'In the Mood for Love' 4K UHD Review: The Criterion Collection (2024)

For a film mainly guided, stylistically, by feeling more than by thought, Wong Kar-wai’s In the Mood for Love opens rather pragmatically: A simple exchange in an apartment hallway between a landlord and her two prospective tenants, Mrs. Chan (Maggie Cheung) and Mr. Chow (Tony Leung Chiu Wai), introduces the principal elements of what is, in essence, a straightforward story of star-crossed lovers and their unconsummated relationship—a romance thwarted as much by tragic circumstance as by the story’s central cinematic contrivance.

That two exceptionally beautiful neighbors would find themselves drawn into one another’s private orbit when it became apparent that their respective spouses, perpetually “out of the country on business,” were conducting a mutual affair is a scenario tailor-made for the movies, a shopworn fiction ripped from the dusty pages of a dime-store harlequin romance. Such a simplistic premise hardly seems appropriate for an art-house accustomed only to novelty and wit, to pairings beleaguered by more than the stubborn will to remain steadfast and true.

And appearances aren’t totally deceptive, as In the Mood for Love is, in many ways, a remarkably uncomplicated film. But it isn’t comprised of clichés so much as it is deliberately reduced to them. The revelation that transforms it from a very good film into a truly great one occurs during its final moments, when an intertitle recasts the preceding action as reflection: “He remembers those vanished years as looking through a dusty window pane. The past was something he could see, but not touch. And everything he sees is blurred and indistinct.”

Has there ever been a more apt description of the cinema’s capacity for imperfectly rendering our memory, lost to time, which we are forever desperate to reclaim? The camera, of course, is our favorite dusty windowpane, its blurring effect a necessary consequence of our distance from what we most want to be near. And so what seems conspicuously “indistinct” about In the Mood for Love—the pervasive sense of simplicity that governs the drama, from the convenience of its setup to the vagueness of what proceeds from it—becomes, in retrospect, a sophisticated expression of the fundamentally abstract quality of memory and reflection, not so much a paean to past love as to past love remembered in the present.

Perhaps we could say that In the Mood for Love’s real subject, then, is the gulf that divides the past from the present, articulated both by the film’s sumptuous period imagery—the colors and textures of Hong Kong in the 1960s rendered iconic by Wong’s patient, perceptive eye—and its mesmerizing coda, in which Mr. Chow whispers the secret of his love and longing into the walls of Angkor Wat, a site which stands as an enduring symbol of time’s ceaseless forward march. History can be felt in the rocks and in the soil, with which Mr. Chow stores away his feelings, and an expanse of time so much greater than us all is suggested in all of it. Everything recedes from us always; their love fades away, the 1960s fade away, this film fades away.

“By its very design,” Eric Hynes wrote for Reverse Shot, In the Mood for Love “only cuts deeper as it ages—and as I age.” Our memory of the film is, of course, not unlike the memory of love, regarded differently over time and with distance. The action of the romance in the film is reduced to slow-motion gestures, sidelong glances, and shared pauses, and, in turn, what we recall of In the Mood for Love is reduced to its essence: We may remember the impossibly rich red of a wall, the undulations of a pot of noodles, the patterns of Mrs. Chan’s cheongsams, the smoke of Mr. Chow’s cigarette. The details seem hazy, as though we watched the film through a dusty windowpane, its features blurred and indistinct.

Image/Sound

Those who abhorred the tweaks that Wong Kar-wai made to In the Mood for Love and his other films while preparing the restorations that Criterion Collection used for its World of Wong Kar-wai Blu-ray box set will not be swayed by the boost in image fidelity offered by this film’s jump to full ultra-high-def. But the fans who made their peace with the different color timing are in for a treat, as the already vibrant colors, deep black levels, and tactile details of the Blu-ray are magnified even without the benefit of HDR boosting. The UHD brings back some of the reds that were muted in Wong’s more green-oriented re-coloring. Whether repeat viewings have softened the dissonance of the filmmaker’s changes or the full 4K image reveals the full logic and vision of his choices is hard to determine, but it’s certainly easier than ever to appreciate his revisions. This release also comes with the same 5.1 track as the Blu-ray box set, and its crisp, well-balanced surround sound is still gently enveloping.

Extras

This release ports over all of the supplements included in the World of Wong Kar-wai set: Wong’s two-minute short Hua yang de nian hua from 2000, an interview and cinema lesson from 2001 featuring Wong, a Toronto Film Festival press conference from the same year with Tony Leung Chiu Wai and Maggie Cheung, and a documentary, also from 2001, on the making of the film. There are also deleted scenes with commentary by Wong, as well as an interview with critic Tony Rayns, who discusses the film’s thematic and emotional use of music. The only fresh feature is a newly commissioned booklet essay by author Charles Yu, who structures his writing in short, elliptical observations that mimic the poetic flow of Wong’s editing style.

Overall

The first of Wong Kar-wai’s controversial restorations makes the jump to full 4K with a sumptuous transfer that makes his alterations much easier to appreciate.