In the Mood for Love
2000
Wong Kar-wai
Welcome back to another in our Film Club mini-series, "Already Seen It," in which a member of Film Club chooses a movie from the least they've already seen, and makes me watch it. Catherine has already seen In the Mood for Love, and she sent me this prompt after I let her know that I watched it too.
"With the title and the idea of 'mood lighting' and color psychology, I'm curious if you felt color played a more significant role in the film than usual."
See, this is the kind of shit that I need from my more film-inclined friends in FC. I need prompts that involve ideas that I would have never been able to think about on my own. Catherine apologized that it was a "leading question," and I know what she meant, but I'll confirm it in another way: it was leading in the way that it literally leads me to think about shit that is all new to me, way outside my normal film-watching routine. I can confirm with y'all that I was watching In the Mood for Love and not once during its 98-minute runtime think about the color palette.
But that's the point of this exercise, to explore new ideas, so let's explore it. The first thing I found was that the color was updated from the 2012 version to the 2021 version (both via Criterion). I think I watched the more recent one, with the yellow tinge. I appreciated that someone in those reddit comments said that the yellow one is more accurate to the director's intentions, and I especially appreciated the comment about how the newer one reminds the audience of an old photograph that you'd find in a grandparent's shoebox from way back when. The whole movie is of a specific moment in time, and does feel like we, the audience of the 21st century, are looking back at something from long ago, peering in on a decades-old secret or private moment.
I also read through a few articles. This New Yorker one was particularly nice (you can click the link, but I can't imagine that it works very well on mobile, there was a lot of cool movement on that website when access on the desktop). It spoke mainly to the general aesthetic of the film, both the color and also the style and manner and setting. In the Mood for Love is highly influential in this way, and that article gives a lot of side-by-side comparisons to films that were explicitly influenced by this one.
I don't know if either of these sources speak directly to the "color psychology" that Catherine mentions. I'll be completely honest with you, I am hesitant to adhere to this particular thought process, that certain colors symbolize certain feelings or ideas. I know it's a real thing, and I know that it makes a difference sometimes, I'm just weary of it. I'm talking about something like this, where we the audience can say that there are lots of uses of the color red in the film, and that this red traditionally symbolizes love. I don't believe that's untrue, but I just wonder if that was actually the intention of the filmmaker, or if it's something that we as the audience assign to it.
Like, of course red "symbolizes" love and romance. We see the color everywhere on St. Valentine's Day, for example. But it's a question of chicken-and-egg: do we use red because we feel love and feel compelled to choose red to match that emotion, or are we told that red symbolizes love, and thus are compelled to feel an emotion like love whenever we see red? I think it's relevant to a discussion about In the Mood for Love because 1) red really is present throughout the film (even without thinking about color psychology, I noticed the startling red curtains in the hotel), and 2) the director may have had intentions on invoking certain feelings by choosing certain colors to match with those feelings. Red for love, yellow for nostalgia, green for newness, that kind of thing.
And I of course back wholeheartedly the idea that a director is creating a world that we get to live in for an hour and a half, and that the director is going to be making purposeful decisions, from that macro to the micro, from dialogue to such minor details as what color the curtains should be. All of that makes the film feel that much richer and more important and easier to think about in contexts such as film club discussions and blog posts. I was pulled almost immediately into the world of In the Mood for Love. Just because I wasn't conscious to the decisions like color palette doesn't mean I wasn't subconsciously affected by what those colors were and how they (again, subconsciously) affected how I felt about it in that moment.
If you had asked me what about this film pulled me in so thoroughly before I was asked about color psychology, I would have said that I am fascinated with the ways in which human beings connect and form bonds and examine those bonds in real time and constantly reevaluate what we mean to other people and what other people mean to us. I loved how understated the plot was, how it took me probably a little longer than intended to figure out that these two main characters were connected because their respective spouses were having an affair together. It was an effective film because it didn't feel the need to make it overdramatic. Finding a small spark of connection within the sadness of such a situation was truer to life than any melodrama we would have felt if we had, for example, even seen either spouses face at any point!
(A thought I had about the color stuff in relation to the intriguingly understated plot—I wonder if, like the New Yorker article states, this is one of those movies that requires rewatching. I mean, I know people say that about every movie that's even slightly more complicated than, like, Happy Gilmore, and it's been said throughout this Film Club plenty of times. But my specific thought this time was around wondering who might read such a New Yorker article filled with spoilers about this film. Do people read such articles before watching the film. And, if I were the type of person who could read such spoilers, and then watch the film for the first time, might that first time not allow me more space to think about things such as color palettes? If I'm not trying to keep up with the plot, since I already know it? I'm not going to change my ways because of this thought, but it's a thought were putting out there anyway.)
To me, this felt like a beautiful inverse of one of my favorite movies ever: Brief Encounter. There's the overarching similarity of two people crossing paths and knowing full well in that moment that the paths are not converging but simply crossing. But the difference is the circumstances that bring them together, and the ways that they are kept apart, and how they choose to address that inevitability. I love how both movies have the fucking balls to examine (not "to question," I think that would be overstating it) the idea of monogamy. How there's love in finding your forever person, and then there is a different kind of love in the margins and in the cracks in between, a love that is similarly powerful but a completely separate tone and taste.
All that could be chalked up to "seeing what I want to see," of course. Just like the color palette. But I do want to see it, that's the thing. I really do appreciate the idea that a film is using the sense of sight to its full advantage to move the audience with the emotions it intends to. Color, I can see now, would be an important function of that. Mood lighting too, even though I haven't touched on that yet. I saw the lighting as more indicative of the space that the character inhabit, the crowded apartments versus the quiet moments with just Chan and Chow, the mood lighting reflecting the gentle moments of connection. As with the color, it's not that hard to imagine the director purposefully choose lighting to directly inform what emotions the audience is feeling.
Do I think that these pieces of the film played a significant role? That's hard for me to say, but only due to my own deficiencies when it comes to understanding the art of film, and my lack of confidence. Thinking about it now, though, I can see how such factors lay the framework for an effecting movie about love and one ultra-specific way in which love could find us, wallop us, make us feel pain in its absence. I don't know if color is significant in its role, but everything, color included, certainly added up to me feeling something powerful about In the Mood for Love. Watching this movie felt like unplugging the hole in the wall and listening to the secrets shared within.
GRADE: 4 pukes out of 5
NEXT TIME: We have our Juice discussion on Zoom on 7/22/26 at 9 PM! Followed by a discussion blog post the next day!
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