Screened at the Frida • 2nd Viewing
“You notice things if you pay attention.”
For which we rarely do.
I am being judged. When I want to love, I will be judged; there’s no avoiding that. If I want to love again, I can try, but only in a desperation to win back what is no longer mine, to ignore confrontation of reality and bliss in temporary imagination. You look at me and you see the truth, through the frames you seem to handle the neutral perspective while I abuse the radical one. This is the strike of love, or more so, the strike of failure to genuinely love as the spontaneous human beings we are; all of us are doing this and witnessing this everyday dammit, and it f**king irks how it’s impossible to stop, and impossible to remember or apply this piece of wisdom throughout our romantic experiences. It seems that memories and knowledge only like to skirmish one another, leaving our grasp on objectivity in bittersweet tangles.
A tragic acolyte between the experiments of recreation in Alain Resnais’ Hiroshima Mon Amour (1959), the elongated richness of cinematic foreplay in Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo (1958), and the surreal gentleness of Wong Kar-wai’s own unique storytelling birthed firsthand before our eyes and ears, In the Mood for Love serves as a breakthrough representation of the bewildering application of how time functions in the name of love. New romance seems to almost instantaneously provoke change through incomprehensible instinct, without cause or rationality, thought or contemplation, it is a purely emotional, psychological feeling of attachment that breaks us from routine until we fall into it once again and travel in search of a new means of saving; perhaps through love again. But love doesn’t stop their nor does Kar-wai make it out to seem so set-and-stone; it’s more so worked as a playing ground for affairs to be eventually sequenced in either shadows for some or plain view to others, ones that dance or tremble with either fatigue or desperation, longing to recapture yet hopelessly not having any of the actual information to do so in the first place, as relationships are just far too strenuously complex to decode especially when looking back on them and less so when living in their current moments where the mind is usually numbed of usage. The heart of In the Mood for Love feasts within this arena of love and the collaboration between pre and post-love, reconciling that they all sort of exist in a same fragmentation of time, each deducing what should’ve or could’ve happened in frustratingly ambiguous ways.
This movie has some of the strongest composition and color I’ve ever seen used in such a confined setting too; I couldn’t not mention that in my review, and in future viewings I’ll probably expand on it a little more. In the Mood for Love should be the dictionary definition of a perfectly shot (bottle?) movie! Kar-wai better stop f**kin’ with my heart or he’ll be getting even more perfect scores from me.
Verdict: A+
Wong Kar-wai Ranked, My All-Time Favorite Movies
“In the Mood for Love” is now available to stream on The Criterion Channel and HBO Max.
Burning the Celluloid 
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