Fa Yeung Nin Wa

When I watch movies like In the mood for love I feel a shooting pain in my head. I feel sad and angry at myself that why I did not watch this earlier. This movie was on LAN for around couple of years. No one evre recommended it to me, most probably because no one ever saw it. Movies like these come on our LAN and because of the lack of a serious audience get lost in the oblivion. IMDb gives it 8.0 and Ebert gives it 3 stars. If any one of them had been more favorable towards it, I would have seen it earlier. The mistake that I made was that I did not check the Awards and Nominations page because if I had done that, I would have seen the awards it won at Cannes. Then I would not have postponed watching it.
I sat down to watch this with a huge expectation, which is not a good thing to do. I was relieved to see that the print available was a DVD rip and the subtitles were embedded in it. I have faced problems with subtitles files in the past which can lessen, if not ruin the movie watching experience.
The entire movie has brilliant use of color and still has a noir potrayal. Before watching this, my favorite movies with extensive color usage were What Dreams May Come and Fear And Loathing In Las Vegas, but both these movies had a script which required extensive color usage. From my limited personal experience I know that it is harder to make an impact by potraying a normal character than an eccentric one and if you apply the same analogy to colors you would know the precise reason why I promoted ITMFL to my favorite colorful movie. This also has the best use of deep focus and shadows that I have ever seen and I have seen Welles, Renoir and Apocalypse Now.
Various scenes in the movie hit you for unconventional but yet extremely effective style of potrayal. In a particular scene two characters are talking at the front door of an appartment. The camera remains fixed at one end of the alley focusing on the character who is outside the apartment and the other character remains outside the frame for the entire two minute conversation. You would not find this in your usual hollywood blah. Another scene has two characters passing on stairs giving each other nothing more than a glance. I am not articulate enough to put that scene into words and I don't think that many people other than Kar Wai Wong would be able to do it on screen.
Smoking has been an integral part of cinema since... well at least since Bogey. But no movie other than ITMFL has used smoke in a better manner. A particular scene opens with a ring of smoke and then the characters come into picture. In another scene the guy is smoking while he is working on a story. The room is not well lit just like the rest of the movie and you can see the smoke rise just above him towards the light source. That particular frame is no less than a Dali picture.
As far as the story is concerned, it is very realistic in nature. No heroic characters, no exagerations, just life. Two people who are aware that their respective spouses are cheating on them are attracted towards each other but they are afraid to do anything about it because of social pressures and the moralistic stand that both of them have taken through mutual consent. That is just a brief idea, for the rest you will have to do what I did... Watch the movie!

Happy Bday Bhatu.