I think the movie is slightly hampered by its coda, but is otherwise quite flawless. And I happen to hold opposite views: I found Days of Being Wild enjoyable, but disjointed, Fallen Angels to be disjointed, but watchable, and Happy Together to be somewhat of a mess, punctuated by greatness.
The thing about WKW is that his movies are uniformly stylized, so you have no doubt whether or not it's a Wong film--but his style is ill-suited to complex narratives, at least in my opinion. In the Mood for Love is one of the best movies ever made precisely because it focuses on his strengths: emotion, theme, and rhythm, while downplaying his weaknesses: narrative and conclusions (well, not the last one). He does give up a lot of his experimental side, and there are only just as many memorable scenes from ITMFL as his other movies, but it is the only Wong film whose individual scenes add up to a meticulous and devastating whole. If you didn't enjoy it, please try again, as I have a long list of reasons why I love this film and would like to understand what flaws people could truly pin on it.
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Bodelious
13 years ago
I watched this movie when it first came out in 2001. I watched it again 10 years later, and the emotion that I felt is still intense now. I love the subtlety of it. There's love story that's full of passion, and then there's WKW's love story that is full of subtle emotion. At this age of time, we are so used to love being so expressive, but I can imagine love then in the 60s, in a culture that is so reserve, that this is a movie that shows us just that. It is the lack of actions that makes you want it so much more, that it is slowly burning inside you. I agree with someone who said the last scene, when he told his secret, very heartbreaking for me.
I've watched every WKW's movies, I love Chungking Express the most until I watched ITMFL, truly a masterpiece for me.
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Errington_92
12 years ago
The mood is there, the slow motions, the successive cuts on a single scene, the dramatic love story, the music, the color, the dancing camera, the voyeur camera... And yet when the ending came, although I could recognize its beauty, I was unable to feel it inside.
Quite surprised how all this would make you feel empty, I had the opposite feeling to all these elements. The ambiguity and technical style of In The Mood For Love when the ending came concluded why its such a powerful piece.
"I'd rather be hated for who I am, than loved for who I am not".
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