Critics reviews

It’s intoxicating stuff and, by the end, a tearjerking portrait of what could have been.

In the Mood for Love is pregnant with emotion, though rife with repressed feelings and impulses... Like all [of Wong's] other films, [it] is a stylistic tour de force, one that wordlessly emotes and wears its emotions on its literal silk sleeves.

Although In the Mood for Love isn’t in the mood for action, it dazzles with everything but. As mood goes, this reticent, remembered romance is quietly erotic, probing all those ”almost” spaces in an almost love affair. As cinematography goes, it’s luscious.

A film that ripples with textures and sensual energy as the camera becomes preoccupied with small gestures: the rattling of mahjong tiles, the way fabric bends, hands leaning on a tabletop. It is a film where absence is infused with beauty, poetry and romance.

The film is pregnant with the overwhelming feeling of infatuation, executed in a lusciousness that recalls something from a dream. But for every restraint there is a counterpoint in excess: Maggie Cheung's many gorgeous dresses are as flamboyant as they are confining; the musical score is both pitch-perfect and overwhelming, familiar and foreign; the cinematography is so rich and meticulous that its multitude of color is evocative of Douglas Sirk's melodramas.

IN THE MOOD FOR LOVE (2000, 98 min, 35mm) represents Wong at his most deliberate extreme but also serves as a quite palatable introduction.

What seems conspicuously "indistinct" about In the Mood for Love—the pervasive sense of simplicity that governs the drama, from the convenience of its setup to the vagueness of what proceeds from it—becomes, in retrospect, a sophisticated expression of the fundamentally abstract quality of memory and reflection, not so much a paean to past love as to past love remembered in the present.

Like the other Hong Kong directors of his time, Wong imbues everything the West regards as film cliché with a new glamour and fervor; but whereas in the cinema of John Woo and Tsui Hark this romanticism lurks behind an operatic violence, in Wong's films love is never merely a distraction or a motivation or a fleeting promise of redemption but the dominating conflict.

Wong Kar-Wai’s In the Mood for Love is a master-class in how to move the camera. Every shot is full of interest and mystery, the frame crammed with details that threaten to overwhelm the viewer.

What I hadn't fully realized about In the Mood for Love [on the first viewing] was the extent to which Wong fringes his devastating beauty with self-critique. Glamorizing the past is another feeble attempt at controlling what can't be controlled, yet it's a human impulse that's as reliable as heartbreak. I can think of no movie that better or more elegantly embodies this futility than In the Mood for Love. By its very design it only cuts deeper as it ages—and as I age.

By the end, Wong denies us the satisfaction of resolution, but in sharing his mastery of cinema and his gift for conveying mood, desire and vivid emotions, he's more than generous.

Wong Kar-wai’s In the Mood for Love is a ravishing evocation of a unconsummated romantic relationship put through an emotional and cultural ringer.