LGM Film Club, Part 494: In the Mood for Love

Is Wong Kar-Wai’s 2000 film In the Mood for Love the perfect movie? I mean, it has as good a claim as any. It’s not only his best film, it’s one of the greatest films ever made. It is completely pitch perfect. There’s the astounding acting from Maggie Cheung (I wish she hadn’t retired from acting a few years after this; turns out she also speaks flawless English as she showed in Oliver Assayas’ film Clean and she’d be so great today in so many roles) and Tony Leung. There’s the dresses, oh yes, the dresses. The musical themes. The cinematography. The choices on slowing the camera down. The wisps of cigarette smoke. The unwillingness to give audiences what they really want from this couple. And then the end in Cambodia. It’s really a wonderful work of art.

What’s really too bad is that after the almost equally excellent sequel 2046 that follows Leung’s character through his heartbreak that Wong tried to make it in America with the disastrous My Blueberry Nights and simply stopped having stories to tell, returning to Hong Kong and running out of stories to tell. He made The Grandmaster in 2013, which I’ve heard looks good and is totally forgettable otherwise. He has a TV series over there now, but the idea of this legend directing a minor TV series is hard to swallow. But this happens at time–who would have thought that the series of great movies John Sayles made in the mid-90s would be basically it for him? He started making Lone Star-type sociology films set in different locations to lesser results and finally just couldn’t get funding to make anything at all. Take what you can get from your great directors because the artistic brilliance sometimes has an expiration date, as it did with Wong.