Tag: classic

Film by Ezekiel Yu
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A still from Wong Kar-wait's classic Hong Kong film, "In The Mood For Love," starring Tony Leung and Maggie Cheung, as analyzed and reviewed by Ezekiel Yu.

Power of Perhaps: Wong Kar-wai’s “In the Mood for Love” (2000)

Mrs. Chan and Mr. Chow are well-dressed, well-mannered, and are shown to be nothing but dedicated to their spouses. When they become neighbors in a cramped Hong Kong apartment complex, their exchanges are casual and do not definitively exhibit the signs of attraction. It is only when they begin to suspect that their partners are cheating on them—with each other—that the possibility of their own entanglement emerges. And then something like Mrs. Chan and Mr. Chow’s fuller selves, hidden underneath all that civility and exceedingly neat composure, meticulously unfold; although it is melancholy that pervades the twosome’s rendezvous, not the pleasure of illicitness, because it is fidelity betrayed, and not desire consummated, that serves as the dominant theme of what they find themselves partaking in.

How writer-director Wong Kar-wai sets the scene of their affaire de cœur is one of In the Mood for Love’s (its original Chinese title something like Flower-like Years) defining and brilliantly stylized attributes, and by keeping Mrs. Chan and Mr. Chow’s adulterous partners faceless throughout, he de-prioritizes aspects of these narrative-types that lesser artists would opt not to, in their urge to titillate the viewer.

By focusing on the cuckolded pair, Kar-wai is trying to tell a subtler story; a story less about coveting one’s neighbor’s wife/husband, but about the conditions after such a betrayal has occurred, when one must rebuild some sense of self (and sense of love, if not love outright) with a stranger-cum-acquaintance through the fellowship of mutual loss. […]

Film by Laura Woods
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Posters over time depicting Fritz Lang's classic silent film, "Metropolis" (1927).

Myth in Motion: Review of Fritz Lang’s “Metropolis” (1927)

Sometimes, restriction can push greatness into being, heightening what’s left in its confines. I’ve often noticed this in poetry, with certain writers reaching their zeniths in formalism while their talent slackens in free verse. But my recent attempts to become more acquainted with silent films have provided me with another example of this principle at work. In fact, I often find myself thinking that silent cinema seems like a whole different medium to the “talkies” (it’s really kind of a shame that it couldn’t have continued to develop alongside the latter as a parallel variant of film, but I digress). Silence instils its own demands, and so, its own unique opportunities for pay-offs. What clearer demonstration could be had of this than watching Fritz Lang’s 1927 film, Metropolis?

Viewing Metropolis in 2024, I’m left with an impression of something both familiar, and somehow alien. The film’s depiction of its setting has created a wake of imitators over the last almost 100 years of science fiction—its skyscrapers continue to loom in pop-culture’s view of The Future. Metropolis’s towering imagery has left its imprint, and yet this does nothing to diminish the distinctive power that it holds. Part of the visual signature of the film, and in my opinion, one of the most striking and unusual (to modern eyes) aspects, is in the stylised way its actors move. I often felt like I was watching a dance. From the opening scenes of workers mechanically trudging like cattle at their shift change, we move to the fluid frolicking of the city’s young elites in their gardens above, and through their movement, we understand all that we need to about this unequal world. It’s not altogether realistic—but this is a strength, since it’s very much in keeping with the fable-like tone of the story. […]