Bittersweet Dreams

Glances exchanged in a hallway. A ringing phone, never answered. A woman waiting under a tiny awning in the pouring rain. A man whispering a secret into a hole in a wall. "In the Mood for Love," director Wong Kar-wai's elegiac new film, is a work of sighs and suggestion, one that points toward meanings but never speaks them aloud, building toward a finale but never surrendering to a conclusion. Without a real sex scene or a true climax, Wong conjures up a mood of tension, mystery and eroticism and stretches it out as far as it can go, and then farther still, like a lover holding on to that final moment before release. This is tantric filmmaking.

"In the Mood for Love" is set in Hong Kong in 1962 (the film is in Cantonese and Shanghainese, with English-language subtitles). By seeming coincidence, a journalist named Chow Mo-wan (played by Tony Leung) and a secretary named Su Li-zhen (Maggie Cheung) move into separate apartments in the same bustling building on the same day. It soon becomes clear that the pair share another connection as well: Both are trapped in troubled marriages. Drawn together by shared hardships, the two strike up an acquaintance that threatens to become something more.

"In the Mood for Love" has a strange, unsettling rhythm and look. The colors are thick and lush; everything seems layered and gilded and lacquered. The film's mellow soundtrack strikes a tone of vague regret. We hear Nat "King" Cole singing a Spanish-language rendition of his song "Perhaps, Perhaps, Perhaps," and the song is played over and over. The film's pacing takes a few beats to settle into, like a jazz band improvising in an unusual time signature. Hours, days and years pass between scenes, without explanation. The ambient noise of the apartment building often seems poised to overwhelm the dialogue, and the rooms and halls of all the buildings are cramped and closing in. Everything is interior. Cheung wears the thin, close-fitting fashions of the period and her clothes seem to be a metaphor for her character's romantic life: It's something that's wrapped tight around her, pushing her to reveal her sexuality even as it confines it. Leung gives a quiet, nuanced performance: His voice is calm, his lips drawn tight, and his eyes betray a deep melancholy.

"In the Mood for Love" is a short film (97 minutes) that feels long. Not because the film is dull or repetitive, but because Wong requires so much of the audience. It's almost an interactive film; it challenges the viewer to read between the lines, between the scenes, to figure out what's happening outside the frame in order to understand the evolving relationship of the characters. What unfolds is a kind of game of cinematic charades, straining to tell us something important while employing all but the obvious words.

Wong's 1994 film "Chungking Express," with its hand-held camera work and blurry, bleary-eyed images, was a fully satisfying work that managed to be lyrical and elusive without being frustrating. "In the Mood for Love" leaves too many emotional questions unanswered (the director and his two stars both told TIME that many of the scenes that were shot were left out of the finished film). Yet there is a certain power in the movie's dreamy irresolution. Nights spent in pleasant sleep fade away in the memory; trouble-filled dreams, however, have the ability to stay with us, at least for a time. "In the Mood for Love" doesn't have an ending, but it lingers.