Last night, I watched "In the Mood for Love," which I've been meaning to see for sometime. After bawling my eyes out at the end, I Wikipedia'd the film, only to find out that Wong Kar-Wai had meant for the English version to be called "Secrets." Thank goodness they'd convinced Wong otherwise because the film is so gorgeous and so elegant that such a paltry title -- edging on the side of nauseating horror flick -- would have done this magnificent film wrong.

"In the Mood for Love" is lush. It is so rich in its reds, and so accurate and so subtle in its portrayal of the evolution and heartache of forbidden relationships that watching it is absolutely delicious. Set in the `60s, the main thrust of the story is about a man rents a room in one apartment, and a woman who rents a room in the apartment next door. Their spouses have late shifts that leave the two lonely, but serendipitously running into each other in the hallways of their apartment building and noodle shops. They soon discover that their spouses are, in fact, cheating on them. In further fact, the cheating spouses are cheating with each other. And so, the abandoned spouses strike up a friendship, slowly and then longingly.

What makes the film zip during the first half is its humor. The laughs track a nice gradient: the slight humor of accident when Chow's (Tony Leung's character) furniture keeps getting mixed up with Su's (that's Maggie Cheung); the slightly more obvious humor of boisterous families obsessed with mahjong and cooking; and the overt humor of a bald, horny man trying to get into Su's pants. And who wouldn't want to get into Su's pants? Or, rather, who wouldn't want to slip off one of her elegant -- and eclectic -- cheongsams. It has been argued that they are supposed to mark different points in time, but they are also just beautiful dresses, strange for their stiffness, and, not surprisingly, unbelievably sexy. They reveal the exquisiteness of Su's character; her put-togetherness. And they leave the rest of the work -- the bottled emotion and the desperate loving -- to Cheung. And she pulls both off beautifully.

Su is equal parts feminine for Tony Leung's austere, belabored Chow. Leung (called "Short Tony" in the East) is enigmatic, calm, restrained. His composure and tightness hold the film together; and when something so small as a hair goes astray, one wonders what has happened to Chow and, simultaneously, why one is so enchanted and drawn to Leung. While, as a result of Leung's superb acting (and Wong's romantic sensibility), there is plenty of lingering over each scene, each cigarette smoked, each fraught gesture, there is a sense that the film itself moves at an unstrained, rather quick pace. Though the characters themselves ache, the cuts and fades-to-black are simple and easy. They keep going even if the characters aren't ready.

And it is this unreadiness that makes "In the Mood for Love" so poetic. When I watched "2046" (my first Wong Kar-Wai experience), I felt defeated and robbed by the tight spaces, and the tightness of Wong's camera shots. I thought it was born of interest for the sake of "interesting"; but, of course, that assumption was too easy. But while watching "In the Mood," I began to understand the strained quality of Wong's filmmaking. I realized that the tight spaces are devices committed to the characters; these awkward physical situations, and our peering into them, telegraph the characters' strained states. And they simply left me wanting more; not only just to see more, but to know these stories intimately, to know them well. I scoured my memory for pointers from "2046," but couldn't dig up anything of use. Some things are not meant fold up neatly and others, I suppose, are meant to be kept secret.

---
Also see reviews by Stephen Teo (who points to Su's cheongsams as indications of the passage of time), Stephanie Zacharek (for Salon), Elvis Mitchell (for the NYTimes), Peter Rainer (for New York), David Walsh (writing vociferously for the World Socialist Website), Michael Thomson (of the BBC), and a refresher on the critically acclaimed (and bemoaned) movies of 2001 (from the Village Voice).