Movie Review – In the Mood for Love (Where does the failure of love come from?)

I watched the movie In the Mood for Love. Let’s find out if the love between Mrs. Chen and Chow is to blame.

 

Mrs. Chen and Chow move into the same apartment on the same day and first meet in a narrow hallway. At the beginning of the film, their interactions are limited to waving hello to each other as they live next door to each other, but things change when Chow tells Chen that a friend of his saw Chen’s wife with another man, and they begin to see each other frequently at a food stall where they both eat noodles for dinner because Chen’s wife often works overtime and Chen’s husband travels for business. At the heart of all the changes is an affair between the two spouses (Mrs. Chen’s husband and Chow’s wife). Chow’s wife has the same bag as Mrs. Chen (which Mrs. Chen bought for her husband on a business trip because they don’t sell them in Hong Kong), and Chow has the same tie as Mrs. Chen’s husband (a gift from Chow’s wife), and in this complicated situation, Chow and Mrs. Chen have a face-to-face conversation in which they confirm the reality of their spouses’ infidelity. They then perform the play in three acts. The first play is in the past, in which they each take on the role of the other’s spouse as they try to figure out how the affair might have started. The second play is from the present day, where they order each other’s favorite food to infer what their spouses might be doing now that they are both in Japan. In the second play, they order each other’s favorite food to infer what their spouses are doing in the present. In the third play, they leave their happy present behind and rehearse their separation from a future perspective. In the play, Mrs. Chen rehearses her separation from her husband by telling him that she knows of your infidelity, but the rehearsal is actually a rehearsal of their (Mrs. Chen and Chow’s) separation. When Chow asks her if she will leave with him, Mrs. Chen hesitates, and in the end, they part ways.

 

 

The whole process is so beautifully portrayed by Mijiangxian that the movie has been praised by many critics as a beautiful love story, but it’s a little bit bittersweet to call it a beautiful love story because it’s an affair nonetheless. However, there’s something about their love that makes you want to root for them. Their love is given a bit of legitimacy by the fact that their spouse cheated on them first, that we don’t see them actively engaging in sexual contact, and that it ends in a lot of back and forth. However, to be fair, their spouses’ infidelity is a matter of speculation and nothing is ever established for certain, so it’s possible that all of these suspicions are just that, suspicions, and the lack of sexual contact in the film suggests that their love was just as physical as any other affair, as Mrs. Chen tells Chow on the way home in a taxi that she doesn’t want to go in tonight. This makes it clear that their love is not just beautiful to look at, but morally unjustifiable. However, if you put aside the legalities and focus on their relationship, it’s a heartwarming story.
As the subtitle of the film’s very first scene sums up their love story, “It’s an awkward moment, the woman shyly bows her head and gives the man a chance to approach her, but he doesn’t have the courage to do so, so she turns and leaves.” Like when Chow plays Mrs. Chen’s husband in the first act, and Mrs. Chen replies, “I don’t want to go in today,” in a moment long after the fact when it’s unclear whether it was an act or the truth, or when Chow’s suggestion that she and Chen leave for Singapore is met with Mrs. Chen saying, “If you have one more ticket, will you take me with you?” in the room they share after Chow has left. Just as Mrs. Chen returned years later to the place where she was living at the time, but Chow never bothered to knock on the door of the room next door, and just as they hesitated at countless crucial moments, their love became a thing of the past that could only be tucked away in the gaps. This story of mixed fortunes is easy to relate to because we’ve all missed out on something because we hesitated, and there are many moments of regret and unknowing moments of love. Thus, their love is anonymized and further glorified by being overlaid with our own past love stories in Mrs. Chen and Chow’s love story. As the subtitle at the end of the film says, “The past years are like a dusty glass window, you can see them but you can’t touch them, so he still misses the past years If he can break the dusty glass window, he might be able to go back to the time of the past years.” Perhaps the beautiful moments of those years are all the more striking because they are untouchable. Of course, breaking the window might allow them to go back, but destroying something inside is certainly not an easy decision, and we all know that, so we don’t expect Mrs. Chen and Chow to fall in love. Rather, it may be the most beautiful thing to stay in the fantasy with regret. Reality destroys and fades many things. Their love began as a play and ended as a play. Later in the film, when Mrs. Chen calls Chow, the light opera music that plays in the background without any words, gives the impression that their story is literally like a play. Just as everyone feels like a protagonist in an artistic narrative at the moment of love and parting, their love story ended in a play and thus became a ‘narrative’. In this way, we can see that love is not only dramatic but also fleeting, as it is filled with many regrets and inconsistencies caused by the timing of fate. Thus, through the movie, we can look back on our past love and understand that it is because we have seen the end that we are able to place the narrative within ourselves as a beautiful moment of completion.