By M
To someone who would think it’s funny this review follows Melancholia’s.
To my shame, I don’t know much of the work of Wong Kar Wai. I watched In the Mood for Love and unoriginally thought it was wonderful. Then I watched My Blueberry Nights and quickly decided I couldn’t bother to get interested in the guy. Well, clearly that was too hasty a judgement.
This movie is a pill for euphoria. It is to enthusiastic-happiness exactly what In the Mood for Love is to sad-calmness. Not that it’s not calm, it is; you find calmness in the certainty that you will recover euphoria.
The movie is first a collection of perfect sentences. Those sentences, which, when you get one in a day, you savour for weeks. The music is part of that. It’s chosen and embodied. The characters through those perfect sentences open-up their fragility to you fully, and become the most beautiful actors you have ever seen, thanks to WKW’s camera.
He brilliantly passes from the first story to the second through a random but firm connection, that of ‘love’ or better said, that of the fascination for the other. The way the actors look at each other, it’s truly about that, fascination for the other and then, the world revolving around that person: its interest is infinite not only for what it offers but for what it makes you create.
The secondary characters, such as the owner of the Midnight Express, the little girl who eats ice-cream, and arguably the dull flight attendant, all perfectly serve their role. They help the plot advance and steal you as many smiles and frowns as they please.
Besides all the good things above, the second best thing about this movie is the movement of that golden camera WKW sometimes holds on his shoulder, and that paces you at different rhythms, in a perfect coherence with the different stories told.
Indubitably, the very best thing about this movie is the superposition of images, which again builds the rhythm, including a mix of fast-moving and slow-motion that singularise the characters in unsuspected ways that suddenly create gouache paintings on your screen. What to say, the guy is a genius.
My favourite thing about this movie, which necessarily is the third best thing about it, is that it is a movie about things, and about how we exist in things and how things exist in us. Blurring frontiers, attaching yourself to places that lead you to people, whether they come or not, is the somehow-sad-but-illusioned message that this movie sends. Believe it and you win.
Watch it. And once you have watched it the first time, take it as a pill each time you need it.
cucurbitacee 