“In the Mood for Love”’s New 4K Restoration is More Tragic as It Replaces Romance with Ambivalence
“In the Mood for Love”’s New 4K Restoration is More Tragic as It Replaces Romance with Ambivalence
In the Mood For Love is the film I’ve seen the most. With each viewing new elements of the film are revealed to me, along with a growing recognition of how the manner in which I understand the world has changed over time. I’ve also had the lucky opportunity to see this in many disparate scenarios and through different mediums: alone as a highschooler in my childhood bedroom, downloaded with a poor quality torrent on a mediocre laptop screen, on a living room TV in my second week of college with a new friend, the occasion of which I only retrospectively realized probably constituted a date, with a DVD copy projected in a classroom of freshmen film school students, on a crystal clear DCP and also in 35mm film in fully packed movie theaters, and finally now again with this 4K Digital Restoration at QCinema 2022. I know this movie like the back of my hand, and yet this new restoration unfolded more for me than ever before.
The significance of the new restorations supervised by Wong Kar-Wai is that they act less like traditional restorations and more like remixes on the original materials. This is because he has decided to change the color palettes of each of the films for their renewed distribution in 4K. More so than for movies from other filmmakers, the color stories in WKW’s movies play a very crucial role in the experience of seeing them, so much so that the mere replication of some of his films’ palettes are sufficient for many to pinpoint which films are being referenced. A lot of this has to do with the distinctive style of frequent collaborator cinematographer Christopher Doyle. To alter the palettes of the films can therefore radically change the way in which one processes these films, or at least it did for me with this screening.
The most radical alteration done in this new restoration is that they muted its most iconic color, red, and increased the prevalence of greener hues. For anyone who’s seen previous versions of the film this is a jarring change. So much of the film’s iconography features its use of luscious reds, from its rose-tinted poster to the pop of color of Maggie Cheung’s cheongsam. The effect of desaturating its primary color is profound.
Red is the color of romance. One thinks of love, eroticism, warmth, of connection, embrace, the secret sanctity of a kiss. With the original colors this film feels drenched with an air of possibility, of the two protagonists being pulled towards each other by the gods of love. There’s more of an emphasis on the spaces between them, on what is and isn’t said, and on what could become if either were willing to be straightforward. In my first times watching the film I interpreted it as a romance between two strangers whose personal love-lives had fallen apart. It was about two people caught in a heartbreaking position, and finding solace in one another before realizing that their new attachments to each other were untenable— because they refused to become like their cheating spouses. The first few times I saw the film I defiantly argued against friends that they couldn’t have slept together. I only realized in retrospect that that was more of a projection for my ideals of innocence than anything else. I would have rather thought that they kept true to their goals than that they had become what they’d despised. But my views on this have changed radically since then. This new color alteration solidified those views.
Green to me is the color of ambivalence. It sits somewhere between the ravishing warmth of red and the calculated cool of blue. It’s not love, it’s not indifference, it’s somewhere in the middle. Without the predominant lens of romance washing over the film I paid less attention to their connection to one another and instead noticed their internal struggles. Previously I saw the two characters as lost, lonely, and in need of love. With each succeeding meeting I built up a growing emotional relationship between them. However, in this viewing I was more aware of the unspoken trauma that each had to deal with on their own. They just found out that the loves of their lives are betraying them. What I used to interpret as a developing and budding romance with all the blanketed reds was now replaced with the recognition of two individual people doing their best to process personal trauma. Maggie Cheung’s oft-wandering eyes read to me more as in thought about her relationship with herself and her husband, than it did about Tony Leung in front of her. It completely changed the way I understood their relationship with one another.
De-emphasizing the eroticism and romance in the film most changed my interpretation of the film’s climax. Understanding cinema through the lens of turning points isn’t necessarily the best way to do so, but it’s common to wonder where things most crucially shift before the film’s final act. For this viewing I realized that the most climactic moment in the film is this interaction:
MC: I didn’t think you’d fall in love with me.
TL: I didn’t either. I was only curious to know how it started. Now I know. Feelings can creep up just like that.
It’s an iconic scene, which made my new realizations about it feel more revelatory for me. I didn’t think how I felt about this could shift so much. Originally I treated this scene as more of a summary of the film’s themes. The tragedy is that although they both had no intentions of cheating, love between them still emerged and therefore made their continued connection feel immoral. He was willing to leave his wife for her, but she wasn’t, and so the best way for things to pan out was for them to separate from each other. It’s tragic because their mutual feelings for each other cannot be reciprocated, although they may have grown to prefer each other’s company than towards their absent spouses. Perhaps in another life they’d live happily together, but in this one things were not fated.
Without all the reds dominating the scene, however, my new reading of it made me feel that what this interaction most shows is their differences in how they’ve processed their trauma. By expressing surprise that Leung’s character fell in love with her, she exposes that she hasn’t fully processed her husband’s cheating. Up to this point in the film she’s still seen pondering about why her husband would cheat on her and practices the ways in which she’d confront him when she’s ready to. She hasn’t come to the profound realization that Leung’s character already has: that feelings can just creep up. By phrasing the sentiment in this way, he’s separated the act from its actor. Feelings just creep up. He isn’t only talking about himself, but his own realization about what likely happened with his own wife. He has disconnected the blame towards her and more stoically comes to the conclusion that perhaps things just happen. She isn’t to blame. Feelings can creep up. And with this he shows that he’s moved past the trauma of his wife’s cheating and already allowed himself to feel again for someone new. But Cheung’s character is still stuck in her own head, perhaps blaming herself, her husband, or even the world around them. Her ambivalence to the notion that he’d fall in love with her exposed to me that she hasn’t been paying attention to him throughout the film, at least not as much as he’d been towards her. And soon after this scene we see her break down in tears for the first time. She’s finally understood.
But by this point in the film she’s already made her decision to stay with her husband and he’s already set to fly off to Singapore. As she breaks down in this scene all I could think of is that she must have in that moment realized all she’s failed to notice prior. And this is the deeper tragedy: she wasn’t fully there with someone who had grown to truly love her. And now time is ticking before he finally leaves. A few scenes later we see her on a rainy night in a taxi leaning on his shoulder saying she doesn’t want to go home that night. The following shot opens with them sitting in separate rooms the next morning, each melancholically leaning against the same wall while the film’s title song plays over the radio. Not the American standard “In the Mood for Love” but the Chinese title’s “花樣年華”, or literally translated, “The Blossoming Golden Years'', by the legendary singer Zhou Xuan. The feelings evoked by each title are significantly different. The English title highlights the possibility of love between the two, that each would slowly be “in the mood for love” for one another. But in Chinese the title evokes more of a sense of a glorious lost past only alive in reminiscence. The best of their days together has come to past. And from this point in the film forward they proceed on separate paths, never to cross again. For this reason it seems more natural to me for the night to have ended in a sexual encounter: a first and last goodbye before never seeing each other again.
Each time I see In the Mood for Love new revelations come to me. They’re thoughts that probably say more about myself than they do for the film as an objective work. But they’re also the realizations that I think make this medium its best. So much of the beauty in art comes from the different ways it can reflect back on us ourselves and the ways in which we process the world around us. It’s a worthy endeavor to make art so infinitely open and interpretable. This movie among very few others has had that impact on me over the last decade. And in many ways it’s shaped who I am today. I invite everyone to see both versions of the film and come together with friends afterwards to talk through how each has differently interpreted its story. Learn more about yourselves and those most close to you. Foster human connection.
The newly restored version of Wong Kar-Wai’s classic “In the Mood for Love” is screening in QCinema 2022 on November 20 at Gateway Mall and November 22 at Power Plant Mall. It is also available for purchase at the Criterion Collection website.
Author’s Note: An interesting historical note for mega-fans of this film that I believe is often overlooked is that there is major significance to the locations and years used to mark the passage of time here. Tony Leung’s character decides to leave British-occupied Hong Kong for Singapore in 1963, the same year that Singapore officially became independent of the British Empire after 144 years of imperial rule. It’s no coincidence that his decision to be free of his failing marriage and her decision to remain stuck mirrors the colonial relationship between both countries during this time. In 1963 Singapore merged with Malaysia and in 1965 officially became its own separate country. The end of the film is briefly set in 1966 in Hong Kong and Cambodia. The two protagonists’ paths nearly cross in Hong Kong but fate has different plans for them. And in Siem Reap we see news reports of a peaceful meeting between Prince Sihanouk and General de Gaulle from France— the leaders of Cambodia and its former colonizer France. It’s notable that this is just the calm before the storm in both countries. In 1967, anti-British riots would dominate Hong Kong, while in Cambodia, it marked the start of a decade-long Civil War that ended with violent Khmer Rouge rule. On the other hand, independent Singapore would ascend over the next decades.
