In the Mood for Love

 IN THE MOOD FOR LOVE
FA YEUNG NIN WAH
(traditional Chinese: 花樣年華
simplified Chinese: 花样年华 
lit. 'Flower-like Years', 'the prime of one's youth') 
Writer & Director ~ Wong Kar-Wai
2000, Hong Kong-France
Stars ~ Maggie Cheung, Tony Leung, Chiu-wai, Ping-Lam Siu

It starts with a set-piece straight from a farce: two neighbours moving in at the same time, the movers getting their possessions mixed up when delivering to the wrong apartment. It could be comedy, or meet-cute, but that’s not this film. It’s the first of many times that they graze past eachother before they meet properly, and when they do they just kinda drift into the narrative. They fall into dramatising their belief that their spouses are having being unfaithful with one another; they role-play how they think the affair happened and confrontations. And of course. It is no surprise that they fall into the very trap that they themselves have set.

In fact, that’s not the only farcical situation they find themselves in, trapped in a room to avoid discovery while their neighbours play mah jong outside all night. Indeed, the supporting cast we see could easily be comedic if turned up a bit. But the film is harnessed to the introverted, somewhat serious and brittle lead characters. 

It is Wong Kar Wai’s seventh film, built from daily improvisation and collaboration with the actors, an idea rather than a script; Wong crafts the story in the edit, describes himself as a band leader. Developed originally from the idea of exploring characters through food and the title ‘A Story of Food’. It is set in Hong Kong1962, the year Wong’s family moved from Shaghai to Hong Kong.The surface of this film, encapsulating highly attractive people with unspoken desire, has had a long-term influence on advertising. Certainly its use of slo-mo moodiness hasn’t dated, a motif of romantic evocation. In fact, ‘In the Mood for Love’ has proven a popular recurring screening with twenty-somethings at London’s Prince Charles cult cinema.  The whole film looks dipped in mint and rouge, perhaps the occasional plum, and a jukebox of oldies. The choice of Nat King Cole is because Cole was his mother’s favourite. It is chic and dressed to knock you out; even the characters say of Maggie Wong’s gorgeous parade of cheongsam dresses, “She dresses like that to buy noodles?” They have money but nowhere to go?

Wong started in Hong Kong With Chris Doyle, then moved the shoot to Bangkok with Mark Lee when Doyle walked away. He discovered that Bangkok looked more like the era he was trying to capture, meaning the film was shot twice over. This added to an already arduous production that had endured Asian financial crises on top of Wong’s protracting improvisational style and starting production on already for its sequel, ‘2046’. And yet it is obvious that he had a confident vision, for the film feels of a whole, never hinting at any fractuous two year production. For example, Wong talks of how the intent was “we always wanted to keep the audience as one of the neighbours” and a passing-by and voyeuristic mood is kept throughout. 

Where the mode for much film is for characters asserting themselves, finding their voice, the characters of journalist Chow Mo-wan and a shopping company secretary Mrs. Chan are both introspective and quiet. For the most part the mood, movement and music elucidate their thoughts and turmoil. Tony Leung seems to have simply gone with the flow whilst Maggie Cheung struggled at first with the lack of structure and dialogue, although eventually finding her rhythm with it. She now considers that she put her soul into it, and certainly Wong casts the impression that he sees this definitely as a collaboration, always saying “we” when interviewed about the production. Rarely are reserved characters given such elegant context and roam and romance in. 

Wong has spoken  of the influence of Hitchcock’s ‘Vertigo’, of the fact because the protagonists are a handsome pair that we don’t suspect them of darkness or creepiness: “Just imagine if it was John Malkovich playing this role. You would think, ‘This guy is really weird.’” That’s true, but also that the aesthetic doesn’t play that card either, saturating us in the tragedy of the unrequited love of two heartbroken people, giving that as the impetus. Certainly when you add suspicion to their behaviour, you can detect that Chow is perhaps manipulating Mrs. Chan, where he appears to be the director of the role-playing. Yet, malevolence does not linger as an aftertaste, just loneliness.  
 
Like Truffaut’s ‘Lift to the Scaffold’, ‘In the Mood for Love’ is a quintessential example of a jazzy mood put on screen. One could translate the slow motion and glides punctuated repeatedly by ‘Yumeji’s Theme’ as an evocation and romanticism of nostalgia and memory itself: certainly it insists on its own mournful elegance. It is a film where Wong is trying to recapture an era and the gossip of his childhood. With that, the longing of the film is similar to that of coming-of-age. Mood and memory is the story.

The Seventh Seal

The Seventh Seal

Det sjunde inseglet

Writer & Director ~ Ingmar Bergman

1957, Sweden

Stars ~ Max von Sydow, Gunnar Björnstrand, Bengt Ekerot, Nils Poppe

 

His seventeenth film, Ingmar Bergman’s ‘The Seventh Seal’ was adapted from his own play ‘The Wood Painting’ (‘Trämålning’,1953/1954) which he wrote for an actor’s workshop as director of the Malmö City Theatre. The title ‘The Seventh Seal’ refers to a passage from the Book of Revelation:  "And when the Lamb had opened the seventh seal, there was silence in heaven about the space of half an hour." (Revelation 8:1) In Bergman’s original play, Death is represented by silence, but Death here is personified by Bengt Ekerot, coming for a knight on his way home from The Crusades. But the knight, played by Max Von Sydow, challenges Death to a game of chess for a delay until he can find meaning.

The influences on the film range from Picasso, Shakespeare, the frescoes at Härkeberga church and his upbringing in a devout Christian household, his father being a rector. A religiously themed film running on symbolism, ‘The Seventh Seal’ is the tonal opposite of Jodorowdy’s ‘The Holy Mountain’, which feels like a film made by a very naughty boy. Instead, Bergman’s vision is playful, clear, pristine, austere, mature, aided by the high contrast black and white. The seriousness of intent and purposeful staginess is the stuff of endless parodies, but there is a confidence here and a surprising humanity that immediately disarms. There’s a lot of lolling around in love and contemplation. The tone is that of a fairy tale being treated to the veracity of a historical drama, although its historical accuracy is erratic: for example, The Crusades were before The Black Death, and witch persecutions in Sweden came much later. But its strength as allegory is not in doubt, and Bergman’s magic touch is in its surety in making such potentially humourless premise easy entertainment.

 

 

Characters speak to one another in existential angst and contemplation, adrift in a world of plague casual misogyny, piety, doubt and stalked by Death. A frivolous and somewhat bawdy mobile theatre is interrupted by a procession of self-flagellating religious zealots that only pause to tell the crowd they are all going to die. It is perhaps telling that the one character without dimension is the hectoring preacher. And yet it is anything but a dark film, offering instead bright black and white and a lightness familiar from Bergman’s earlier amusements such as ‘Smiles of a Summer Night’ and ‘Summer with Monika’. It makes a pit stop for a comic sequence where the blacksmith confronts his wayward wife and her lover the actor, for instance, more like his earlier work, but still has dark gags of Death putting the work in by chopping down a tree and cheating at chess. Interviewed by Melvyn Bragg on the South Bank Show, 1978, Bergman spoke of how he was very scared of Death, how the film acted as “medicine” for this, and spoke of Death’s appearance as a clown or a priest. Indeed, Death is mistaken for a priest a few times.

The squire Jöns (Gunnar Björnstrand) is almost a self-aware character, almost meta in his approach to others and the crisis of Faith all around him. In that sense, he acts as an audience guide through this doomed landscape. And you have actors synonymous with Bergman, for he had a reliable and loyal troupe of actors and crew. Max Von Sydow has a natural, unmatched gravitas but without condescension, which is perfect for the existential crisis of Block the knight. Bibi Andersson was Bergman’s lover at the time and instrumental in convincing to cash in his long stint as a director to produce this project. She provides all the natural, earthy warmth acting as a counterbalance to all the “I should murder my wife” humour.

‘The Seventh Seal’ is considered a benchmark film that contributed to cementing if not creating the idea of the Art Film after its screening in Cannes in 1957. Bergman’s questions about Faith and mortality are persistent and open to the subjective biases of the individual, right through his subsequent films to varying degrees. That they serve both believers and non-believers – the knight, for example, is evidently struggling with sensing he’s lost Faith – is a sign of the complexity, generosity and universality of his treatment of these themes. These questions are always tied in with theatre and performance and often the trimmings of horror, from ‘Hour of the Wolf’ and others like ‘Wild Strawberries’. I always enjoy the fact that I never know if he is going to drop in a little horror motif. Even ‘Fanny and Alexander’ begins with Death casually walking across a room. And here, Jöns’ early encounter with a corpse is a full-on genre moment. From the unsettling flagellation parade to the beautiful coastal vistas, from the horror of witch burning and robbing corpses to the broad “but my wife” comedy and the wild strawberries communion, Von Sydow’s knight rages philosophically and carves his way through all the tonal fluctuations. 

In the end, the knight finds no meaning from Death – who declares himself “unknowing”, so no answers there – but rather, meaning in moments of mercy and acceptance. This is enough because, of course, Death will always win in the end. A film that remains enigmatic, humanely philosophical and resolutely positive, despite the subject matter. 

The Holy Mountain

THE HOLY MOUNTAIN
Writer & Director ~ Alejandro Jodorowsky
1973, Mexico
Stars ~ Alejandro Jodorowsky, Horacio Salinas, Zamira Saunders

A kaleidoscope of symbolism, symmetry, creativity, misogyny, intentional and unintentional humour, dodgy dubbing and random animals. Jodorowsky gets by on intermediate narrative but a wealth of social and spiritual commentary and prescience: rituals, algorithms, false idols, counterculture outrage, consumerism, selling wars to children via games, etc., and – which got the second biggest laugh from the full audience – religiously themed firearms (the biggest laugh was “My chauffeur is not good at sex”). Meanwhile the soundtrack veers between spiritual chants, jazz, throat singing, to glam and electro. So singular is Jodorowsky’s stream-of-consciousness vision and cut-up carnivalesque narrative that it is impossible to predict what is coming next.

 

 

Jodorowsy fled Mexico during filming because of government threats due to his portrayal of soldiers massacring civilians; John Lennon partly financed it. Gregory J. Smalley writes, 

“The Holy Mountain is meant as a Symbolist work, not as unconscious nonsense; but the end user, unable to decipher the film, experiences it as Surrealism.”  

 Certainly, there’s the overall sense that the true meaning of it all is all in Jodorowsy’s head, and we’re just along for the ride. With the story relegated to intermittently decipherable allegory, the audience is left hooked by the brilliance, bemusement and excess of the film-making.  
   
‘The Holy Mountain’ is all at once and in part stunning, baffling, inconsistent, erratic, dazzling, psychedelic, oblique, deeply felt and always beguiling. The quest is an illusion and the point. Film-making as a religious revelation and indulgence, art as the way to immortality, art for art’s sake.

Eo

Eo

Director – Jerzy Skolimowski

Writers - Ewa Piaskowska & Jerzy Skolimowski

2022, Poland-Italy

Stars - Sandra Drzymalska, Isabelle Hupperte, Lorenzo Zurzolo

 

It can be a little odd/embarrassing telling someone that you went to see a film about the life and times of a donkey. What that doesn’t convey is that any apprehensions that this might be twee, staid or a little po-faced is thrown out from the opening where we have strobing red lights and close-ups that take a while to work out. Anyone who is a fan of Skolimowski’s ‘The Shout’ (which I have been since I was a kid) or ‘Deep End’ will know that he’s quite the master of atmosphere, the offbeat and the uncanny.  Hence, ‘Eo’ is only ever a cut away from some abstraction, or strobing, or amazing vista, always just a step away from alternating between near-fantasy and then neo-realism. Donkey dreams? We have that. A hunt in a forest turned into a hypnotic nocturnal light display? That too. The score and sound design likewise keeps pace by surprising in its variety.

 

Taking a starting point from Robert Bresson’s ‘Au hazard, Balthasar’ (1966), Eo the donkey follows the ‘Black Beauty’ route, an innocent passed though hands both good and bad and always exploited in some way. Even being rescued by the best-intentioned animal rights activists from the circus takes the donkey from the love of his trainer and sets him off on his journey of hazards with occasional reprieves. The edge and suspense are generated by wondering just how bad or good things will get for this unwitting animal at the mercy of a mostly manipulative human world. Unlike Pinocchio, this innocent has no voice, dance routines or agency on his travails. When he falls under the attention of any human, we are concerned if they want to turn him into horse meat or adopt him. The irony is, being under human altruistic care will be his only safety, and going through an open gate in search of freedom might not be the best plan. The machinery of mankind doesn’t allow any autonomy for animals.

 

The subjective view sometimes wanders – a robot dog; a football, even – but it is only when Isabelle Huppert cameos for a little human melodrama that the narrative seems to altogether forget the donkey for a while. ‘Eo’ doesn’t rely on anthropomorphism, despite the occasional donkey memory of the circus woman that loved him; or as Donald Clark writes “You couldn’t call the piece sentimental, but it is occasionally hard not to make it thus in your own head.”  However, the occasional drifts in perspective and open vistas set Eo adrift in a wider world of non-human standpoints, and highlights, say, the herd mentality of football fans; or generate surprising observations, like the apparent class divide between horses and donkeys.

 

Fascinating and restless, a film that succeeds in making the audience contemplate the plight and status of the animals we both adore and maltreat. Unsual and mesmerising.