page_title: Wong Kar-wai
section_title: In the Mood For Love
hierarchical_section_title: Wong Kar-wai / Biography / Widespread recognition (1996–2000) / In the Mood For Love
caption_attribution_description: Maggie Cheung at the Shanghai movie festival (2007). 中文: 张曼玉在上海电影节。
context_page_description: Wong Kar-wai BBS is a Hong Kong film director. His films are characterised by nonlinear narratives, atmospheric music, and vivid cinematography involving bold, saturated colours. A pivotal figure of Hong Kong cinema, Wong has had a considerable influence on filmmaking with his trademark personal, unconventional approach. His films frequently appear on best-of lists domestically and internationally.
  Born in Shanghai in 1958, Wong moved to Hong Kong with his family when he was five. He began a career as a screenwriter for soap operas before transitioning to directing with his debut, the crime drama As Tears Go By. While As Tears Go By was fairly successful in Hong Kong, Wong moved away from the contemporary trend of crime and action movies to embark on more personal filmmaking styles. Days of Being Wild, his first venture into such direction, did not perform well at the box office. It however received critical acclaim, and won Best Film and Best Director at the 1991 Hong Kong Film Awards. His next film, Ashes of Time, was met with mixed reception because of its vague plot and atypical take on the wuxia genre.
context_section_description: In his 2005 monograph, Brunette gives the opinion that Happy Together marked "a new stage in [Wong's] artistic development", and along with its successor – In the Mood For Love (2000) – showcases the director at "the zenith of his cinematic art." The latter film emerged from a highly complicated production history that lasted two years. Several different titles and projects were planned by Wong before they evolved into the final result: a romantic melodrama set in 1960s Hong Kong that is seen as an unofficial sequel to Days of Being Wild. Wong decided to return to the era that fascinated him, and reflected his own background by focusing on Shanghainese émigrés.
  Maggie Cheung and Tony Leung Chiu-wai play the lead characters, who move into an apartment building on the same day in 1962 and discover that their spouses are having an affair; over the next four years they develop a strong attraction. Teo writes that the film is a study of "typical Chinese reserve and repressed desire", while Schneider describes how the "strange relationship" is choreographed with "the grace and rhythm of a waltz" and depicted in "a dreamlike haze by an eavesdropping camera".
  The shoot lasted 15 months, with both Cheung and Leung reportedly driven to breaking point. Wong shot more than 30 times the footage he eventually used, and only finished editing it the morning before its Cannes premiere. At the festival, In the Mood For Love received the Technical Grand Prize and Best Actor for Leung. It was named Best Foreign Film by the National Society of Film Critics and nominated in the same category by BAFTA.  Wong said after its release: "In the Mood For Love is the most difficult film in my career so far, and one of the most important. I am very proud of it." In subsequent years it has been included on lists of the greatest films of all time.
caption: Maggie Cheung, star of In the Mood For Love and three other Wong films
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