In the Mood for Love

This high rating to In the Mood for Love (2000) should not come as any surprise to anyone, since this film is not just necessary to an understanding of viewing Wong’s later 2046, but is itself more nuanced and invested in the possibility of expression rather than foreclosure. Moreover, whereas the latter film examines the issue of suppressed desire circling in upon itself, this film is more thematically vital because it analyzes a desire that still has the possibility to be consummated and not simply become pathological, as 2046 does.

In the Mood for Love finds two cuckolded spouses in the 1960’s, Chow Mo Wan (Tony Leung) and Su Li-Zhen Chan (Maggie Cheung), working to disassociate the affair their respective partners are carrying on with each other by acting out and fictionalizing the affair via role play with each other. This reversal lets the cuckolded spouses secure control of their lives as they alone animate the actions of their partners. This act, however, finds complication when Chow finds himself attracted to Su Li-Zhen and discovers that the attraction is not shared. The emotional damage sustained at the hands of the unfaithful partners leads each to a place of avoidance.

Moreover, the residue of Su Li-Zhen is a stand-in for Chow’s adulterous wife. He enacts a form of transference between Su Li-Zhen and his wife, whereupon his attraction to Su is negotiated through the initial love he received from his wife, but is elevated by the additional virtue that Su possesses, in that Su rejects the possibility of their ever descending to the same unfaithfulness that his wife demonstrated. This is the very essence of Chow’s paradox: he loves Su precisely because she will not love him. Instead, Chow unconsciously introjects the heartbreak that his wife caused him and substitutes Su Li-Zhen for her. With this disassociation, Chow denies any psychological suffering that his wife caused him, since she is inscripted through the melancholic gaze that Chow thrusts onto his remembrances of Su. As such, Chow still denies himself any possibility for recovery by not being honest with himself, but it is honesty and integrity that suffers, becoming barricaded as a secret that promises to haunt him ever after.

In the Mood for Love: 10/10