At the beginning of the pandemic, Wong Kar-wai’s In the Mood for Love (2000) was the film most on my mind. There was really no precise prompt for my renewed fascination — I had simply made my way back to the film’s dreamscape, and wanted to see it again. I say “wanted,” but really it felt more like a need. The film felt like a sincere (if only temporary) solution to all my restiveness and sadness.
In missing In the Mood for Love, I privileged certain aspects of the film: melancholy, the color red, domestic divisions, and night rain. Plot, names, and pacing were all hazy or peripheral. My memories alone spoke for the film, reanimating it and creating ever more a world full of my private preoccupations.
I was obsessed with how the film made me feel, but it’s more like I was obsessed with how I felt when, using pieces of the film’s reality, I imagined my precise fantasy of aesthetic escape. In this way, I screened the film in my mind like a lived memory and a present fantasy. I wanted to go somewhere I had never been and, in fact, that I was inventing off of Wong Kar-wai’s work. I found myself inside the coloring of the film, which I remembered to be red, red, red. I was obsessed with pouring rain falling sideways past streetlamps.
Roland Barthes wrote in “Camera Lucida,” “I may know better a photograph I remember than a photograph I am looking at, as if direct vision oriented its language wrongly, engaging it in an effort of description which will always miss its point of effect, the punctum” (64). The process of remembering In the Mood for Love facilitated and clarified to me my punctum, or emotional prick(s). Clearly I was obsessed with particular moments in the film. But why red? Why rain?
When I finally rewatched In the Mood for Love, it was apparent that I hadn’t exactly been pulled back by the film but by my memories of it. In rewatching it, my memories suddenly had the company of reality. The dissonance between what I had assigned emphasis to and all that actually exists and is prominent in the film wasn’t uncomfortable but felt like I was peeling back a layer of consciousness. While my memories had certain roots in the film, they were still generative and lacked the contextualization of everything I had forgotten.
What I remembered were domestic divisions — literal walls and distance. Yet I realized this was a complete reduction of the film’s reality. Domestic space in the film is porous, and liminal places like doorsteps, corridors, and stairwells are regular sites of encounter. It’s the psychic space of the film that particularly disorients. Often characters disappear into a room and the camera doesn’t follow. We hear conversations from the hallway like we are eavesdropping.
The isolating distance I mapped onto the spatial world of the film may have been a sense of the distance between desire and realization in the film, or perhaps was born out of a desire for the film to answer to a pandemic difficulty of my own life. Now I wonder if my longing for the film had something to do with the boisterous neighbor-ness of it: the crowd of people who seem perpetually installed in the kitchen drinking and playing mahjong, the landlord Mrs. Suen’s (Rebecca Pan) somewhat intrusive, somewhat benevolent check-ins.
Memory’s inability to make space for everything is, in the end, a relieving limitation. In addition to aiding in reverence for the specific, it sustains a renewing joy in rewatching. For in my memory of red, I forgot about green. I forgot about the telephones and clocks that populate the film. I forgot about the brilliance of Mrs. Chan’s (Maggie Cheung) costuming and acting. And even though I craved it, I couldn’t truly remember the spell that slow-motion scenes with “Yumeji’s Theme” puts you under.
All this has made me think more about the creative space of memory. When we allow ourselves no loyalty to a realist sense of “accuracy,” what emerges? Our lack of knowledge, or purported “incorrectness” about plot points, is on the other hand an evocative truth, revealing the moments, sensations, or qualities by which we have been most affected.
This quality of memory is obvious, perhaps, but film gives us the ability to return to a materially unchanged subject of our imprinting. No matter how much misremembering I do of all the unfilmed moments of my childhood or even the Sunday roast I ate last weekend, I can never go back to the source of the encounter. A return to them is circumscribed exclusively to my memory. But with films we have the ability to reencounter.
This year, coincidentally, is the film’s 20th anniversary, which has brought with it a renewal of appreciation for In the Mood for Love and subsequent programming, including a 4K restoration led by Criterion. I can’t help but feel that with In the Mood for Love, we need no reminder — the film itself will bring us back.
What I carry with me until my next viewing of it will be no doubt different. Any linear narrative of watching and rewatching is disrupted — you may never watch the same film again because you will always be different the next time. And so the next time, that difference will mean you are seeing a new film. Spectatorship may not be replicated exactly.
This seems, for many, to torment. The list format “films/TV shows/etc. I wish I could watch again for the first time” has popped up across platforms. And, to be sure, there is something about seeing something you have never seen before. But for so many films, remembering and rewatching are not simply to hark back to the moment of first encounter, but are part of the inimitable process of falling in love with them further and anew.
In the Mood for Love is astounding, and not just for its material truth, but also for the experience of remembering it, which is to say imagining it. And, for me, the impossibility of ever getting over it. It is a great comfort to be in life with films like In the Mood for Love. Next time I come back, I can count on the joy of new differences. Once you have seen In the Mood For Love, you will always have somewhere to go.
