[Reading Response] ‘Cuts through Hong Kong’ by Eunice Seng

Seng’s ‘Cuts Through Hong Kong’ fully situates In the Mood for Love in its historical context, revealing it as an embodiment for the conflicting and transient identities of Hong Kong’s migrants in the 1960s. This is achieved through an insightful and coherent analysis of the film’s story, built environment and cinematic style.

The film’s story revolves around the intimate and ambiguous relationship between two Shanghai immigrants – Chow Mo-wan and Su Li-zhen, neighbours in the same apartment complex. Though both were married, their partners never appeared in the scene. A prevailing sense of absence is felt through Chow and Su’s lone movements through the building’s corridor, stairs and steps; each independently wandered through similar spaces, appearing synchronously in mortgage style, which enacts a narrative of what theorist Akbar Abbas calls “metonymic substation”. They became double for each other, filling up the void of each’s partner, and doubling was also reflected in elements like spacial symmetries.

The sense of transience and indeterminacy, in addition to an immigrant state of being, becomes also a feature of the environment. As Seng points out, in the sixties, the city of Hong Kong was changing too, and transitoriness is reflected through the blurring of private and public spaces in the film – for example, the building’s corner, where Chow and Su interact, is transformed into a quite intimate space.

Finally, the film’s temporal collage style captures the transience of identities and time. From 1962 to 1966,  21 temporal shifts flicked through Su’s changing cheongsams. Meanwhile, black screens were used to transit between spaces, metaphoric of the unsettled state and confused identities of the protagonists. In many ways, In the Mood for Love reflects the director Wong Kar-Wai’s wish to capture and preserve the memories of a turbulent time, of what he himself, as a Hong Kong migrant from Shanghai, had lived and experienced.