After enjoying ParaNorman last week, the film for this week would be In The Mood For Love (2000) and it was directed by Wong Kar-Wai. At the beginning of the film, I felt that I need to watch it carefully because it brought me the feeling that I am not going to understand what the story tried to deliver if I miss any part of the scene.
Synopsis
The flow of story starts with a journalist named Chow Mo-Wan (Tony Lueng) and Su Li-Zhen (Maggie Cheung), a secretary of shipping company rented the same apartment with their own spouses. Unfortunately, their spouses' loyalty to them started to be the one of their main obstacles. In order to revenge what their spouses did, they started to secret date with each other and find out that they loved each other. At the same time, they also quarreled when date and afraid people's view on their behaviour. Do they became lover until the end or they didn't?
Timeline of Movement
Although the film was released in 2000, the movie remained how the look of old Hong Kong in 1960s. For example, the feature of old buildings, the costume of character and character's behaviour are the example of the look of Hong Kong in that time. As I saw from the movie, most of the building were old with old door, chair, table and car. Also, the floor of the building looked nostalgia which rarely can be seen nowadays.
Next, the costume for a woman wore in the movie was Chinese traditional dress, Qipao. This dress looked noble for a woman and it also represented a symbol for a woman. However, man from the film would wear suit like western people did and it tried to show the level of mature for a man. In addition, the character's behaviour of woman on that time would look shy and small. Yet, man used props like cigarette to show a man's action during that time.
Beside this, I am going to touch some theories that related to the film. There are three theories can be discuss as below following:-
French Impressionism
The word 'french' is the term to represent a thing from France country whereas 'impressionism' is something you see then it will remember in your memory. French impressionism began from 1919 and it ended in 1928. French impressionism stopped because of the high production cost and people not interested on it. For example, if you are the boss of a company; will you think of close your company in order to decrease the lost or keep on losing your profit? So, this explained why french impressionism ended.
Most of films would have psychological depth for people to think of why they shot like that and what are these meaning from the movie tried to say. Just like what I watched from the Hong Kong film, I started to guess the meaning of the film because it had not clear linear narrative for me to know. Furthermore, some parts of the scene manipulated plot time in same way like they went to street night market to buy food to eat. The plot keep on repeating about 3-4 times how they passed by each other in the street market and the time was at night.
This Hong Kong movie also included some visual depiction which means know what happened to that particular scene through what we see. Firstly, rhythmic editing in where Ms Su and Mr Chow moved their furniture to the apartment. The flow was arranged from start to end and their faces looked excited when the furniture went into the rooms they rented. Secondly, camera movement in car scene was smooth because they used to tied inside the car. This will help to bring the natural feeling when you are sitting in a car and the camera will shake followed with road passed by car.
Surrealism
The meaning of this word is something really real as happen in real life. However, it is hard to see this term in film nowadays because most of them are in Sci-Fi which means something you need to imagine. For example, unnatural power like superhero is one of Sci-Fi. So, film maker has to ensure that is no Sci-Fi if he or she wants to make the film seems surreal. Surrealism started in 1924, a few years after French impressionism and it ended 1929 due to same problem as what French impressionism faced.
Moreover, surrealism was different from French impressionism in the way of absence of character psychology. After that, it was connected to literature and painting which something not made of digital but used something real to represent. For example, the sound of people eating at the street night market and chit chat were used instead of take it from digital sound effect. This is because the movie wants to bring audience to what situation actually Mr Chow in when he was eating.
On the other hand, surrealism was the term that anti-narrative which means it opposed to use description to explain a thing. It also aimed for causality which if you do something then you will receive something from what you had did. For instance, Ms Su got suspicious by other people saying that she was too friendly to Mr Chow and that was not suppose to be happen and finally ended up with people's gossip. This does not uses any narrative to describe the incident but just shows the audience the incident happened to them in a direct way.
German Expressionism
In the same year with French impressionism (1919), the term of German expressionism began from expressionist movement art of early 1900s. According to Cinema Studies: The Key Concept (2013) written by Susan Hayward in page 189 with line 10-11, she mentioned that the word expressionism means 'squeezing out', thus making the true essence of things and people emerge into visible form. In my word, expressionism comes from the word 'expression' which means the look of our face when experience something.
From In The Mood For Love, the German expressionism can only be seen in lighting and distorted bodies and shapes. The level of light in the movie which was in high contrast or low-key. Then, this kind of light will create dramatic shadows and the purpose to do this is wants to bring the feeling of mystery to the audience. For example, there were more dark scene compared to bright scene. Plus, the distorted bodies and shapes would be the furniture that moved to the apartment. For this, everything looked very narrow and I got distorted by those furniture and started to wonder can the furniture able to move in or not.
The scene that I liked
I love these scenes because it showed how much they cared each other.
The scene that I disliked
Conclusion
Finally, film maker used to combine these 3 terms to make this film which really impressed me. At beginning, I found out that this film was boring to me because I was not really know the meaning of the film. However, someone told me that I need to view the movie in their situation and that time then I figured out this movie was not boring if you used different view to watch. Thanks for reading.
References
S.Hayward (2013), Cinema Studies: The Key Concepts, Fourth Edition, Routledge, London and New York
