On "In the Mood for Love" and Poetry

In the Mood for Love

Elizabeth Garcia

            Reading Devotional Cinema and watching Kar Wai Wong’s In the Mood for Love have made me think more about the poetry of cinema. This poetry is not about literary devices and symbols to analyze or deconstruct. The cinema’s poetry, for Nathaniel Dorsky, is about alchemic mixing, “the rightness of all these shifts of space, the weight of light and darkness are the meaning, the aliveness, and the beauty of the film. All is present, all is functioning.” (40) I would like to talk about a film’s poetic balance, its capturing of a “succession of visual events that are sparing enough, and at the same time poignant enough, to allow the viewer’s most basic sense of existence to ‘fill in the blanks.’ If a film fills in too much, it violates our experience.” (29)

            The cinematography in In the Mood for Love is lush, colorful and also is loneliness, isolation, tension, connection, and love. I noticed the use of shots of Mrs. Chan and Mr. Chow where the screen was divided into vertical thirds, and his or her face (not the two of them together) would take up either the left or right “panel”. The background was usually a wall or a surface that was mostly one neutral color. Compared to the film’s many bright colors, such as Mrs. Chan’s floral dresses, their homes, etc. these stark backgrounds emphasize the characters’ feels of entrapment, stuck in a section of the screen, and their being alone, dealing with their spouses’ infidelities. For quite a lot of the movie, I felt that Mrs. Chan and Mr. Chow’s relationship developing so slowly, and almost imperceptibly in front of me. One way I noticed time actually passing was Mrs. Chan’s dresses changing. This became a useful tool, because often a scene ends and another one, in the same setting begins, as if the fraction of a second between scenes had actually been that amount of time, not a day or more. This example of the treatment of time passing allows viewers to “fill in the blanks.”

            Another kind of shot used that helps tell their story is the medium shot in their apartment’s hallway. The shot appears very narrow, particularly because about half the shot is comprised of a wall, and the other half is where people are visible. These cramped shots evoke the protagonists’ physical proximity to each other, while also clearly showing a boundary line –(the separation of wall and not-wall), which symbolically separates them. That line prominent in the shots of their home hallway and in shots of Mrs. Chan in her landlady’s kitchen. Their domestic lives, the existence of their spouses and domestic responsibilities, keep them separated.

            Though I’m running out of time, I want to mention that I also really enjoyed the slow motion sequences of Mrs. Chan walking to buy noodles. The repetition of the song played in that scene and a few others was powerful. The songs, some instrumental and one sung in Spanish, added to the scene’s rhythm and dramatic energy. I would love to explore more when the songs were played and how those scenes are connected –what the songs signified.