Image copyright Block 2 Pictures
Calling upon the connection between memory and nostalgia Wong Kar-Wai replays a bygone love affair in his seventh film, In the Mood for Love. When one recalls a past, perhaps momentous, event in life, certain neurons fire in the brain creating fireworks of emotional processing resulting in nostalgia. The longing for a time long gone, is perhaps the brain’s most powerful emotion, capable of skewing memory’s fact to fiction. The film offers the viewer an escape into the hazy archives of the main character’s minds. Wong illustrates emotion’s influence on memory with the immutable severance between the film’s two lovers, Mrs. Chan and Mr. Chow, in a scene nearing the film’s final moments.
The scene in question picks up as Mr. Chow and Mrs. Chan consider if their relationship could be more than platonic. They are frightened to stoop to the level of their spouses, yet are victims to the allure of desire. Within this scene, frame-within-a-frame cinematography is implemented to create the illusion of peering in on a memory. In addition, the construction of their living spaces conduct their interactions while resembling memory’s unreliability. Subsequently, the use of the color green to represent the stark truths of reality juxtaposed with red’s romanticization illustrates a separation between sensibility and fantasy. All of which are ultimately used to establish memory as a mercurial mentor of the mind, more susceptible to emotion than to fact.
Reflecting on past ventures can sometimes feel like a personalized movie is playing back inside the mind. Building on this concept, Wong implements powerful frame-within-a-frame cinematography throughout the film. At the scene’s start, a door frame fills the right third, veiling Mrs. Chan from the audience. Not only is the viewer forced outside of the image, the viewer is also removed from Mrs. Chan’s emotions. In this way, the audience must guess what Mrs. Chan feels in this moment, overdramatized by the nature of the human mind—what the eyes cannot see tends to be imagined worse than it is realistically. In addition, Mr. Chow is framed once by the camera and again by the window in his hotel room. The repetition of these frames isolate what is changeable and what is not. The indisputable events that occurred within the structure of these frames cannot change, however Mr. Chow’s inner perception of them can. What feels like a blossoming and forbidden love to Mr. Chow, is actually a rather perverse fantasy, created to offset the inevitable truth that the two are just as corrupt as their adulterous spouses. The realization that their love can only prevail within the framework of their minds comes as a heartbreaking reminder to the audience of what can happen when the fantasy one creates only serves to prolong the confrontation of a stinging truth.
When retelling a story from memory, unimportant details go by the wayside leaving a nondescript narrative which does not represent the whole truth. Acutely aware of this concept, Wong Kar-Wai developed the living and working spaces of the two leads to dictate their encounters while also reflecting the limits of their own memories. The physical location of the clock in Mrs. Chan’s work is never revealed yet it still feels as if it looms over her. What is significant about the clock is not where it rested in relation to her office, but that it was a constant reminder that it was only a matter of time before her reality became a distant memory. Furthermore, their relationship grows within the confines of a nondescript hotel room. It’s location, physical makeup, and other residents remain unknown except for the hallway leading to the room and the interior of the room itself. These continuous missing details indicate the recalling of a memory. The hotel room itself dictates the couple’s intimacy, since they can only be vulnerable with each other behind a closed door. The non-place demeanor paints the setting as less of a hotel and more as a metaphorical location inside the minds of the two leads. Their minds are where the nostalgia of their love affair can live on untouched by the judgemental gaze of the outside world. The lack of detail in both the workplace and the hotel room help illustrate memory’s changeable state, reliant upon the emotional attachment to these locations rather than the objective events that occured within the buildings.
Color has long been used throughout movies to evoke an emotional response from the audience. Throughout In the Mood for Love, the use of the color green is often associated with Mrs. Chan. Within this scene, Mrs. Chan’s phone and workplace have a murky and unpleasant green hue. The color green represents the inner beliefs and societal pressures which tie Mrs. Chan to the real world. She cannot escape the rules which trap her with an unfulfilling job, which tie her to her unfaithful husband, and which crumble her self-assurance under the hot breath of gossip during a neighbor’s game of mahjong. As Mrs. Chan sits alone in the hotel room her green qipao dress serves as a stark contrast to its red interior. Mrs. Chan could not run to Singapore with Mr. Chow because her strict adherence to regulation always kept one foot in reality. Conversely, their hotel room, which fosters the secrets of her and Mr. Chow’s love, is drenched in red from the walls to the curtains to the bed to the floor. Red is closely associated with desire and passion, and is worn by brides to symbolize luck, happiness and love in Chinese culture. Mr. Chow is tied closer to the color red throughout the film as a man who falls victim to the persuasive powers of his own fantasy. Red represents emotion’s ability to skew objectivity, however, green served as a reminder that these delusions were not sensible. The contrast of the two colors throughout the scene represents how their deep love for each other can alter the memories of their relationship, but the reality of their unlawful affair kept them from pursuing the relationship further.
Nostalgia’s compelling and forlorn qualities shadowed In the Mood for Love with a wistful fog of an unconsummated love. In the end, the two leads kept missing each other not because of bad timing, but because they were more comfortable loving the imagined versions of each other rather than the real people. These imagined versions of themselves developed through reminiscing on their past together, a time when they found each other in the midst of immense tragedy and loneliness. At the scene’s conclusion, the viewer is left to ponder if their romance could have survived outside of their shared betrayal, or if it was nothing more than a product of memory. Wong Kar-Wai’s In the Mood for Love beautifully depicts a memory as a motion picture, leaving one reminiscing on the past, out of focus, melancholic and altogether dream-like.
Skyler Sulby is an undergraduate student in the Film & Media Studies program at University of Southern California.