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Rating: "Who has suffered a damage is dangerous because they know they can survive", is the famous line from another movie that tried, with less success, to depict how the end of a great love in an individual's life can become a sickness of the soul. Because love, the kind that happens once in a lifetime, the one with a capital L that is pure irrationality, pure delirium, and pure passion, in my opinion, always knocks on the door in the wrong way and at the wrong time and rarely lasts longer than a fire.
What Wong Kar Wai masterfully manages to portray in this intense film is what happens in the inner world after having loved like this, after having felt in the other the completion of oneself even if only for a short while. Where reason brings out cynicism, leads to the re-elaboration of grief and to the destruction of the object of love to be able to continue to survive, the inner world does the exact opposite because in the senses it is as if certain emotions were recorded forever and a small detail, a distant voice, a song, a gesture, or a glance is enough to bring them to light again.
It is in this state that the protagonist of the film, Chow, moves in the evocative Hong Kong of 1966, suspended between the cynicism of someone who has "survived" and the eager search for those lost sensations. He is nothing more than a wretched spreader ready to beg strong emotions from any woman who can bring back the memory of his only love, but who, once "touched" by him, like him, will love no more.
The illusion of found love can only be created in a dimension suspended between dream and reality because the moment the image is in focus it loses all tension and value, and she who held a promise of happiness becomes little more than the squalid lover of a squalid day.
Acting as a binder between the evocative frames, the claustrophobia of the interiors, the continuous flashbacks, the sensuality of bodies and glances, and the subtle games of seduction is the music.
Listening to the film's soundtrack immediately transports us back to the sensations we felt while watching it and internalizing it.
Among a waltz, a tango, and a rumba we return to perceive the macabre dance of the protagonists' emotions, who possess all the elements to achieve happiness but choose to live in the past and thus in unhappiness.
The main theme curated by Shigeru Umebayashi, as in "In The Mood For Love", is a vortex that obsessively returns, interspersed with the irony of "Sway" or "Siboney", or the solemn "Casta Diva", or even the intriguing "Polonaise", superbly highlighting every step, every gesture, and every glance.
The sounds, which seem to come out of an old dusty radio, expand to recreate the same sensation of intertwining between space, time, dream, reality, and strong emotions that the film intends to convey.
Simply marvelous!
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