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In the Mood for Love

156 statements
29 feature instances
6 referencing feature instances

In the Mood for Love	type	TVTItem
In the Mood for Love	label	In the Mood for Love
In the Mood for Love	page	InTheMoodForLove
In the Mood for Love	comment	In the Mood for Love (original title: 花樣年華) is a movie by Hong Kong art-house director Wong Kar-wai, who had previously made a name for himself with the critically acclaimed Chungking Express in 1994. Released in 2000, it is set in early 1960s Hong Kong within a Shanghainese community and tells the bittersweet story of Mr Chow (Tony Leung Chiu-wai) and Mrs Chan (Maggie Cheung) who are neighbors, and whose respective spouses have an affair with each other. While they find themselves increasingly attracted to each other, they refuse to give in to their feelings out of a sense of propriety.It is the second part of an informal trilogy of films. The first, Days of Being Wild (1991), was (partly) about Maggie Cheung's character from this one. Tony Leung also appeared in an uncredited cameo, but it's unclear if he was playing the same character. The third film, 2046 (2004), is about Leung's In the Mood for Love character, with Cheung briefly appearing in flashback. Though thematically similar (as is much of Wong Kar Wai's work, which very often deals with the difficulty of finding love), the films don't have much in common story-wise. 2046 might spoil In the Mood for Love a little bit, but otherwise they're separate experiences.
In the Mood for Love	fetched	2023-06-29T15:28:30Z
In the Mood for Love	parsed	2023-06-29T15:28:30Z
In the Mood for Love	processingComment	Dropped link to Foil: Not a Feature - IGNORE
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In the Mood for Love	processingUnknown	SlowMotion
In the Mood for Love	isPartOf	DBTropes
In the Mood for Love / int_3d7b1b61	type	Twice Shy
In the Mood for Love / int_3d7b1b61	comment	Twice Shy: Downplayed. Both Chow and Chan seem to be aware of each other's romantic feelings, but neither one makes a strong gesture toward the other, and they end up not getting together.
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In the Mood for Love / int_40bb59d0	type	Blatant Lies
In the Mood for Love / int_40bb59d0	comment	Blatant Lies: Chan hears that Chow is sick and wants sesame syrup, so she makes some and brings it to him, then lies and says she wasn't specifically doing it for him.
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In the Mood for Love / int_40cc0c7e	type	Bittersweet Ending
In the Mood for Love / int_40cc0c7e	comment	Bittersweet Ending: Chow and Chan are able to experience true love with each other, but they never consummate their feelings and they end the story apart, with Chow admitting his secrets while alone. It also seems Chan and her husband have broken up, as her new neighbor refers to the apartment's inhabitants as just, "A woman and her son." Chan's marriage was never very real in the film—never shown on screen. Yet it is, ostensibly, the reason she won't be with Chow, so for it to be simply discarded offscreen makes the whole plot more "all for naught".
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In the Mood for Love / int_49d59be9	type	Scenery Porn
In the Mood for Love / int_49d59be9	comment	Scenery Porn: Angkor Wat. (That's assuming every movie photographed by Christopher Doyle doesn't automatically qualify.)
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In the Mood for Love / int_49f6a9e4	type	Most Writers Are Writers
In the Mood for Love / int_49f6a9e4	comment	Most Writers Are Writers: Chow and Chan are both creative people. Part of their relationship is collaborating on a martial arts serial. What kind of person thinks that creative collaboration is terribly romantic? Writers, that's who.
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In the Mood for Love / int_50ca4422	type	Unresolved Sexual Tension
In the Mood for Love / int_50ca4422	comment	Unresolved Sexual Tension: The leads hang out, eat noodles, role play scenes from their spouses' affair as they imagine it, and collaborate on a martial arts serial. They have UST aplenty but they keep their hands to themselves. Worried their landlords will think they're having an affair, they rent a love nest where they go to have their not-affair.
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In the Mood for Love / int_5792b4a	type	Hiding from Embarrassment
In the Mood for Love / int_5792b4a	comment	Hiding from Embarrassment: Mr Chow and Mrs Chan spend a whole night chastely held up in a bedroom together because leaving would mean walking past where their landlords are playing mahjong all night long. If their landlords saw one leaving the other's room like that, they'd think they were having an affair. And they are definitely not having an affair.
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In the Mood for Love / int_6205f4e5	type	Courtly Love
In the Mood for Love / int_6205f4e5	comment	Courtly Love: Their relationship defies categorization—it's too furtive and illicit for Chastity Couple, too subtle and chaste for But I Would Really Enjoy It. Courtly Love is the closest fit; they're basically attempting to do Courtly Love. They believe that not consummating their affair makes it okay, gives them moral legitimacy, and sets them apart from other adulterers. Yet it's also a deconstruction; Chow ultimately comes to the decision that this kind of desire is too hard and painful and he can't keep doing this indefinitely.
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In the Mood for Love / int_64dc65f1	type	Literally Loving Thy Neighbor
In the Mood for Love / int_64dc65f1	comment	Literally Loving Thy Neighbor: Their respective spouses fall into this trope by having an affair with each other. Chow and Chan zigzag the trope with their growing feelings but adherence to the letter—if not the spirit—of propriety.
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In the Mood for Love / int_6627695f	type	Author Appeal
In the Mood for Love / int_6627695f	comment	Author Appeal: Shanghainese culture, and feelings of alienation. Both big parts of Wong's own life. It may be hard for non-Chinese speakers to pick up the fact that there are actually two varieties of Chinese spoken in this film — Cantonese and Shanghainese. For a Chinese audience, this reveals that the setting isn't just any ordinary place in Hong Kong but specifically an exiled Shanghainese enclave.
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In the Mood for Love / int_7a368a80	type	Comic Role Play
In the Mood for Love / int_7a368a80	comment	Comic Role Play: Played for Drama. Chan and Chow meet up to act out fictitious scenarios of being their spouses having an affair, imagining and reimagining how that affair began. It's awkward, funny, tense, and flirtatious.
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In the Mood for Love / int_7abba202	type	The Faceless
In the Mood for Love / int_7abba202	comment	The Faceless: Neither character's spouse is ever shown; we only hear their voices or see the back of their heads. Ultimately he decides to leave his wife, but she decides to stay with her husband. The almost complete lack of information we have about either spouse or marriage means that this decision has minimal context for the audience.
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In the Mood for Love / int_8797239c	type	Bait-and-Switch
In the Mood for Love / int_8797239c	comment	Bait-and-Switch: One scene features Chan asking her The Faceless husband about whether or not he's having an affair. He admits it and she slaps him... except she just mimes slapping him. The scene then cuts to a different camera angle to show that the man is actually Chow and she's practicing how to confront him.
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In the Mood for Love / int_87ab7f69	type	Sharp-Dressed Man
In the Mood for Love / int_87ab7f69	comment	Sharp-Dressed Man: Both leads wear unfailingly formal attire. Chow is always wearing a suit, his hair always gelled. Chan wears an endless parade of beautiful qipaos, hair always in a perfectly coiffed updo. In addition to looking good, this clothing is also restrictive; you can't run in that dress, can't raise your arms in that suit jacket. Other characters wear suits and qipaos too—this isn't unusual within their context. Yet when compared with their peers, the leads go above and beyond. They never dress otherwise, even at home. Their adherence to strict, restrictive standards of dress mirrors their adherence to strict, restrictive standards of sexual ethics.
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In the Mood for Love / int_8b442f50	type	Did Not Get the Girl
In the Mood for Love / int_8b442f50	comment	Did Not Get the Girl: Chow and Chan never consummate their feelings and fail to reunite.
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In the Mood for Love / int_916c72b3	type	Rule of Symbolism
In the Mood for Love / int_916c72b3	comment	Rule of Symbolism: The room number of their rented love nest is 2046. Hong Kong was a British colony for a long time. When it was handed over in 1997, it was given status as a "special administrative region" with 50 years of self-rule. This "one country, two systems" setup will expire in 2047 and Hong Kong will be fully absorbed into the mainland China. Thus, 2046 is imagined to be the final year of Hong Kong as we currently know it.
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In the Mood for Love / int_9a747119	type	Drop-In Landlord
In the Mood for Love / int_9a747119	comment	Drop-In Landlord: Chan and Chow aren't renting apartments, they're renting rooms. Chow's room was the Koos' son's bedroom until he moved out. Their landlords are also their housemates. They're friendly and chatty, exuding grandparent energy, always extending invitations to their tenants to eat dinner or play mahjong with them. On one hand it's nice for the lonely leads to have someone caring for them like this. But on the other hand there's no privacy and it's claustrophobic. Chan and Chow are in their 30s; the landlords are probably in their 60s. Their invitations are nice, but it doesn't really do much to stave off the leads' loneliness and hunger for a friend.
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In the Mood for Love / int_9e07f1f8	type	Nostalgia Ain't Like It Used to Be
In the Mood for Love / int_9e07f1f8	comment	Nostalgia Ain't Like It Used To Be: Played with. It came out in 2000. The director set the film in the 1960s Hong Kong of his childhood. The film depicts its protagonists pining after 1940s Shanghai. They're probably in their early 30s here, and so 1940s Shanghai would've been their childhood.
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In the Mood for Love / int_b25547b1	type	Pink Is Erotic
In the Mood for Love / int_b25547b1	comment	Pink Is Erotic: Chan and Chow rent a room where they go engage in chaste creative collaboration on a martial arts serial and not have an affair. But they didn't rent office space intended for creative professionals — they rented what looks like a love nest set up for a tryst. It's a red room with gauzy curtains and a bed, and it looks sexual. The set design says plainly that which the leads refuse to say.
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In the Mood for Love / int_bda2a088	type	Did They or Didn't They?
In the Mood for Love / int_bda2a088	comment	Did They or Didn't They?: They never consummated their relationship. Probably. There's one night when Chan says, "I don't want to go home tonight," and what follows is not shown. She has a young son in one of the timeskips. He's her husband's. Probably. Although he is the right age to have been Chow's.
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In the Mood for Love / int_c3c18143	type	Hope Spot
In the Mood for Love / int_c3c18143	comment	Hope Spot: The various chances Chan and Chow have of reuniting are missed, and they don't meet again.
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In the Mood for Love / int_d50a5478	type	Unlimited Wardrobe
In the Mood for Love / int_d50a5478	comment	Unlimited Wardrobe: Chan wears a different qipao in every scene, and sometimes even within what seems to be one scene, hinting the two of them are playing out various scenarios more than once.
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In the Mood for Love / int_e28f88b8	type	Last-Name Basis
In the Mood for Love / int_e28f88b8	comment	Last-Name Basis: Supposedly Mrs Chan's name is actually Su Li-zhen, and Mr Chow's full name is Chow Mo-wan, yet these names appear nowhere in the film itself.
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In the Mood for Love / int_eab1efea	type	Landmark of Lore
In the Mood for Love / int_eab1efea	comment	Landmark of Lore: The epilogue of the film takes place in Angkor Wat, a place where Mr. Chow feels he can safely unburden himself of his secret.
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In the Mood for Love / int_faf4a043	type	Good Adultery, Bad Adultery
In the Mood for Love / int_faf4a043	comment	Good Adultery, Bad Adultery: Averted. The protagonists, already close in spirit, discover that their respective spouses are having an affair with each other, yet they tacitly agree not to do likewise — although there are hints (not that there are anything but hints in this film) that they came very close.
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In the Mood for Love / int_fcdf597b	type	Titled After the Song
In the Mood for Love / int_fcdf597b	comment	Titled After the Song: "花樣的年華" (Hua Yang De Nian Hua) is a song by Zhou Xuan. The international title is from the song "I'm in the Mood for Love".
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In the Mood for Love / int_fdc1e848	type	Will They or Won't They?
In the Mood for Love / int_fdc1e848	comment	Will They or Won't They?: A good question. Many viewers have admitted impatience that the protagonists would get it on already.
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In the Mood for Love / int_fe5c7660	type	Eating Lunch Alone
In the Mood for Love / int_fe5c7660	comment	Eating Lunch Alone: An adult variant, the loneliness of the leads is emphasized by their eating meals alone.
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The following is a list of statements referring to the current page from other pages.

In the Mood for Love	hasFeature	Hiding from Embarrassment / int_fd85a7b2
In The Mood For Love	seeAlso	In the Mood for Love
In the Mood for Love	hasFeature	International Coproduction / int_fd85a7b2
In the Mood for Love	hasFeature	Pink Is Erotic / int_fd85a7b2
In the Mood for Love	hasFeature	Titled After the Song / int_fd85a7b2
In the Mood for Love	hasFeature	Unresolved Sexual Tension / int_fd85a7b2

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