Mrs. Chan and Mr. Chow Play Themselves
Hong Kong, 1962. Two separate couples, the Chans and the Chows, chance to take up rooms simultaneously in apartments belonging to the Suen family and the Koo family. As the newcomers move their belongings in, their possessions occasionally get mixed-up in the confusion, what armoire goes to which apartment and so on. Most screenwriters would use this beat as an opportunity for a kind of clockwork that sets in motion, say, a Sundance Lab plot, resolved in an ironic dénouement revealing a misunderstanding that the audience has been privy to since the first act. In Wong’s In the Mood for Love [Fa yeung nin wa, or The Age of Blossoms / Those Wonderful Varied Years, 2000 — the English title is Wong's choice but doesn't appear onscreen], the move and confusion in the tight corridors are but a metaphor that sets up a series of criss-crossed networks among couples.
(1) Mrs. Suen (Rebecca Pan) and Mrs. Koo (Koo Kam-wah?) are nearly identical; the one’s apartment is as good as the other's and the two landlords with their friends meet almost nightly to play mahjong with their families.
(2) The spouses of Mrs. Chan (Maggie Cheung) and Mr. Chow (Tony Leung) are having an affair; whether they met at the Suen/Koo households or machinations were put in place to maneuver their both looking at apartments in the same building via their spouses’ inquiries remains unknown throughout and is left to the viewer to infer.
(3) Mrs. Chan’s boss Mr. Ho (Kelly Lai Chen) is carrying on an affair with one Ms. Yu, and it is Mrs. Chan’s role to act as secretary for the arrangement, along with selecting gifts for the two on his behalf, similar to Mr. Chan’s purchase of matching handbags during his business trips to Japan, both for his wife and for his mistress (Mr. Chow’s wife). She has to put herself in Mr. Ho’s place to buy his wife and his mistress the gifts.
(4) Mrs. Chan and Mr. Chow will role-play the spouses upon discovering their affair in an attempt to ‘understand’ what shifted on the spectrum from courtship to romance. (How did their romance blossom? What are its corridors?)
(5) Mrs. Chan and Mr. Chow will fall in love themselves, with the role-play always having been a kind of pretense for their genuine mutual attraction.
The shock: Mr. Chow, now separated from his wife, announces to Mrs. Chan he’ll be leaving for Singapore to avoid "the gossip," and he’d like a ticket to go there — she works, if not at a travel office (Mr. Ho is awaiting shipments of some sort at one point), then at a concern that helps to accommodate travel. (One other overlap in the network: Chow’s wife in the oblique images we see of her at the office appears to be positioned at one point upon Chow's arrival at her place of employment directly before a wall of travel brochures.) At this point Chow and Chan admit they’re in love with one another, and now things shift to a rehearsal for Chow’s Singapore departure, thus fully enveloping the ‘game’ and coming full circle in which they play themselves at a more explicit level. Whereas once before they were reticent to grasp hands in the back of a taxi, now the act comes to fruition. Zhou Xuan’s “Hua yang de nian hua” comes on the radio. (The subtitle announces it as “Full Blossom” — from what I can tell it’s a Mandarin representation of this film’s Cantonese title which I believe means “The Age of Blossoms” with a suggestion of “Those Wonderful Varied Years,” as someone once translated it in a text I read years back; I find this exquisitely beautiful.) Chow asks Chan to go with him. Two moments of stasis.
Singapore, 1963. Chow has managed to have been transferred to The Singapore Daily from his previous newspaper gig in Hong Kong. He comes back to his room one day to find a cigarette butt in the ashtray with lipstick on the filter. Has she broken up with her husband? cf. Fallen Angels's cleaning sequences...
Hong Kong, 1966. Mrs. Chan visits Mrs. Suen. The latter is moving to the US to help out her daughter with her kids. Synchronicity: Mr. Chow also stops by to see the Koos; they've since moved out. Suen tells him "a woman and her kids now live there." It's Mrs. Chan. Mr. Chow doesn't know their identity, and he leaves without encountering her.
Cambodia, 1967. In archival footage, the prince and princess greet General de Gaulle in Phnom Penh.
Chow goes to Angkor Wat, and whispers his life into the crevice of the temple, sealing it with mud and straw.
It must be noted that the fetish music cue that Wong uses throughout In the Mood for Love is taken from Seijun Suzuki's 1991 picture Yumeji. Both are perfect films. •
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