Film Studies - In The Mood For Love [W8 Review]

In the Mood for Love is a Hong Kong romantic film directed by Wong Kar-Wai. The movie is presented a love story between two married couples happened in a slow pace. The message bring to audience is love can happen in any condition without matter the age of character, time or place, but not every love story will have a good end.

French Impressionist Cinema is popular within year 1919 to 1928. The characteristics of French Impressionist Cinema is to explores psychological causes, audience can experienced the feeling of the characters with camera framing without have to give narration to audience, revealing play of the character's consciousness, and concerns mental states, dreams or fantasies. French Impressionist is now rarely to be seen in modern film due to less demand from audience and rising production cost.

In the Mood for Love is about two married couples, Mr Chow and Mrs Chan who moved in a apartment and renting rooms with their spouses on same day. Similarities among Mr Chow, the newspaper editor and Mrs Chan, the secretary is their spouses are always away and busy. Due to this reason, they have become friends after spending couple times together, but their relationship started to develop as they found out their spouses were cheating on them. However, they always reminded themselves to keep this relationship secretly from their neighbors as to avoid becoming a gossip topic among the tenants. In the end of the story, Mr Chow decided to and this relationship as he was posted to work in Singapore.

There is few scene keep repeating to show the relationship between Mr Chow and Mrs Chan started to develop: meet nearby the apartment, eat at the same restaurant, ride on a same cab. As these scene is shown, the same soundtrack keep repeat too. These repeated scene also have different action as their relationship gets deeper, As an example, Mrs Chan lie on Mr Chow shoulder in the cab, compared to the starting she still worried they will have feeling towards each other.

Mr Chow and Mrs Chan having dinner together

Next, there is a scene where it capture the motion of the smoke towards ceiling instead of framing Mr Chow. The smoke motion has metaphor the stressful of Mr Chow after discovered his spouse might have cheat in their relationship, and his feeling towards Mrs Chan has started to change without him noticing it.

In some part of the movie has applied colour psychology metaphor. According to Lilly Mtz-Seara, red bring the meaning of passion, desire, excitement and energy, yellow is knowledge, joy, betrayal, deceit, cowardice and jealousy. The director well play with this two colours in this movie. As an example, there is a scene where Mr Chow meet Mrs Chan in her room, the whole scene is filled with red colour to show that Mr Chow desired to meet Mrs Chan. In another perspective, its can be read as danger because if their relationship is exposed they will end up as the gossip topic among the tenant.

Another colour psychology example is Mrs Chan drinking at a yellow window. The director has use yellow window to show the inner feeling of Mrs Chan, which she felt that she has betray her husband as she started to have feeling toward Mr Chow. It also show as cowardice as Mrs Suen tell her not to meet Mr Chow too often as some of the neighbor might have suspect their relationship in the previous scene.

In conclusion, this film show quite a lots of metaphor with framing technique and colour psychology. French Impressionist might require audience to watch again for several time to understand the deep meaning behind its film. A japanese movie, Tag(2015) which i watch before also have used a same kind of framing technique like In the Mood for Love.

References
http://gaddisvisuals.com/colorpsychology/