In the Mood for Love by Kar-wai Wong Review by: Jacqui Sadashige The American Historical Review, Vol.

106, No. 4 (Oct., 2001), pp. 1513-1514 Published by: Oxford University Press on behalf of the American Historical Association Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2693166 . Accessed: 22/03/2013 05:14
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Film Reviews

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time he was a child in the countryside until his death was not purely idyllic. He resented the consumerism of becomes secondary to his artistic nature. Miami and had many criticisms of U.S. views on sex The second criticism relates to historical represen- and sexuality, for example. tation. Viewers receive very little information about Schnabel's treatment of Arenas's life in New York is the struggles of the revolution and its attempts, how- not as visually or emotionally compelling as the early ever ill-informed and paranoiac, to create a socialist parts in Cuba. In the film, Arenas lives a subdued life anti-imperialist society. The 1960s and 1970s were until his eventual death in 1990. In fact, Arenas decades of consolidation under the mantra "Within experienced the wonders and dangers of New York for the Revolution EVERYTHING. Outside the revolu- almost a decade, and he wrote about many of them. tion NOTHING." Cuba had survived the Bay of Pigs Some viewers may be annoyed by the use of acattack in 1961, threatened the balance of power during cented English with Spanish in the background to the missile crisis of 1962, and became a leader in Third bring forth a foreign flavor, although somehow this World anticolonial struggles. Castro's regime at- technique recreates the atmosphere of Cuba for an tempted to rid itself of capitalist bourgeois values but English-speaking audience. Representations of Afrosuffered from the brain drain and disillusion so aptly Cubans are also at times problematic, particularlythe portrayed in Tomas Guti6rrez Alea's film Memoriesof superficial presentation of the Afro-Cuban religious Underdevelopment(1968). Cuba promoted universal ceremony (Santerfa) more than half way through the health care and education while often responding to film. Schnabel symbolizes Cuban repression with a internal challenges with Stalinist tactics and purges. police raid of a Santeria "performance," musically But the government'sview of homosexualitywas not as dramatized by Gustav Mahler's somber Adagietto uniform as its view of dissidence. Overt homosexuality (Symphony No. 5) drowning out the rhythm of the was often misunderstood as capitalist decadence, a drums. At this moment, Arenas's and Schnabel's type of antisocial behavior or "improper conduct," worlds unite in a theme that resonates throughout the views superbly exposed in Nelson Almendros and film: repression is the enemy of art. The film nonetheOrlando Jim6nes Leal's film ImproperConduct (1984). less affirmsthat even in the direst of situation, Arenas Even so, this policy was selective, and many homosex- the artist was able to hold on to something that uals served the revolution, as Guti6rrez Alea's film allowed him to celebrate life, at least until he decided that life was no longer worth living. Fresa y Chocolate (1994) attests. DARIEN J. DAVIS Schnabel does succeed in showing the contradiction MiddleburyCollege that is/was Cuba, or, in Arenas's words, "the voices of poetry versus the drums of militarism."He emphasizes the power of art with words from Cuban literary IN THIEMOOD FOR LOVE. Produced, written, and dipersonalities, such as L6zama Lima and Pifiera, who rected by Kar-wai Wong. 2000; color; 98 minutes. appear briefly in the film. The importance of these two Distributed by USA Films. literary giants is not sufficientlyunderscored, however, nor do we witness how the regime marginalized them. According to recent entertainment industry news, the Moreover, many important characters enter and leave successes of Gladiator and Crouching Tiger, Hidden the story with little explanation (including Jorge and Dragon have spurred further interest in historical Margarita Camacho, who helped Arenas smuggle his drama. Not only has Touchstone Pictures been heavily work out of the country). Yet the revolution included promoting Pearl Harbor for months, but a number of many talented intellectuals and writers, including film projects treating historical events and personages Miguel Barnet, Eliseo Diego, Roberto Fernandez Re- are scheduled to begin production. These include, for tamar, and Nicolas Guill6n, and it received support example, plans for epic films about Hannibal's crossing from many others abroad. Cuba became a pioneer in of the Alps during the Second Punic War and the Latin American film, with directors such as Guti6rrez destruction of the Japanese samurai class in the nineAlea and Julio Garcia Espinosa, and eventually cre- teenth century, as well as the continued mining of the ated one of the major Latin American film festivals in World War II vein opened up by Saving PrivateRyan. Although the actual and anticipated popularity of 1979. Musical pioneers such as Silvio Rodriquez and Pablo Milan6s, who did not necessarily toe the party such films, at first glance, would seem to evince a general and widespread interest in history, the specifline, played important roles in Cuban cultural life. Arenas's sense of urgency and fear was not un- ics of subject matter, narrative architecture, and visual founded, however, and apologists must recognize the articulation reveal how narrowlyHollywood, if not the problematic legacy of the revolution. The Mariel crisis general public, conceptualize that term. Not only does which lead to the boatlifts took the regime by surprise, history seem to take place in a handful of locationsand in the end many former supporters desperately sub-SaharanAfrica, for instance, is clearly positioned wanted to leave Cuba. 125,000 left in 1980 alone. The off the map-but Hollywood's version of it remains, sense of freedom that Arenas felt in the United States for the most part, a linear narrative focused on the is aptly portrayed by the scene of him and his devoted actions of singular individuals. Kar-wai Wong's In the friend Lazaro staringup to the skies as snow falls upon Moodfor Love does not at all fit into this frameworkof them. But Arenas's experience in the United States expectations that has come to typify historical drama.

AMERICAN HISTORICAL REVIEW

OCTOBER 2001

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Film Reviews
Japan, Nat King Cole crooning in Spanish, an oldfashioned manual typewriter. Such tidbits, although mundane, defamiliarize the film's exoticism while grounding its characters squarely in an era. And then there are the cheongsams, high heels, and bags adorning Maggie Cheung. Rendered in a myriad of period fabrics-from silk shantung to nearly psychadelic floral prints-by Wong's longtime art director and costume designer, William Chang, Cheung's form-fitting and high-necked cheongsams, like the starched collars and greased hair donned by Tony Leung's Mr. Chow, seem to mesh time and mood. But do the physicallyrestraining fashions worn by these two characters function as an outward expression of their inner restraint, or did people really dress this way in Hong Kong during the early 1960s? The question underlies In the Mood inasmuch as the film is constantly negotiating cinematic aesthetics with narrative trajectory, private memory with public record. Many critics have already noted In the Mood's debt to Wong's childhood memories and the history of his parents' generation, Chinese transplantedfrom Shanghai to Hong Kong in the wake of the triumph of Mao Zedong in China in 1949. Yet only the slightest mention of such movements and forces is made. A family is said to have left Hong Kong for the United States. Film stock of Charles de Gaulle's visit to Cambodia flashes in 1963 across the screen. For the most part, however, Wong fixates on private moments and material memories that evoke a time, a place, and a mood. While such things are, to a degree, set against history per se, In the Mood insists upon the persistent relationship between the incidental and the monumental. One of the film's three title sequences announces, "That era has passed. Nothing that belongs to it exists anymore."Here is an era whose gender politics allows Mrs. Chan unquestioning complicity in her boss's adulterous affair-for instance, procuring identical gifts for his wife and mistress-yet does not permit her even to playact making advances to another man. This is an era before the advent of cell phones and answering machines, when privacywas limited by the fact that messages had to be left and anyone could answer the phone. The cramping architecture of their apartment building ultimately presses Chow and Chan together, even as the closeness of their community and the fabrics that clothe them enforce moral and sartorial restraints. As the film's progress moves from Hong Kong to Singapore to the ruins of Angkor Wat, and Mr. Chow, in particular, is left burdened with memories he can see but cannot touch, In the Mood suggests that the monumental traces that often pass for history cannot compare to the substance and the sentiment that are forgotten. While Wong may indeed feel that very little remains from the era of his childhood, he can be assured that the memories he has called forth will linger well into the future.
JACQUI SADASHIGE

Yet, in addition to providing a veritably incandescent work of contemporaryfilmmaking,Wong's most recent feature poses questions about the nature of historical periodicity and change and its connections to individual lives-for instance, the imprints left as memorywith a depth and complexity that is rare in contemporary film. Despite the international cult status of his work and his award for Best Director at the 1997 Cannes Film Festival (for Happy Together), Wong has remained virtuallyunknown to the American cinema-going public. Many aspects of In the Mood for Love-for instance, its languid and protracted rhythm, use of slow motion, and a concomitant fixation on the passage of time-reflect the aesthetics and obsessions that mark much of Wong's earlier work and illustrate his own striking approach to the territoryof historical memory. At the same time, the singularity of its narrative and the absence of his signature frenetic and kaleidoscopic camerawork seem to signal a new direction. At base, In the Mood for Love explores, in exquisite and aching detail, the interactions between next-door neighbors Mrs. Chan and Mr. Chow (played by Maggie Cheung Man-yuk and Tony Leung Chiu-wai, respectively) against the background of Hong Kong's ambivalent historical situation in the early 1960s (a compound of colonial heritage and Cold War politics). The film's two protagonists move into their crowded Hong Kong apartments on the same day in 1962. Although they encounter each other only briefly and intermittently, the nature of their contact shifts once they realize that their spouses are having an affair. Vowing not to mimic the deceitful actions of their partners, Chan and Chow engage in waltzing restraint that curiously echoes the fraught dance of great powers around Hong Kong itself. They stroll and dine, but their conversations consist of projected fantasies. She plays his wife and he acts as her husband. As they run through a variety of scenarios, such as a dinner date or an evening walk, they attempt to piece together the trajectory of their spouses' affair, a sort of private history. Who made the first move? What are they doing now? While Chan and Chow aim to construct a plausible chronology, the film itself thwarts their endeavors by withdrawing from narrative convention and movement. The adulterous spouses are glimpsed from behind, and only rarely at that. The two leads never exchange so much as a single kiss but instead dance around one another: crossing paths as they walk to and from a noodle stand, meeting to pen a martial-arts novel, and rehearsing, at one point, their own parting from one another. Very little, thus, actually happens. Instead, Wong returns repeatedly to lingering shots of ceiling fans, curling cigarette smoke, a hand grazing a door jamb in retreat, and Maggie Cheung, modeling a seemingly endless collection of cheongsams in vintage 1960s fabric. And herein lies the crux of Wong's, luminous mediation on the historical ground that underpins personal experiences of longing and loss. Scattered amid the slow and wistful narrative lie history's traces: the first rice cooker imported from

University of Pennsylvania

AMERICAN HISTORICAL REVIEW

OCTOBER 2001

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