In the Mood for Love: Romance as Allegory. Biancorosso, G. In Kim, S. D. & David, J., editors, pages 187--188, October, 2006. The Executive Agency for Culture Cities, The Ministry of Culture & Tourism.
abstract   bibtex   
Hong Kong, 1966. Three years after her “separation” from Chow Mo-wan (Tony Leung Chiu Wai), So Lai-chen Chan (Maggie Cheung) returns to the old flat where her aborted romance had started only to find it empty. Upon asking the whereabouts of the landlady, Mrs. Suen (Rebecca Pan), Lai-chen is told that because of the riots she has left Hong Kong to join her daughter in the USA. Looking out the window, she can hardly hide her tears. It would seem intuitive to interpret her reaction as an expression of regret for a missed opportunity and nostalgia for happier times. But the dynamics of Lai-chen’s sudden breakdown are more complex and signal a subtle yet unequivocal intrusion of politics into what up to that point had seemed a rather narrowly conceived, if extremely sophisticated, romance. For the “missing” landlady was the objective, if unwitting, enabler of Mo-wan and Lai-chen’s encounter and she had come to stand for the environment – personal, social, and political – that had nurtured and protected the growth of their feeling of love. With Mrs. Suen gone, and with the disappearance of a whole communal and societal network associated with her, symbolized by the intricate close quarters of her flat, Lai-chen now knows that the love story has truly come to an end -- hence her despair. While the romance takes shape during a period of relative political stability, its end thus coincides with a moment of political turmoil. Like that other great film about passion and solipsism, Oshima’s The Empire of Senses, In the Mood for Love poses as a mere love story only to open up, in a brilliantly off-handed fashion, a scenario of political devastation against which romance becomes all but impossible. For all its casual tone, then, the remark about the 1966 riots is a shivering revelation of the social and political conditions that have made possible the protagonists’ solipsistic absorption in their feelings as well as the fragility of Hong Kong’s status as a geographical and political island.
@inproceedings{kim_mood_2006,
	title = {In the {Mood} for {Love}: {Romance} as {Allegory}},
	abstract = {Hong Kong, 1966. Three years after her “separation” from Chow Mo-wan (Tony Leung Chiu Wai), So Lai-chen Chan (Maggie Cheung) returns to the old flat where her aborted romance had started only to find it empty. Upon asking the whereabouts of the landlady, Mrs. Suen (Rebecca Pan), Lai-chen is told that because of the riots she has left Hong Kong to join her daughter in the USA. Looking out the window, she can hardly hide her tears. It would seem intuitive to interpret her reaction as an expression of regret for a missed opportunity and nostalgia for happier times. But the dynamics of Lai-chen’s sudden breakdown are more complex and signal a subtle yet unequivocal intrusion of politics into what up to that point had seemed a rather narrowly conceived, if extremely sophisticated, romance. For the “missing” landlady was the objective, if unwitting, enabler of Mo-wan and Lai-chen’s encounter and she had come to stand for the environment – personal, social, and political – that had nurtured and protected the growth of their feeling of love. With Mrs. Suen gone, and with the disappearance of a whole communal and societal network associated with her, symbolized by the intricate close quarters of her flat, Lai-chen now knows that the love story has truly come to an end -- hence her despair. While the romance takes shape during a period of relative political stability, its end thus coincides with a moment of political turmoil. Like that other great film about passion and solipsism, Oshima’s The Empire of Senses, In the Mood for Love poses as a mere love story only to open up, in a brilliantly off-handed fashion, a scenario of political devastation against which romance becomes all but impossible. For all its casual tone, then, the remark about the 1966 riots is a shivering revelation of the social and political conditions that have made possible the protagonists’ solipsistic absorption in their feelings as well as the fragility of Hong Kong’s status as a geographical and political island.},
	publisher = {The Executive Agency for Culture Cities, The Ministry of Culture \& Tourism},
	author = {Biancorosso, Giorgio},
	editor = {Kim, Shin Dong and David, Joel},
	month = oct,
	year = {2006},
	pages = {187--188}
}

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