FILM

WON KAR-WEI AND HONG KONG

a moody dream of the past

By Yiran Han

Will it ever work out

Wong Kar-wai is one of the most prominent directors in China and became world famous during the 1990s. Since he was born in Shanghai and grew up in Hong Kong, his films have an interesting relationship to the city he grew up in, a city that really doesn’t exist anymore. At the time of Kar-wai’s youth, HongKong occupied a unique place in Chinese cultural life. It was still governed by the British, but would soon become a part of greater, Mainland China. Needless to say, people who lived through the change over were confused about their identities and futures.

Among his many great films, In the Mood for Love (2000) is important and outstanding. Not only does it represent the height of Kar-wai’s artistry, but also indicates his thinking on what it means to have lived and experienced old Hong Kong, or now, the Hong Kong of the past. Almost everything about the film—the concerns of the characters, the music, and the highly stylized sets—are the result of this basic change in cultural life and expectations.

What does it feel like?

In the Mood For Love is about a man and a woman whose spouses are cheating on them; in fact, their spouses are cheating with each other. Zhou Muyun and Su Lizhen become friends of a sort, commiserate about being cheated on, and start to fall in love. It is important to the film that they do not date, do not have an affair, do not do anything except kind of wish that they were together even though both of them will not allow it. The director uses their love as a way of describing the incredible changes of daily life in Hong Kong during the changeover, but we see it through the lens of an agonizing, painful, and beautifully filmed love story that takes place in the 1960s.

From my point of view, this is a story about open secrets. When Zhou and Su first some how find themselves in the same place together, they tell each other that they were betrayed in marriage. Gradually, as they find themselves falling in love with each other, their relationship becomes their secret. Yet, it’s an open secret, obvious to anyone who bothers to look. Hong Kong contains lots of different cultures. Compared with the Mainland China, the island advanced faster and freer. In the 1960’s people were feeling the huge changes in the world and the social pressure to not conform, which is the type of paradox Kar-wai clearly loves.

For example, Zhou smokes a cigarette at his desk: we see that a light hangs over his head, the smoke rise up to the light, and there’s no sound, no music, nothing. All we do is watch smoke rise for several seconds. And you are left with an obvious question: what will happen, what will happen to Zhou at this moment of great change. Will he always be alone, but will he find the right person—one could ask the same of Hong Kong, or maybe even China.

Please talk to me, but not too close

In one of the most famous scenes of the movie, Zhou and Su stand together in a street and talk. Wong lights Su with red and yellow light to give her a warm and inviting color. In our minds, we remember the smoking scene and how cold the color was around Zhou. Here smoking becomes a metaphor for union and togetherness. We have seen the smoke and how cold it can be. So that when we see it again with the possibility of such warmth, we want them to get together, to in a sense move from the cold light to the warm one, to finally smoke together. And again, with the idea of Hong Kong just below the surface Kar-wai presents all of this in such a hesitant manner. Should they or shouldn’t they.

From the first day of the British army's entry into the Chinese colony, Hong Kong, with a total land area of 1,106 square kilometers, stood at the forefront of history. In the past two hundred years, the Opium War, the Sino-Japanese War, the Ten Years of Turmoil and 1997 have become four important nodes in the evolution of Hong Kong. Especially in the wartime period, Hong Kong’s "free ports" were something that both sides wanted to keep. In the political, economic and cultural industries Hong Kong has created the idea of Hong Kong and this relationship is a clear allegory of how those ideals seep into every aspect of the world and lives of individual people.

Hong Kong in the 1960s has some similarities to contemporary Chinese cities. Everyday life can be both refined and full of various rules and repressions. Because it was a colony, a port city, Hong Kong was always adept at assimilating new cultures and ideas. However, as a part of China, the culture of the mainland has also deeply affected Hong Kong life, as we can see in Zhou and Su’s romance. They are willing to take a chance and face their inmost emotions to pursue true love, but they are also constrained by rules. Because, even though they have been betrayed, the cultural life of 1960’s Hong Kong would consider succumbing to their emotions as a betrayal to marriage. You can see how complex the film is in how Kar-wai presents the question of a true union or marriage.

We must never be together

The social and political issues of Hong Kong at the time were a driving force in Kar-wai’s imagination. In 1984, China and Britain signed the "China-UK Agreement", meaning that Britain would return Hong Kong to China at an agreed upon date. You could say that at that moment the conditions for In the Mood for Love were established and Hong Kong became the symbol of the complex relationship between East and West. The film is full of nostalgia for a situation that just couldn’t continue. As the subtitle of the film states, “The era is gone. Everything that belongs to that era doesn’t exist.” The same could be said of the beauty and the precarious situation of Hong Kong.

©Yiran Han and the CCA Arts Review