23. Wong Kar-Wai's In the Mood for Love (2000)
“We won’t be like them.”
So promises a cuckolded husband to the woman married to the man who’s sleeping with his wife in 1960’s Hong Kong. Shaken by their partners’ mutual infidelities, Chow Mo-Wan (Tony Leung) and So Lai-zhen (Maggie Cheung) develop an intimate, though chaste, refuge together, the most visible product of which is distressed, silent longing. Wong’s tactile direction gives an aching body to the frustrated interlude. It’s the pinnacle of his sensualist cinema, wherein all of the elements sing in conspiracy: the voluptuous colors (of the décor, the light, the wardrobes) pursue a rhythm all their own, the lyrical decoupage moves masterfully between truncated episodes and Christopher Doyle’s photography captures perfectly the subtle physical details out of which the protagonists construct a companionship. It’s heartbreakingly beautiful watching the betrayed fumble a tentative love of such promise, but the intensity of their affections surpasses the limp pronouncements and tired postures of a thousand empty screen romances. It was the decade's first great love story, a documentation of a love that might have existed.
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