Among director Wong Kar-wai's most critically acclaimed films, In the Mood for Love (2000) is a tale about two Shanghainese transplants who, after becoming next-door neighbors in Hong Kong, learn that their spouses are having an affair. Instead of confronting their spouses, Chow and Su turn to each other for support and role-play scenarios as their respective spouses to try and figure out how the affair began. Over time, their friendship evolves into something more—not quite romantic, but not strictly platonic—until Chow moves to Singapore for a change of scenery.
In the Mood for Love had a long, complex, and obstacle-laden production totaling fifteen months of shooting. The film was initially intended to be a straightforward, consumable story to recoup funds from Wong's previous films which, due to his improvisational style and tendency to overshoot and sculpt a story in the cutting room with a glut of footage, were very costly to the studio. Instead, Wong quickly fell into his usual patterns; the atmosphere and setting of In the Mood for Love—Hong Kong of the 1960s—was of too much personal significance for Wong to cut corners. So, as a result of his refusal to use special effects or studio soundstages to artificially recreate the city streets and alleyways of his childhood, the production team sought out locations that approximated the architecture and mood of his nostalgic vision. Much of the outdoor footage was captured in neighborhoods in Bangkok, Thailand. Due to the rapid and perpetual modernization of Hong Kong, none of Wong's old haunts even moderately resembled what they were in the '60s, and due to Wong's notoriously improvisational style and political content, particularly his willingness to be critical of the CCP and the portray the human costs of the Cultural Revolution, they were unable to acquire filming rights in Beijing.
In addition to capturing some of Wong's signature directorial markers—use of slow motion, doubling, and high-energy, kinetic shots, to name a few—the film also contained, as a result of the distended shooting schedule, an interesting variation of cinematography. After having to turn down several other jobs, the original cinematographer and frequent Wong Kar-wai collaborator Christopher Doyle opted to leave the project, and was replaced by Mark Lee Ping Bin, a renowned Taiwanese cinematographer whose sensibilities tend more toward longer, wider shots.
In the Mood for Love is now considered the second installment in a loose trilogy, the first being Days of Being Wild (1990) and 2046 (2004).
