For Fans of In the Mood for Love

What separates In the Mood for Love from other love stories is that almost nothing happens and everything is felt. Wong Kar-wai understood that cutting away at the moment of contact is more affecting than showing it. The camera lingers on a doorframe, a hand, a cheongsam brushing a wall. The lesson for viewers: the works that hit the hardest at this register are the ones that trust the audience to carry the weight themselves. Past Lives does this. The Remains of the Day does this on the page. Brief Encounter did it first in black and white.

The film's period detail is not nostalgic decoration. The cramped Shanghainese landlady's flat, the shared staircase, the newsreels of de Gaulle visiting Cambodia playing in the background: these details box the characters in. Their social world, the gossip of neighbours, the face-saving codes of 1960s Chinese emigre culture, is precisely what makes their situation impossible. Other films and series that use period setting as moral pressure rather than costume include My Brilliant Friend (Naples, 1950s-60s) and Pachinko, which spans Korea and Japan across four generations.

Shigeru Umebayashi's 'Yumeji's Theme' was borrowed from a 1991 Seijun Suzuki film. Wong Kar-wai simply knew it was the right piece and kept using it. The waltz's stately sadness became inseparable from the slow-motion footage to a degree that the music now sounds like memory even on first hearing. Composers who work this way, where a single repeating theme accumulates meaning across a film, include Jonny Greenwood (There Will Be Blood, The Master) and Ennio Morricone in his more intimate register.

Wong Kar-wai has no genre in the conventional sense. His films are neither melodrama nor art film in any comfortable category. They are about time, specifically about how memory distorts and softens the things we could not bear to feel directly. 2046 is the closest thing to a sequel to In the Mood for Love, following Mr. Chow into the 1970s as he writes a science-fiction novel about people who ride a train to a place where nothing changes. It is stranger and less beautiful, but it completes something the earlier film left open.