Wong Kar-Wai
In The Mood For Love

Yes, there are other reviews and no, I don't care. Talking about masterpieces is a virtue and should always be the right thing to do.

"It was an awkward moment: she stood there shyly with her head down to give him the chance to approach, but he couldn't, he lacked the courage, so she turned and left." In the mood for love

When the unmistakable notes of the iconic musical theme (Yumeji's Theme by Shigeru Umebayashi) begin to play, I am immediately brought back to the moment of that first viewing many years ago, and soon I too think back on the time passed and lost. It too, like anyone's time, is destined to live only in the space granted by memories.

"The root of all man's problems is memory. Without memories, every day would be a new beginning." Ashes of Time

Memories, which define us and simultaneously chain us.

"Memories are always soaked with tears." 2046

A memory, like the story of Su and Chow, perhaps only imagined, certainly never lived. In that amalgam of modesty and shyness in every glance, in every gesture, there is the sense of a love destined from the start to go unfulfilled, between two people who brush against each other without ever truly meeting. Except for the brief moment when two hands hold each other for the first and last time.

A feeling finally lost in the seas of time and space, but survived in the mind, like a hypothesis of happiness, like a secret to be whispered into the hole of a tree just before being sealed inside for eternity. Or perhaps just like the memory of a bitter dream, a dream at the end of which tears flow upon waking, as it is unattainable.

After all, our whole life is nothing but a perception of feelings and desires born from solitude.

But what distinguishes In the mood for love from many other films, even masterpieces (think of The Age of Innocence), that have narrated and depicted, through poignant images, the condition of a stifled, restrained, repressed love due (among other things) to social stigma and the lack of conditions for it to be expressed? Beyond Wong's sublime and wonderful style and the photography of the ineffable Christopher Doyle, not to mention the unmatched class and beauty of Maggie Cheung and Tony Leung, what elevates everything, and makes this one of the greatest films of all time, is precisely the ever-present reflection—central to the Shanghai director's entire body of work—on time.

Wong Kar-wai's cinema is particularly hard and bitter precisely because it confronts you with something that, unfortunately, we all must face over the course of that river that is existence: the passage of time, its being intangible and elusive, its devouring everything—eras, moods, figures, and relationships—without the possibility of turning back, whether one is ready or not.

Wong speaks of the universal condition, confronting you with the irrevocability of regret, the cruelty of fate's caprices and missed connections, due to insecurities and hesitations, and in this, there is something unsettling. Wong conveys all this with unimaginable poetry and beauty of style, a bit like sinking a blade into the chest with delicacy, but the blade of a knife will never leave without deep wounds.

Because the past remains a place shrouded in mist, to be observed with tears, even when memories fade and time thus becomes ash. Before getting lost in a night full of darkness and taking a train to an unknown destination, towards an uncertain fate.