ParkBench, Come Sit With Me

Chinese noodle place in a narrow alley walkway. Rainy days. It's Hong Kong in the 60's filled with retro feeling represented by big Siemens wall clock, Japanese rice cooker, vaselined slick hair and a body hugging sensual Cheongsam/Qipao dress. To borrow a phrase from one of the film reviews this movie is a "Literary Vision" which to my interpretation is like a composition of beautiful sentences and old photographs combined together forming that distinctive Won Kar-Wai's hip and artistic style of movie making. His composition of the retro icons mixed with Nat King Cole's Spanish songs and even "Bengawan Solo" song as the backdrop has succesfully transfered us back to the dream and nostalgic time.

The story is about a married man Chow Mo-wan (Tony Leung) and a married woman Su Li-zhen (Maggie Cheung) who moved to an apartments next to each other on the same day. This mellow -drama between the two developed when they both discovered that their respective spouses (which were hinted mostly off-screen as these characters were never really shown in the film) were involved in a torrid affair with each other. Leung and Cheung then fell in love to each other and formed a relationship of restrained love bounded by ethics and moral principles. Their uncertain affair has an air of sadness and consolation over the betrayal they felt from their spouses mixed with a lot of ambiguities about the extend of their plutonic relationship whether it was about the sharing of feelings, love, and sexual desires. Did they eventually slept together?. These are the abstractions of the plot which Wong Kar-Wai has build with a romantic athmosphere and characterization illustrated through a mind -massage narrative, settings, wardrobe and color.

It is a movie of "dream time" and melodrama of mood. The acting of Tony Leung and the sensual Maggie Cheung in her Cheongsam provide a portrayal of restraint love from the fight between emotional desires and moral principles and society's norms. These mood of loves between them were shown like a painted canvas of wet alley street, steak dinner, a seedy hotel room, duck noodles vendor in Singapore, and an anti-climax ending in Angkor Wat ruin in Cambodia.

Filmography:
In The Mood of Love (Hua Yang Nian Hua). Written and directed by Wong Kar-Wai. Starring Tony Leung and Maggie Cheung. Block 2 Pictures, Inc (2000). Cannes 2000 Award.