Fa yeung nin wa (In the Mood For Love)

Searching for lost time: longing for the distant Hong Kong of the years 1962 to 1966, the childhood years of the color space artist Wong Kar-wai. Longing also for a fragile dream of love, which is recalled here as a melancholy, beguiling play of shimmering nuances - in circling repetitions whose innermost secret is never revealed. A romantic chamber play. Its intensity is due to the restraint and enigma with which the emotional traces are drawn: a man and a woman, lonely tenement neighbors whose spouses are cheating, come closer together. Architecture of the Delicate, whose shattering climax is the the gentle touch of hands in a cab late at night. Refinement of gently gliding emotions, perfectly composed in terms of color and space, austere and intoxicating, congenially accompanied by Nat King Cole's Spanish hits. A movie of perhaps. Mastery of the melodrama in the form of possibility. (Christoph Huber)

Photo: Austrian Film Museum