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In the Mood for Culture:
Enigmatization and the Culture of Disappearance in In the Mood for Love
York University Film Studies Essay

Wong Kar-Wai’s In the Mood for Love(2000) is at once both a departure for the director, and also a textbook example of the director’s themes and narrative and visual style. At first glance, the film may seem less post-modern than his other films in its lack of MTV-style cutting and narrative jumping, but looking deeper one can see how Wong, like in his other films, is mining past Chinese and American culture and creating a web of references with which to frame his narrative. The narrative, though perhaps more restraint than his other films (such as Chunking Express [1995] and Ashes of Time[1994]) in the fact that in concentrates on only two protagonists, nonetheless deals with the same set-up: the lives of random characters are shown to intercut, meld, and melt into one another’s. As always, there is a sense of time being spent, the pressure of a deadline; as Wong’s films express anxiety over Hong Kong’s political issues, such as the 1997 deadline of Hong Kong’s return to Chinese rule and its subsequent “disappearing” culture.

Ackbar Abbas, in his book, “Hong Kong: Culture and the Politics of Disappearance”, writes of Hong Kong’s “culture of disappearance” (Abbas 17). Abbas asserts that the reunification of Hong Kong with Mainland China in 1997 created an “open-ended” situation that is still being dealt with (Abbas 22). The question of what will happen to Hong Kong’s capitalist and American influenced culture when it is returned to the Communist mainland creates a “hyper-anticipatory and predictive” society—a society that has birthed a cinema in which the elusive nature of Hong Kong’s culture is itself the topic (Abbas 22).

Hong Kong is the setting for In the Mood for Love. Spanning the years 1962-1966, the film tells the story of a newspaper editor, Chow (Tony Leung Chiu Wai), and a secretary for an export firm, Li-zhen (Maggie Cheung). Moving to Hong Kong from Shanghai, the two occupy adjacent apartments with their respective spouses, renting rooms from landlords whom are close friends with each other. The friendship between their landlords leads to Chow and Li-zhen often running into each other during friendly mahjong games, and together they discover that their spouses are having an affair with each other, leading Chow and Li-zhen to develop a romantic relationship.

Abbas writes of the “slipperiness” and “elusiveness” of Hong Kong cultural space, and this is visually represented within (and outside of) Wong’s framing of In the Mood for Love. Characters wander and drift from rooms to hallways, indoors to outdoors, speaking to each other from opposite sides of doors and entranceways. The space here is elusive in its relations—it takes us awhile to orient ourselves within the space of the apartment building.

Cramped and intimate, Wong often has the space interfere with the framing. Thus, characters are obscured behind doorways, ledges and walls. Often, Wong’s camera mimics the cramped spatial relations of the building with close-ups that often “lose” the characters, as they move in and out of the static frame. This framing creates characters that, much like the Hong Kong culture they are being introduced to, are “slippery” and “elusive”. Even when characters are stationary, sitting at a dinner table (such as the scene in the restaurant during Chow and Li-zhen’s first night out) or standing and talking, the camera slowly pans to the side or drifts upwards, losing hold of the characters—giving visuals to Abbas’ “culture of disappearance” (Abbas 17). The title itself emphasizes the “mood” for love, connoting an absence of physical presence. During moments of passing desire, as Cho and Li-zhen pass each other on a staircase, or brush by each other during a mahjong game, the images onscreen melt to a sumptuous slow-motion. During these intense instances of chance and desire, the images slow as if the camera is trying to desperately hold onto these fleeting, slippery, moments.

This visual aesthetic of “slipperiness” and “disappearance”, and its relation to Hong Kong society, is in keeping with the emotional and mental states of the characters. Both Chow and Li-zhen feel for each other, but they keep their distance, whether for reasons of fidelity, ethics, or societal mores. Their feelings slip and slide back and forth between hurt and love, infidelity and loyalty, contempt and love towards their spouses, friendship and love between each other.

They are foreigners here in Hong Kong, each having emigrated from Shanghai, but the cramped space of the Hong Kong housing system also thrusts them into a relationship they would not have experienced anywhere else. Hong Kong is itself as much of a plot impetus as any character, and just as elusive. Indeed, almost every character in the film is either from somewhere else or going somewhere else, moving into the building or going away on business. Hong Kong seems less a home than a transition; people come and go as they see fit.

The temporal setting gives Wong the opportunity to explore Hong Kong retrospectively. Since it is the early sixties, it is a time before the Cultural Revolution and before the Joint Declaration of 1984 announcing the 1997 reunification. Wong is thus able to look at a space and culture that is disappearing before its inhabitants even know that it was disappearing. The film has a sheen of nostalgia, or as Abbas points out, an air of “love at last sight” (Abbas 23). Just as the characters fall more in love the more they realize they can never be together, the film constructs a Hong Kong that is more beautiful for the fact that it will one day no longer exist. That the characters are ignorant of this fact makes them innocent—a defining quality necessary for nostalgia.

The innocence of the characters mirrors the historical innocence of Hong Kong. Its fate often decided by outside forces (as Abbas shows us), Hong Kong passed from Mainland China to the British in the 19th century, to Japanese occupation after World War II, influenced by communist Chinese immigrants after 1949, and then molded by American and corporate forces as the city became a capitalist center for production and trade. Hong Kong’s historical journey has been one of “shock and radical changes” (Abbas 26).

Much like Hong Kong, Chow and Li-zhen’s story has been shaped by outside forces and radical change. Chow originally tries to move into the same apartment as Li-zhen, but upon finding that it is already occupied he almost leaves in search of another building. The landlady, however, Mrs. Suen (Rebecca Pan), tells Chow that her next-door neighbour’s (The Koos) son has just moved, thus they have a room available. So, Chow moves into the room next to the one he originally wanted to rent. This spatial proximity gives way to the affair between Chow’s wife and Li-zhen’s husband, the shocking revelation of which, in turn, gives way to their own special relationship. Much of what they go through is defined by chance (emphasized by the slow-motion sequences where they pass each other in happenstance), as throughout the movie it seems as though they refuse to give in to the situations fate has presented. Much like Hong Kong itself, Chow and Li-zhen do not ask for what happens to them—they must simply deal with it.

“As if to protect themselves against this series of traumas, Hong Kong people have little memory and no sentiment for the past” (Abbas 26). Chow and Li-zhen also have no sentiment for the past. Instead of mourning their relationships, having discussions about how they met their spouses, or talking about the “good times”, they instead playfully ponder how the affair started. Playacting the role of each other’s spouse, they engage in a game of investigative role-playing. Exploring the situation from their spouse’s point-of-view protects them from the trauma of their own predicament.

Recent immigrants, Chow and Li-zhen from the start of the film show no sentiment for history. They do not share their neighbors’ passion for the traditional game of mahjong. They show no enthusiasm for social rituals, such as gathering at eating. Instead of home-cooking, they both prefer to purchase their food at the local noodle/congee stand—foreshadowing Wong’s “later” (in reference to time of setting, not time of release) protagonists who prefer eating at fast food restaurants and express diners. Their only interest in “historical” tradition comes in their ambition to write a martial arts fantasy serial, showing their shared affinity for a romanticized version of a history that never actually existed. Their relationship being a romance that never exists except posthumously though nostalgic memory, this represents Hong Kong itself as a culture that is not only disappearing, but one that never existed except retrospectively—love at last sight.

As such, Abbas asserts, “stories about Hong Kong always turn[ed] into stories about somewhere else” (Abbas 25). This is also true for In the Mood for Love: Mrs. Suen near the beginning of the movie urges everyone to try “Shanghai cooking”. Also, everyone is impressed by and communicates desire for the newfangled Japanese rice cooker. Li-zhen’s husband is always “working abroad”, bringing back wonderful gadgets and gifts from Japan. Chow inquires to Chan about plane tickets for his friend. Chow, a newspaper writer, would rather write about fiction than fact—of a fantasy world of martial arts heroism. Throughout the story, the film creates a sense of “abroad”, of a state of “away-ness”.

Much as Hong Kong’s story gets turned into a story of somewhere else, Chow and Li-zhen’s story is the story of someone else’s relationship. Their initial courtship is a miming of their spouse’s affair. The story of their relationship is that of their spouses. Not only do they playact at not being themselves, they at one point actively ponder: “I sometimes wonder what I’d be if I hadn’t married…have you ever though of that?” Chow asks Li-zhen. “Maybe happier”, she answers. Even when it comes time for Chow to leave, they rehearse the departure as if it were a game, as if life were something and somewhere other than here. Li-zhen cries and Chow comforts her: “It’s not real”, he tells her. But in keeping with the idea of a “culture of disappearance”, Chow physically disappears, off to the ubiquitous “somewhere else”.

Abbas posits that if Hong Kong cinema is depicting a culture that is always on the brink of disappearance, than its ultimate task is to “construct images out of cliches”. Wong Kar-Wai’s In the Mood for Love is no doubt a film strung together of cliches and references. Linda Chiu-Han Lai, in her essay “Film and Enigmatization: Nostalgia, Nonsense, and Remembering”, asserts that Hong Kong films after the early 1900s were produced with multiple layers of meaning: one for a specific local Chinese audience to enjoy, and another, more general meaning, for the international film audience to enjoy. She called this process of layering “Enigmatization” (Chui-Han Lai 232).

The “general” level of meaning that Chiu-Han speaks of is readily evident in In the Mood for Love. It is the typical tale of boy-meets-girl, boy-loses-girl, with the added twist of did-boy-ever-have-girl-in-the-first-place? As the marketing quotes on the back of the Seville VHS tape say: “A tantalizing…powerful love story!” “Love story beautiful and heart-breaking!” But as we have shown, In the Mood for Love concerns itself with more than just two fateful lovers.

Wong’s deeper level of meaning addresses two privileged audiences: the Chinese community/those with knowledge of Chinese history and pop culture, and fans/followers of Wong Kar-Wai’s previous films. In order to reach and provide meaning for these groups, Wong quotes “popular stereotypes, stock characters, recognizable plot lines, and other conventions from classical Cantonese and Mandarin films”, as well as his own past films (Chiu-Han Lai 232). This is called a “nostalgia film” because it references pop-culture codes of the past, and reconfigures them for the present (Chiu-Han Lai 232).

In terms of referencing his past films, there is first the continuation of visual style. Once again, Wong teams up with cinematographer Christopher Doyle. There are several trademarks: the slow motion shots, the frames filled with cigarette smoke, the repetition of songs as motif, the reoccurring images of clocks. Also, there are the settings and spaces: the food stand, the taxicab, the dank street. These repetitions in style help the viewer quickly recognize theme: deadlines (clocks), loneliness (food stands, taxi cabs), passion (steamy food, smoldering smoke, slow motion).

Wong also casts actors in roles reminiscent of and “quoting” their past roles. Maggie Cheung, playing Li-zhen, is tellingly billed as “The Woman” in Ashes of Time (1994). Also starring in In the Mood for Love is frequent Wong collaborator, Tony Leung Chiu Wai, who plays a cop in Chungking Express (1995), and a blind swordsman in Ashes of Time (among others). What is notable about Leung’s role as Chow in In the Mood for Love is the seeming absence of heroism. Here, he does not play a warrior or protector. But the privileged viewer gets pleasure when finding out that Chow aspires to write a martial arts serial, since it references Leung’s past roles and relates their romanticism to his role in In the Mood for Love. Also, when Chow tells Li-zhen to wait in the rain while he fetches an umbrella for her, the act of protection and chivalry rings much deeper for the privileged viewer.

Several themes and sequences play out that only Wong’s audience will catch on to and re-contextualize. For instance, there are the several scenes where Chow and Li-zhen brush past each other in slow motion. General audiences will take these for moments of mere romantic attraction, but Wong’s privileged viewers receive more pleasure having heard narration and dialogue by characters in Wong’s other movies about intertwining fate, chance meetings, luck, and predetermined destiny.

Also, there are the meetings by the congee stand, which general viewers will view as merely a common meeting place, where characters (Chow and Li-zhen) are connected by what they eat. Frequent Wong viewers, however, understand the connection with scenes in his previous films that take place in fast food stands and late-night diners, and know that Wong is drawing allusions to Hong Kong’s future capitalist/Americanized landscape. It is important that Chow and Li-zhen prefer purchasing their food to making it themselves—their relationship symbolizes that of Hong Kong and it’s connection to Mainland China, so it is metaphorically natural that they would distance themselves from tradition. It is also important that, like Hong Kong, it wasn’t their choice to distance/disappear from “tradition”: Chow’s wife is frequently absent so he has no one to cook for him, Li-zhen’s husband is often away and she doesn’t like cooking for just herself.

Another similar recurring motif is the clock—perhaps Wong’s most famous and ubiquitous symbol. Manifesting the anxiety over what will happen to Hong Kong after the 1997 reunification, Wong’s clocks impose a sense of deadline and finality—of time running out. Most famously, in Chungking Express, Wong’s protagonist collects pineapples that expire on the day he expects him and his ex-girlfriend to reunite, tellingly, in the year 1997. The reunion does not happen, so he eats all of the pineapples. Since In the Mood for Love takes place during the 60s, the implied deadline points not to the reunification, but to the start of the Cultural Revolution. In the last close-up we see of a clock, Chow asks Li-zhen (offscreen): “If there’s an extra ticket, would you go with me?” The answer is not given, and we are later transported to 1966—both the year the film ends with and the year of the start of the Cultural Revolution. Just as 1966 is the year Li-zhen and Chow grow physically apart, it is also the year that Mainland China becomes decidedly more Communist, thus forever growing apart from capitalist Hong Kong.

Wong adds this extra layer of meaning by not only quoting and referring to himself, but also to Hong Kong history and pop culture. Only viewers with knowledge of Hong Kong history and society would understand the above stated importance of the congee stands and clocks. Another example is the film’s constant referencing to “business abroad”. Not only is this the frequent plot device of a husband-who’s-never-home, it is also a reference to the economic and capitalist forces that shape Hong Kong/Li-zhen. Despite the connotations of “cheating” that is carried with Mr. Chan’s “business abroad”, he is nonetheless Li-zhen’s husband. This very fact ensures that Li-zhen and Chow can never be with each other. So too is capitalism so attached to Hong Kong that, while connected to Mainland China, it can really never touch/join it in relationship.

To fully understand In the Mood for Love in all its contexts, one must be aware of the genre Wong is playing with. “Ideal viewers” will enjoy the film because they are familiar with Chinese popular culture and cinema (Chiu-Han Lai 236). Just as Wong used the wuxia swordplay genre for his film Ashes in Time, allowing him to quote stereotypes and themes from that genre and re-contextualize them for his own purposes, Wong uses the wenya pian genre as the basis for In the Mood for Love (www.sensesofcinema.com). If wuxia can be related to Western notions of an “action flick” (though I use the comparison warily, since they are hardly the same thing), then wenya pian can be related to the Western genre of melodrama/romance. Here we have the stock characters and plot of boy-meets-girl, etc., themes of loss and love. The film plays with this genre, but twists it for its own purposes by having Chow and Li-zhen never consummating their relationship in any physical or emotionally-committing sense.

Viewer’s fluent in Chinese language and pop culture would also note that the Mandarin translation of the film’s title is “Hua Yang Nian Hua”: meaning ‘Full Bloom’ or ‘Those Wonderful Varied Years’ (www.sensesofcinema.com). “Full Bloom” is also the name of the song Chow and Li-zhen listen to on the radio while sitting in their adjacent apartments near the end of the film. The Ideal Audience would note the correlation with the film’s Mandarin title, but would also note that “Full Bloom”, as sung by Zhou Xuan in the film, was also the popular theme song (by the same artist) of a 1947 Hong Kong Mandarin film (www.sensesofcinema.com). Cantonese being the dominant language of current Hong Kong pop-music, the Mandarin “Full Bloom” further adds a sense of nostalgia to the film and to Chow/Li-zhen’s relationship, referring to the past both in its relation to past cinema culture, but also to the more traditional Chinese dialect.

The film ends with one of a few literary title cards that interject the movie: “He remembers those vanished years…As though looking though a dusty window pane…the past is something he could see, but not touch…And everything he sees is blurred and indistinct”. Audiences well versed in Wong as a director and in Chinese culture would know that these title cards are excerpts from a 1972 novella, Intersection (or Duidao), by Chinese author, Liu Yichang. Much like Chow and Li-zhen (and Wong himself), Yichang is a Shanghai émigré living in Hong Kong. Like Chow, he is a writer and journalist. And like Wong, with In the Mood for Love, Yichang’s novella tells the story of two random people whose lives intersect and interject with each other through random occurrences.

But the passages from Yichang’s novella relate not only to Chow and Li-zhen, but, as we have been saying all along, to Hong Kong as a whole. “Those vanished years” pertaining to Hong Kong’s past that can never be regained. The past as “something he could see, but not touch”, “blurred and indistinct”, speaking to what Abbas called Hong Kong’s “culture of disappearance”. By looking at the titles of his stories, one can see how Yichang’s prose fictions, Wong’s films, and Hong Kong’s culture of disappearance are all related: “Intersection”, “Wrong Number”, and “Indecision”, are all stories found in Yichang’s anthology, The Cockroach and Other Stories.

The final sequence of the film has Chow in Cambodia, 1966. Like he earlier described to his friend Ping, Chow embellishes in the old tradition of whispering your secrets into a tree and burying the hole with mud. Noteworthy here is that Chow does not whisper his secrets into a tree, but rather the column of a large temple ruin. Since the setting is Cambodia, we can assume that these are the ruins of Ankor Wat—a long destroyed temple that is now a Cambodian landmark.

In the previous sequence we are shown news footage of General De Gaulle. The first time such footage is shown in the film, this sequence signifies the politicization of Chow and Li-zhen’s lives. Chow responds by retreating to a ruin of the past, whispering his confessions while a solitary orange-garbed monk watches over him. Thus completes the cycle of nostalgia—as Hong Kong and Mainland China move into a new era, Chow retreats to a landmark to bury his past: his relationship with Li-zhen, and metaphorically, the relationship between Mainland China and Hong Kong. From this point on, after the Cultural Revolution, Hong Kong will forever be “blurred and indistinct”, a culture of disappearance.

I titled this essay “In the Mood for Culture” not to be clever, but to touch upon the suggestiveness of the film’s title. The word “mood” is itself suggestive, rather than concrete. The mood for love is not love, just as Chow and Li-zhen never have a traditional romance. The mood for culture is not culture, just as Hong Kong’s culture is one of it’s own disappearance. In the same vein, or rather, “mood”, Wong constructs his cultural artifacts by collecting references to genres, cliches, history, pop culture, and unifying them auteur-istically with his past films, thus enigmatizing—creating culture by bringing together and bonding those who recognize the culture of disappearance within his films.

Perhaps the best illustration of this is found within film itself. Chow sits in his office, thinking about Li-zhen. The repetitive musical motif playing the background, Chow, like other characters in Wong’s other films, smokes a cigarette in slow motion. The smoke drifts upwards, recalling an early shot of steam rising from a pot of traditional Chinese noodles—thus tying in the present with the past. But as the smoke drifts upwards, so does the camera, loosing grip of its hold on Chow. The smoke is enough though—its smoldering dance evocative of Chow’s passion. The smoke at once related to and suggestive of Chow’s mood, Wong’s films and audience, and the city’s history and culture, it drifts and dissipates into the light.



Works Cited

Abbas, Ackbar. Hong Kong: Culture and the Politics of Disappearance. University of Minnisota Press. 1997.

Chiu-han Lai, Linda. “Film and Enigmatizaion: Nostalgia, Nonsense, and Remembering.” At Full Speed: Hong Kong Cinema in a Borderless World. Yau, Esther C. M. (ed.). University of Minnesota Press. 2001.

Teo, Stephen. “Wong Kar-Wai’s In the Mood for Love: Like a Ritual Transfigured in Time”. http://www.sensesofcinema.com/contents/01/13/mood.html. World Wide Web. May 1, 2003.

Jef.