, described as exhausting and rewarding. ``Most days, you just go in front of the camera and improvise. Kar-wai would watch and watch behind the camera while you do it over and over again,'' said Leung, named best actor at last year's Cannes Film Festival for his role as a conservative, introspective journalist. ``Then comes the smile, and you know you've got it right.''
``In the Mood for Love'' is set in Hong Kong in 1962, a turbulent era when the pre-industrialized British colony was fretting in the shadow of impoverished Communist China, which formally launched the Cultural Revolution four years later and persecuted intellectuals and capitalists for the next decade.
Su Li-zhen (Cheung) and Chow Mo-wan (Leung) rent rooms in adjacent apartments, but they mostly keep to themselves, rarely speaking to each other and being oblivious to the host of nosy but good-natured neighbors.
They find out their spouses are having an affair with each other, and out of curiosity and despair, Su and Chow begin spending more time together. They explore their spouses' liaison, using each other as stand-ins for their partners in mock interrogations. Later, they struggle with a fleeting romance of their own.
It's a relationship with little conversation, a romance with no kisses. They convey their bond only through painful yet yearning glances, both long and discreet, or subtle brushes as they squeeze past each other in stairwells and hallways. The film explores the temptations they silently fight, the joy they fear to show.
``It's a classic Wong Kar-wai film - it deals with the lost soul, the loneliness, and the kind of detached relationship that is so common in today's world,'' Cheung said.
``In the Mood for Love'' is ravishingly rich yet so sparse it seems bleak. Rich primary colors and ballads of Nat ``King'' Cole cloak the movie in a sensual, dreamy mood. But like Wong's previous films, it's not an in-depth character study. It's a showcase of impressionistic portraits of lonely beings, staring at the face of missed opportunities.
``Cinema is a media that combines all these things: It's more than a story, more than music, more than mood,'' Wong said.
Perhaps to accentuate the feeling of forbidden love, the camera is often placed in voyeuristic positions, peering inside a room from the corridor or at a distance from behind a bookshelf. The cheating spouses are never shown in full - only their backs, and often obscured by other objects, are seen.
Though visually stunning, ``In the Mood for Love'' is more sedate that Wong's previous features.
In 1991's ``Days of Being Wild,'' about the demise of a James Dean wannabe bad boy, Wong let the camera languish idly on mundane action or objects - a ticking clock, a cashier waiting for her next customer in an empty store, a policeman walking his beat.
Such lengthy stationary sequences gave way to dizzying hand-held camera action in 1994's ``Chungking Express.'' The film's hip collage of eccentric but ghostly characters include a gun-toting call girl in a blond wig, a fast-food cashier who breaks into and cleans a customer's apartment every day, and a depressed policeman who returns to the same store nightly to buy cans of pineapples with the same sell-by date.
In 1997, Wong was named best director at Cannes for ``Happy Together,'' about two men who leave Hong Kong for Argentina to mend their broken relationship. Wong compared ``Chungking Express'' to pop music, ``Happy Together'' to tango, and ``In the Mood for Love'' to a piece of chamber music. ``Everything happens in a very small room with very little going on. It's not a symphony from which you get a lot of plot,'' he said.
``Most of the events happened outside the frame. There're a lot of things you know, but never actually happened. You don't actually know about the affair, you don't even see a love scene. You have to observe the film to get something that's there.'' AP
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