When Sight and Sound released their 2022 list of the greatest films ever made, only two films produced after the turn of the century made the top 25: David Lynch’s Mulholland Drive came 8th, and Wong Kar Wai’s In the Mood for Love was 5th. Whilst different in so many ways, it’s interesting to think about the films together, especially as we screened Mulholland Drive earlier in the year to mark the untimely passing of David Lynch, and we are screening In the Mood for Love this December to celebrate its 25th anniversary.  

At their heart, both are enigmatic stories of love and solitude told in a dreamlike haze. Both were shot just before the millennium and, perhaps reflective of the uncertainty of that moment, they each play with time and our experience of it. Whereas Lynch dismantles and reassembles the timeline of his narrative, Wong Kar Wai uses time to convey the sweeping emotions of his film.  

In the Mood for Love begins in 1962 Hong Kong, when two couples move into adjacent apartments on the same day. Tony Leung Chiu-wai’s Chow Mo-wan is a journalist, and Maggie Cheung’s Su Li-zhen is his neighbour; we, the audience, never meet their respective spouses. Initially, Chow and Su remain polite but distant—until they realise their partners are having an affair with each other. The discovery draws them closer as they try to piece together the circumstances of the infidelity. But as Chow ponders in the semi-sequel 2046, “Love is a matter of timing,” and the two struggle to reconcile their growing feelings for each other and their desire not to repeat the betrayal they’ve suffered.  

Reflecting the film’s themes of intense longing and unrequited love, Wong Kar Wai saturates the film with heightened sensory experiences. There are gorgeous costumes by William Chang Suk-ping, the evocative, nostalgia-tinged cinematography of Christopher Doyle and Mark Lee Ping-bin (in which, like Mulholland Drive, red is a key recurring motif), and the soundtrack of international ballads. Wong conducts this build-up of intensity through his use of time and tempo. As Chow and Su’s love develops, time in the film slows or freezes entirely, drawing out their yearning in moments unbearably so. Later, as their relationship is interrupted by distance and happenstance, time in the film becomes fragmented, halting and jumping forward.  

The effect is one of cinema’s most intoxicating romances, a film that can stop your heart with its heady composition of image, sound and time. It is a personal favourite of mine, and as a film about nostalgia and the passage of time, it feels very appropriate as it will (inadvertently) be screening in my last month working at The Dukes. After 16 years of curating The Dukes’ cinema programme, I will be moving on in the new year. It has been such a great privilege and an honour to work here, and I am so grateful to everyone who has supported the film programme. Where I grew up, there was no cultural cinema or theatre, and so when I first visited The Dukes, it felt truly like a magical place. After so long, that feeling has never left me, and I’m so excited to see how the programme develops and no doubt flourishes.

Written by Johnathan Ilott

See In the Mood for Love on Thursday 4 December, 8:30pm.

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