In The Mood For Love
The mood for love is abject depression, it seems. A lot is Lost in Translation, but what is above the surface is catnip for arthouse types. Foreigners talking about love, without an happy ending? Sign me up.
A couple of people married with others meet when they both move into neighbouring rooms in a slummy apartment building. Their situation is mirrored in more than one axis: she’s being dumped in a crap apartment by her “loving” husband, while he is moving beyond his means, giving his wife a better life than they can afford.
This makes their marriages unhappy in their own way. Her husband is always away on trips, his presence is only noticed with gadgets from Japan. His wife quickly moves away to her mother’s house, and eventually his co-workers see her out and about with other men. Her husband’s infidelities are kept away from their view.
Even so, they seem to want to get together, but they don’t. It seems this reluctance is not just the social pressure, they are both passive on their conjugal predicaments, infidelities happen to them. They seem fearful of taking the first step.
The other partners never show their faces even, this is their story above all. At first, they are just doing The Rehearsal for the actual talk. Eventually, the guy finds the perfect excuse for spending time with her: he is writing some wuxia stories, and needs a competent editor, who better than a big fan of the genre.
They keep this charade for a long time, but she doesn’t put out, he moves to Singapore with the comic relief co-worker. She might know more than she lets on, this is clarified in the epilogue.
Said epilogue follows her again, a couple years later. She comes back to the same house with her kid, as the old landlady is packing up to go to America. She does live there with her kid, and the dates match up: she might as well be pregnant when she had that fling. He also returns to his old house after some years. The original tenants also fled said political upheaval to Filipines, but the guy that lives there tells her the neighbour is away now. He just missed her, but it seems he understood what went on.
After this un-meeting, he goes all the way to Angkor Wat to fulfil one of his previous semi-rants: choose a random rock, whisper his secret into it, then fill it with mud, so it is forgotten forever.
I had watched this over 10 years ago, and what was still seared into my mind were the dresses, the matching visuals, and the music.
This is my place for ramblings about sequences of images that exploit the human visual limitation know as persistence of vision.