Muhammad Arif Ikhwan / 2022819368 / CAFF231 / FDC 421

Film Review In The Mood For Love (Wong Kar-Wai, 2000)

In The Mood For Love is a Hong Kong film directed by Wang Kar-Wai, where a love

between two people that cannot be expressed and thus they look into each other’s eyes

longing for the touch of their lips to meet but instead must refrain because it is a love

that cannot be action-ed. Initially they provide solon’s by role-playing conversations

as their spouses and pretend to confront them but this eventually progresses into a

potential affair of their own, it isn’t just a affair movie but only the same way it is not

a religious movie. This film offers the sadness, beauty of forbidden love, and in the

end emphasizes on the worth of memories, of things, people, and times gone by. In

The Mood For Love has the air of a story about lost love rather than a romance. A

trauma bond is being formed between the two protagonist as they work to understand

their spouses infidelity via one another. The whole movie feels like the poem at its

end, like a memory through dusty glass, It just so perfectly capture exactly that

feeling. It is a very poetic and romantic movie with unspoken yet intense love they

have for each other. Towards the ending it obviously shows the importance of

Buddhism in the film and with the characters of the film but then interpreting as that

should see. In The Mood For Love is unique because of its quite intensity, they takes a

step further rather than the landscape being grand which is it isn’t, they went deeper

into the intimacy of people and almost like their everyday lives whereas also

translations seemed a little bit more extravagant. The film’s atmosphere is like no

other, it’s sensual and melancholic at the same time. Throughout the film, the framing,

the reflections, the silhouettes and shadowplay, the vivid colours, the low angles, the

soft lighting, the blurred foregrounds, the placement of characters all adding to the

magic of storytelling and evoking emotions so powerful and poignant that can’t help.