In the mood for love

The other day I was watching the movie In the Mood for Love by Wong Kar-Wai. It was the second time I saw it, the first was a number of years ago, when late one evening I stumbled upon it while browsing channels on TV.

I remember the movie had a big impact on me the first time I saw it. I was profoundly touched by it, I felt connected to the mood and to the story on a very deep emotional level. It was one of those movie-experiences where you turn off the TV after the movie ends because you don’t want to break the mood it got you in, and you just sit on the couch for a while thinking about what you saw and how it made you feel.

So when I was browsing the DVD section of the supermarket a while ago and came across a box with 2 movies by Wong Kar-Wai (In the Mood for Love and 2046) I bought it because I wanted to see that movie again, to relive the experience and share it with my girlfriend J, who had not yet seen it.
Very briefly, the story is about two couples who become neighbors in an apartment building. After a while the man of one couple and the wife of the other couple (the main characters in the movie) discover that their spouses are having an affair. This also brings the two main characters together, as they start spending time with each other to talk about the situation, and gradually they also become attracted to one another. They don’t want to be like their husband and wife though, so they do not actually start a relationship, but decide to salvage their marriages.

The first time around, what touched me the most was how the main characters were brought together by chance and by their unhappiness with their existing relationships, and how they gradually became attracted to one another while at the same time realizing they did not want an affair. The impossibility of their attraction and love somehow made me feel sad.

When I was watching the movie for the second time however, it was a totally different experience. During the first half of the movie (when the main characters gradually become attracted to one another) I wasn’t really moved that much at all – at least not to the same extent as the first time. What did speak to me strongly this time however was the end of the movie, where the main characters look back on their ‘relationship’ a few years later, after they have lost sight of each other and have each moved on in life.

Questions about the meaning of their time together, and about what would have happened had they made other choices remain essentially and necessarily unanswered, since they are hypothetical questions. They both still yearn for each other, and look back with affection to their time together, but because of the choices they have made that episode can never be more than a memory, a secret they each carry with them. And its meaning will never be clear either, because there will never be anything more than that vague nostalgic yearning. An off-camera commentator voice says something in the style of “looking back into the past is like looking through a dirty window: everything becomes hazy, nothing is clear”. It was this nostalgic look at our personal histories and the choices we make in life that really spoke to me this time.

I was surprised and wondering about my different reactions both times I saw the movie, and about the fact that neither of these experiences were shared by J, who was not particularly touched by the movie at all. She liked it and found it esthetically pleasing, but she was not emotionally touched by it at all. At first I was a bit disappointed about not being able to share such a deep emotional experience with the person I love. But then it started me thinking about what exactly it was that I connected to in the movie, and why that had been different on both occasions, in the hope of finding out why it had not affected J.

After a while I concluded that each time my reaction had been inspired by my personal situation. The first time I was in an unhappy relationship myself, and the second time I was getting to grips with a key emotional decision I had made in my life. So what spoke to me in the movie was essentially what I was dealing with in my own life each time. That also explained why J remained totally unaffected by it: her life situation didn’t relate to any aspect of the story, so she was not particularly touched by it.

Emotionally speaking, my two viewings and J’s viewing resulted in three totally different experiences, three totally different ‘movies’. But if each one of us projects their own situation and feelings on the story of a movie, and basically sees a different movie than someone else, then how many movies really is a movie? How many stories does one story contain? Clearly the story as it was dreamed up by the author is just one of many possible interpretations.

Each viewer has a unique way of seeing, a unique set of life-experiences and situational variables on which their interpretation of a movie will be based. So each one of those interpretations is really a unique experience. And so there really are as many stories, as many movies as there are viewers. The story as it was made up by the author becomes just a narrative framework for the viewer’s interpretation. Although the author also has put his experiences and feelings into the creation of the story (at least in the best case, if it was created with more than just commercial effect in mind), these become to a certain extent irrelevant once the story is being viewed by someone else, because they will be replaced by the feelings, yearnings and experiences of the viewer.

So when we’re in a movie theater, and the story on the screen touches us profoundly (or not at all), it may be a strange but at also comforting thought that there are literally hundreds of different stories being told that night in that theater, a different one for each member of the audience. Some beautiful, some happy, some sad, and some indifferent.

The story as it is being played out on the screen is just a narrative base, a visual and auditive framework that needs to be completed by our own feelings and yearnings to give it real emotional meaning. We, the viewers, are just as important in creating the movie as was the original author. And because the story as it was interpreted by the author is specific to that author’s personal life and can never be felt in exactly the same way by anyone else, the original story becomes only marginally relevant to the experience. In the end then, in a very true sense we all become the authors of our own personal movie.

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Tags: in the mood for love, interpretation, movie, narration, wong kar-wai

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