In the Mood for Love (2000): The Love Story Built From Everything Wong Kar-wai Left Out

Two people pass each other on a narrow staircase in 1962 Hong Kong. She is carrying an empty thermos down to the noodle stall. He is coming back up with his dinner. Nobody speaks. The camera slows almost to a stop, strings and plucked notes start a slow, swaying waltz, and for about a minute nothing happens except two lonely people being polite. That's In the Mood for Love, and it may be the most romantic thing you will ever see.

Wong Kar-wai's film is about Chow Mo-wan (Tony Leung) and Su Li-zhen (Maggie Cheung), neighbors in a crowded Shanghainese rooming house who slowly work out that his wife and her husband are having an affair with each other. What they do with that knowledge is the whole movie. They swear they won't be like their spouses, and then they spend the rest of the film finding out how hard that promise is to keep.

Why It's a Masterpiece

Most movies about adultery are about the sex. This one is about the not-sex: the glances, the near-touches, the hours spent not doing what everyone in the building assumes you're doing. Wong told Sight and Sound in 2025 that he reminded Maggie Cheung, who was working without a finished script, that the movie was about what's hidden, not what's said. You can feel that in every frame.

Watch Maggie Cheung's walk. She goes down to buy noodles in a different high-collared cheongsam almost every time, and the dresses become a kind of calendar for the story. Wong noticed the joke himself: the neighbors in the film wonder why she dresses up just to buy noodles. Tony Leung, meanwhile, does something very hard. He plays a decent, wounded man and lets you see, under the courtesy, how badly he wants her. He won Best Actor at Cannes for it, the first Hong Kong actor ever to win that prize.

Then there is the music. Shigeru Umebayashi's "Yumeji's Theme," originally written for Seijun Suzuki's film Yumeji, comes back again and again, always in slow motion and always on the way to or from something ordinary. Wong has said the plucked-string motif felt to him like a heartbeat, and he heard it early in the process. Next to it are Nat King Cole's Spanish-language songs, including "Quizás, Quizás, Quizás," which Wong used partly because, as he told BOMB Magazine, Cole was his mother's favorite singer.

The critics eventually caught up. A 2016 BBC poll named it the second-greatest film of the 21st century, and in Sight and Sound's 2022 critics' poll it placed fifth among the greatest films ever made, the highest-ranked film of this century.

Behind the Scenes

This tight, elegant movie came out of total chaos. Wong started around 1997 with a different film entirely: Summer in Beijing, which he later imagined as a triptych. One plan was three stories about food, each built around an invention that changed home life in Asia. For the 1960s, that invention was the rice cooker. Only that segment survived, and as Wong tells it, a story about food turned into a story about a secret.

Wong called it the most difficult film of his career, and the shoot ran well over a year. The Asian financial crisis hit during production, investors pulled out, and filming stopped while he found new money. Because the old Hong Kong had mostly vanished, the street, taxi and Singapore scenes were shot in Bangkok. The hotel where Chow and Su meet was a military hospital in Hong Kong that has since been torn down.

Christopher Doyle, Wong's longtime cinematographer, shot most of the film before he had to leave, and Mark Lee Ping-bin, best known for his work with Hou Hsiao-hsien, took over. Wong has compared Doyle to improvised jazz and Lee to something more classical and exact, and he credits Doyle with shooting about 80 percent of the film and setting its tone.

Maggie Cheung's dresses were all tailor-made, and because the shoot dragged on so long, they had to be refitted whenever her weight changed. Wong told BOMB that her hair alone took six hours a day.

The ending was a rush. Wong cut a sex scene between Cheung and Leung and a whole 1970s section; the story had originally run from 1962 to 1972. He wanted to call the film Secrets, but Cannes told him there were already too many films with that title. While listening to Bryan Ferry's version of "I'm in the Mood for Love," he found a new one. The film made the festival so late that, as he remembers it, they arrived with a print that had only mono sound. His Italian distributor was furious about the missing love scenes and threatened to sue. The next morning the press screening ended in long applause, and that same distributor hugged him in tears.

Hidden Details You Might Have Missed

• You never see the spouses' faces. Mr. Chan and Mrs. Chow stay at the edges of the frame, glimpsed from behind or only heard. Roy Cheung is credited simply as the voice of Su's husband. Wong said the film is about the two people left behind, not the affair.
• The camera is a nosy neighbor. Look how often a doorframe, a curtain or a shelf sits in front of the lens. Wong said they always put something there so the audience would feel like "one of the neighbors," watching.
• Hands do the talking. Wong says he told his leads to act with their hands, because hands give away what faces hide. Watch the fingers on a cigarette, a letter, the hem of a dress.
• Room 2046. As the Criterion Collection's essay points out, the number on Chow's hotel room door is the year Beijing's promise to leave Hong Kong's system unchanged runs out. It also became the title of Wong's 2004 follow-up.
• Clocks, stairs, the same corridor. The repetition is on purpose. Wong told BOMB he kept repeating the music, the camera angles, the clock and the staircase to show that nothing changes except the feelings of these two people.

The Director's Genius Moment

Spoiler warning: this section discusses the film's final scenes.

The ending is the best idea in the movie. Early on, Chow tells a friend about an old custom: if you had a secret, you climbed a mountain, whispered it into a hollow in a tree and sealed it with mud. Years later, Chow goes to Angkor Wat in Cambodia, puts his mouth to a hole in an ancient stone wall, whispers something we never hear, and plugs it with mud. A monk looks on.

What's brilliant is everything Wong leaves out. We don't get the confession, the reunion or the kiss. The film ends on the secret itself, locked inside a wall that has outlasted empires. After all those cramped hallways and thin walls, the sudden open space is staggering. Wong told Sight and Sound he would still make the same cuts today: "The film is about absence. What's missing is as important as what's there."

Another Way to See It

Most people watch In the Mood for Love as the purest love story ever filmed: two good people who refuse to sink to their spouses' level. Wong has never fully bought that. He has compared Chow to James Stewart in Vertigo, and he told Sight and Sound that in his first conception Chow was driven by spite more than heartbreak. Chow wanted to prove Su was no better than his wife. They softened him eventually, Wong said, but some of that shadow stayed.

Look again at those role-play scenes, where the two act out how the affair might have started or how Su might confront her husband. They are rehearsing betrayal: the betrayed couple trying on the role of the betrayers. Seen this way, the restraint isn't simply noble. It's two people using a game to get close to something they won't admit they want. In novelist Steve Erickson's Criterion essay, the lovers hold back out of "a fragile honor and moral vanity," and he argues that all that self-denial only turns up the heat.

One more twist: the film you watch now may not look like the one from 2000. When Wong supervised 4K restorations of his work in 2020, he changed the color grading on several films, including this one. His answer was that "these are not the same films, and we are no longer the same audience." Fittingly for a film about memory, even its colors have shifted.

Should You Watch It?

Yes, and ideally at night, with your phone in another room. If you need a plot that moves, the first 20 minutes might test you. Give in to the rhythm, though: the staircase, the rain, the thermos, the waltz. By the last scene, you'll understand why critics keep putting this near the very top of their lists.

It's short, grown-up and impossible to shake. It's a good first Wong Kar-wai, and if you've seen it, you already know you need to see it again. Criterion has restored it and released it on disc. Afterward, try 2046 to find out what became of Chow, and be ready for a very different, much sadder man.