Kar Wai Wong has strong, nostalgic recollections of his formative years in Hong Kong where, having been born in Shanghai, he grew up from the age of five. In The Mood For Love is the second in a loose triptych of Hong Kong based, 1960s stories, beginning with Wong’s 1990 breakthrough film, Days Of Being Wild, and ending with his later 2004 film entitled, 2046.

Taking place in 1962, In The Mood For Love is about a man and a woman who live in the same building and who suspect that their spouses, mostly away, are conducting an affair. They befriend each other platonically until, after a while, they admit that they matter to each other much more than their morals allow.

Auteur themes resonate in this film, emanating from the director’s vivid and emotional memories of his formative Hong Kong years. Alienation, dislocation and the heightening of these by urban detachment, all give ambience alongside intense aesthetics and a consuming preoccupation with the passing of time.

Substituting the past for the world of his film, Wong attempts to demonstrate how the savouring of moments in life, as they happen, will ultimately do little to lessen the lament of the passing of time, and he conveys this preoccupation by his savouring of moments in the film itself, mostly those between the two lovers. All this bathed in a wash of Hong Kong’s pervading 1960s anxieties, of the encroachment of Communism and the replacement of older cultures by the new.