Those vanished years—In the Mood for Love

Abstract

In the Mood for Love (2000) is a story about a man and a woman who are not having an affair. They hang around in restaurants and on street corners not having one. They look at each other across hallways. They fail to kiss in the back of taxis, or sheltering from the rain. Later, they sit close together in a hotel room; but they're still not having an affair. On the face of it, the reason for their reticence seems clear enough: his wife and her husband really are engaged in an affair, and they've been none too careful in hiding it. Living out lonely evenings, the discarded partners begin to take solace in chance encounters. Gradually, they fall in love, but—having no wish to “be like them”—don't act on their feelings. So they don't have an affair, and we follow them as they don't have one.