During the wooingly sensuous first half of the film, Kar-Wai isolates Leung and Cheung within shots in such a way that the second person in a conversation is never visible. The key to the success of the film is Kar-Wai's use of the interior space, playing with foreground and background planes in ways that are similar to the works of Polanski. Their eventual coupling is obvious from the beginning but the pleasure here is the way that Kar-Wai ambiguously paints such a journey with his grand masterstrokes. He's a journalist who dreams of publishing martial-arts novels and she is a secretary at a shipping company. Chow Mo-Wan (Tony Leung) and Su Li-zhen (Maggie Cheung) move in next-door to each other within the same apartment building. It's a testament to the genius of Kar-Wai that he is capable to making such a simple tale so resonating. Like Soderbergh's The Limey, this is a different kind of curio for Kar-Wai where dialogue and plot are forsaken by mood and composition in order to create a tale of two delicate lives in a seemingly confining emotional stasis. The toned down appeal of the film, centering on the studied view of a relationship put through an emotional ringer, is a retread into Happy Together territory but without the hyper-kinetic patchwork of jarring film stocks and hyper-saturated sequences that have become a trademark of Kar-Wai's films since Chungking Express. It's easy to see why many people consider In the Mood for Love to be Wong Kar-Wai's best film.
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