Two Octobers ago, freshly heartbroken, I saw In the Mood for Love for the third time. Honestly, I was in pretty bad shape. My first real relationship had just ended with a whimper. There hadn’t been any thrown dishes or fuck yous. Love had simply been there, constant, and then I looked again and it was gone. Or that’s how it felt. Presence, then whoosh.
I’d run away to England for the fall, officially to get some writing done, but mostly I was just sad and wanting to be sad anywhere but at home. My focus, care, and energy had dissolved into a soup of loneliness. My stomach was tight, my head was fuzzy, I was crying in bed most nights; it was ordinary grief, but it was mine.
That week, though, at the beginning of my trip, visiting with new friends, I would be myself again, I’d decided. I would be interested in things. The BFI had a great Wong Kar Wai series playing, so I grabbed my friends and hauled them along. I’d seen In the Mood for Love twice in a decade, but I felt like I’d seen it 50 times. Wong’s masterpiece is everywhere, part of the Instagram canon, its chic, sensuous style disassembled and used for parts in music videos, fashion ads, moodboards, Moonlight. I’d always thought of it mostly on those terms, really—swaying hips and amazing wallpaper.
But I was excited—my friends hadn’t seen it. If they liked it, then, by airtight logic, it would mean they liked me. I wanted the validation, and the chance for some secondhand awe, maybe.
The lights went down.
IT IS A RESTLESS MOMENT–
Hong Kong, 1962. Mrs. Chan (Maggie Cheung Man Yuk) and Mr. Chow (Tony Leung Chiu Wai) are new neighbors in a bustling set of tenement apartments. They go to work, they go to eat, they pass each other in the tight hall, on the stairs. Their unseen spouses loom at the edges of the story, and a vague melancholy looms, too. Are the spouses having an affair? Mrs. Chan and Mr. Chow look for answers in each other; they draw closer, slowly. Pain and desire tangle. A procession of floral dresses, silky tracking shots, dum-da-da dum-da-da. Beautiful, familiar—I was mostly concerned with my friends. My eyes kept darting over. Were they feeling the right things? One of them seemed to be falling asleep…
Then, about halfway through, something changed.
Mrs. Chan is hovering near a rowdy game of mahjong. But really she’s somewhere else. She drifts over to a window. We cut outside. The camera rises slowly, examining her as she stares into the middle distance. Shigeru Umebayashi’s iconic waltz plays for the zillionth time. She sips from a glass of water, then pauses, glass held to her lips. The camera stops moving. Her eyes shift slightly, her expression softens. Then she frowns, lowers the glass, and turns away.
That’s it. It isn’t the most impressive or meaningful shot. I barely remembered it from previous viewings. One luxurious silence in a movie packed full of them. But my attention had suddenly shifted. I leaned forward in my seat. How was it that Mrs. Chan seemed to be looking through time more than through space? and how was it she seemed to be looking with my eyes, too, through my time, into my grief?
Recognition thrummed, and I felt in my chest a strong heartbeat, as Nat King Cole croons elsewhere, then a sigh.
My friends faded. The guy in the squeaky seat in the row behind faded. From then until the end, I was transfixed. The step-printing, the tableaux, the heartshocks of color, the tingly clink of a spoon, a curl of smoke, a push-in on a handrail waiting for a hand—all of it had become urgent. Every shot churned with a sadness that hadn’t been there before, a sadness I recognized; it was like mine, but in the way that an ocean is like a mud puddle.
As I watched, I felt my small, unremarkable grief flooding open. Its muck dissolved, its edges washed away. What had been low and murky in me now seemed clear, huge, worth feeling. I don’t mean the pain was gone. The opposite, actually: I could hardly breathe. But I could see for the first time how deep the loss was, or could be, deeper than a single breakup; how it was really a loss that went beyond my life, that bound me to Mrs. Chan, alone at her window, that ran out past us both.
This is Wong’s real accomplishment. His lavish attention to the detail of the film’s setting—the vanished Shanghainese enclave in Hong Kong, its food and fashions—and his feverish, achingly physical style become tools to smudge the boundaries between the intimate and the vast. He’s depicting the impermanence not only of individual passions but of an entire time and place; he is, actually, twining the two into a single loss, a single, continuous, borderless ache. And in the film's final minutes, as newsreel footage runs, as the camera tracks through the ruins of Angkor Wat, Wong reaches even further, tying time’s theft of love to the passage of centuries and civilizations. This isn’t cheap grandeur, it’s pure grace; it dignifies our private losses and desires, grants them scope.
Expanding my loss had made me bigger, too. I hadn’t realized I’d felt so small.
The final title card flashed onscreen:
THAT ERA HAS PASSED. NOTHING THAT BELONGS TO IT EXISTS ANYMORE—
I massaged my face, squishing my mouth into an o. I stared up at the screen, almost in disbelief at what I’d seen and how I was feeling. I must have looked like a cartoon—bug-eyed, teary, a mess of gay little sighs and nods. My friend rubbed my back reassuringly. I just felt so blissfully, amazingly sad. And I felt relieved.
It was a lot like what I’d experienced three years earlier when, sitting on a toilet at LAX after a week of whirlwind romance, it had hit me that I’d finally fallen in love, really fallen in love. I remember pressing my forehead to the stall door, feeling my bangs tickle my eyelashes, and exhaling slowly. It was the relief of new feeling. What had seemed like a wall had just been a mirage. A few steps forward and it had melted away. There was more.
—
This was the most intense example of a pleasure I’ve only started to recognize: Revisiting familiar art not for its comfort and dependability but for the exact opposite reason: To be surprised. To have the rug pulled out from under me.
If I’d seen In the Mood for Love for the first time that night, in some other life, equally heartbroken, I don’t think it would’ve had the same effect. That I’d seen it before and not felt this way—that dissonance made the new feeling way more complex, deepened it, layered it with noisy ghosts. The smug sixteen-year-old, starry-eyed at style and design. The early-twenty-whatever-year-old, slipping lightly into the film’s melancholy, like he’s trying on clothes. The three of us were in that seat together, our perspectives overlapping, jostling. The movie’s upended familiarity had given me a chance to perceive change in myself, to be surprised by myself, one of life’s best feelings.
I want to show changes through the unchanged, Wong explained in an interview. The music is repeating all the time, and the way we see certain spaces, the office, the clock, the corridors, it’s always the same. This lattice of repetitions—the unchanged—becomes the structure that allows for change: the waltz again, the stairs again, the smoke, the alleyway, the phone, the clock again, again—is it the same week? six months later?—and meanwhile desire is swelling, its pressures becoming unbearable.
Wong’s line is close to how I’ve described my experience that night to friends, variations on the pretty lame the movie hadn’t changed, but I had, you know? But maybe that’s the function familiar art can serve in a life. It can be the unchanged, a lattice to grow on.
So I’ll see In the Mood for Love again in two years, twenty years, and it’ll be even deeper, stranger, finer. Or maybe it’ll be dead and cold, and I’ll look back at the feeling it caused in me with curiosity. Whatever I feel, it will be a way to better see myself across time, to see the shape of my life, and to remember, as Pina Bausch put it, that repetition is not repetition. It’s a reason to seek out new art, too, and embrace misunderstanding, part-understanding, unfinished feeling, and even pretend feeling—to watch things now so that I can watch them again later. It makes me feel like a ghost haunting my future self. You think you know how you feel? Boo!
—
As we left the theater, I couldn’t really explain my mushy reaction to my friends. In the black cab, though, streetlights gliding by, I think mostly I was high on hope, hope that any old thing can suddenly be infused with new beauty, that our lives with their limitations can be sites of limitless renewal. Love doesn’t just sit there, like a stone, Ursula K. Le Guin wrote, it has to be made, like bread; remade all the time, made new. Sitting forward in that lumpy cinema seat, at the edge of myself, I had felt a love remade, made larger by loss, made new.
Am I hopeless? Mrs. Chan asks.
Not really, Mr. Chow says, smiling softly.
