In the Mood for Love Reviews

And the mood is everything in acclaimed Hong Kong director Wong Kar-Wai's sad, achingly beautiful love story. On the same sweltering day in 1962, newspaper editor Mr. Chow (Tony Leung Chiu-wai) and shipping firm secretary Mrs. Chan (Maggie Cheung) move into adjoining apartments in the same Hong Kong apartment complex. Both are desperately lonely — his wife is always working late; her husband is away for weeks at a time "on business" — but they remain only passing acquaintances until they realize that their respective spouses are having an affair. Mr. Chow and Mrs. Chan begin spending evenings out in each other's company, assuming the identities of the adulterers in an attempt to "see how it begins." But the game soon grows more intimate: They practice leaving their mates, then leaving each other. Only the watchful eyes of their neighbors and their own sense of decency keep them from actually becoming lovers. The film is both a memory piece of a particular time and place from Wong's childhood and a sequel of sorts to his 1990 DAYS OF BEING WILD (in the credits, Mrs. Chan's maiden name is listed as Su Lizhen, the name of Cheung's character in DAYS). But fans of Wong's earlier, flashier style may be a little surprised by the restraint he and his long-time cameraman Christopher Doyle show here — no frantic hand-held camera, no time-lapse photography, no interwoven story lines, no fractured time frames. The film is slow-paced and slyly structured around snatches of clandestine phone calls and furtive shots, and it's extraordinarily sexy: The atmosphere is all cigarette smoke and Nat King Cole songs, silk suits and tight sheath dresses. What remains constant is the director's sense of the essential isolation of modern life; Wong continues to be cinema's premier poet of heartache.