Sinophone becoming in Wong Kar-wai’s in the mood for love (2000)

Abstract

Wong Kar-Wai’s In the Mood for Love (2000) tells the story of Mr. Chow and Mrs. Chen, who, in learning that their spouses are engaged in an affair, fall in love themselves. However, in vowing to “never be like them,” Mr. Chow and Mrs. Chen abandon their affections and, by the end of the film, go their separate ways. As many have suggested, In the Mood for Love is as much a melodramatic love story as it is an allegory of Hong Kong’s precarious political situation since the British handover of Hong Kong to China in 1997. But rather than understanding the failure of their relationship in the limited sense of Wong’s representation of the difficulties ahead for Hong Kong’s political reunification with China, we argue that In the Mood for Love should be read as Wong’s portrayal of an opening to a form of life and identity that resists the narrative of Chinese essentialism often purported by the CCP. We explore this potentiality by examining how Mr. Chow and Mrs. Chen’s role-playing of their spouses’ affair, the film’s non-linear sense of time and the continual juxtaposition and confluence of East and West through dress, food, and music function as constructs of Gilles Deleuze’s crystal image. We further contend that the film’s repeated use of the crystal image suggests a Deleuzian reading of the potential processes of deterritorialization and, what we call, Sinophone becoming for both individuals and communities that constitute the Chinese diaspora.

Keywords:

• Gilles Deleuze
• crystal image
• becoming
• Wong Kar-wai
• In the Mood for Love
• Sinophone

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. Yue references the process of reterritorialization (148) once in her essay on the film while we take up and expand upon Front’s (2011) explication of the relationship between music, movement and the process of becoming below.

2. What happens to Hong Kong’s political and cultural autonomy after 2046 remains unclear (Pepper 2019). Nevertheless, as we have seen with respect to both China’s early intervention into Hong Kong’s democratic process in 2014, which motivated the Umbrella Movement, and its recent attempt to impose a severe extradition treaty, leading to the protests in 2019–2020, Hong Kongers have a legitimate fear that they will lose their political autonomy and autochthonic way of life long before 2047.

3. Although Wilson’s essay focuses on the film 2046, she seems to misread this sense of the necessity of moving on from past loves in this film also. In 2046, this ritual of speaking into a hole is repeated and repeatedly discussed by Tak, who is the fictional stand-in for Mr. Chow. Tak is the protagonist of Mr. Chow’s science fiction novel 2046. Tak tells us that he is attempting to return from 2046, where he was in search of a lost love, to get to 2047, two fictional places in the film that designate the year before and after Hong Kong’s independence from China. Yet he is never able to reach 2047 and rides on a futuristic high-speed train for tens of thousands of years. Wong’s point here is that one can never (completely) return to the past, because to do so prevents you from ever reaching the future. Hence, in political terms, Wong seems to be suggesting the obverse of In the Mood for Love. That is, just as a future integration with China is impossible, so too is a nostalgic return to pre-1997 Hong Kong. Hence, through his fiction, Mr. Chow recognizes that he can never return to the love of Mrs. Chen. However, as we have suggested with In the Mood for Love, and with 2046, Wong is asserting that while one must always be moving into the future, so too must one never forget the past.

4. Similarly, Jason G. Coe observes that Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (2000) goes beyond ‘betraying a cultural guilt and silent repression often in tension between filiality and self-fulfillment’ to the point that the film’s use of the Chinese melodramatic form ‘serve[s] as a cultural backbone of a deterritorialized imagined community’ (107).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Richard Letteri

Richard Letteri is a professor of Communication Studies at Furman University in Greenville, SC. He teaches in the areas of rhetoric, political communication and film. His essays have appeared in Quarterly Review of Film and Video, Asian Studies Review and Deleuze and Guattari Studies.

Zac Huang

Zac Huang received his M.A. in philosophy at The New School for Social Research. His main areas of interest are phenomenology, psychoanalysis, and film. He is presently an independent scholar.