Wong Kar Wai: The one that got left out

Last night I found on Youtube a couple of scenes which were deleted from the final release version of Wong Kar Wai’s In the Mood for Love. I felt a little cheated (no pun intended!) when I saw this bit.

The two of them are in the hotel room, wondering how "they" managed to make love; and them finally doing it themselves.

[This link is un-embeddable]

Some of the charm of this film lies in the fact that Su Li-zhen and Chow Mo-wan never really allow themselves to be "like them", like their unfaithful spouses. Their play-acting is endearingly sad, precisely because they never want to do anything more than pretend, rehearse. They have about them a formality which is highly stylised, like the entire film. Their pretences are ruled by a morbid curiosity which seems to arise from a troubled innocence.

No matter how I try to explain why their sleeping together was not hard for me to digest because of any moral considerations, I can hear the tone of disapproval in my own words. The decision to not do anything about the love that comsumes both of them is contradicted by their sleeping with each other. I think what I did not like about this idea is the lack of subtlety. It is a crude statement to hear her orgasmic gasps from the camera’s eye- view which peeps in from the outside of the hotel room window. It turns what is apparently a love born of great conflict and a shared hatred and sorrow, into something tawdry.

Even to me, even while writing this, it seems unfair to put such a premium on the love of these two being unrequited. Not unrequited in the conventional sense, but in the sense of, to put it more aptly, being unrequitable, and hence unrequited. Why, indeed, can’t they be like "them"? Surely the situation is different. Surely the circumstances under which their relationship began, and the reasons for which they love each other are not the same as those of their betrayers?

I’m reminded of the Harrison Ford movie Random Hearts (1999) in which he and Kristin Scott Thomas are in a similar situation, except that their spouses have died in a plane crash (which is why these two meet in the first place) and that the reasons (on her part, mostly) holding them apart are not quite the same as those in Wong Kar Wai’s film. In this case, the betrayers are dead, their affair was not known to anyone else, the survivors are in the green to hook up. But there is the guilt and the impropriety of beginning a relationship so soon after the tragedy, improper especially since Kay has an election campaign to run. It is the guilt that finishes them in the end, and the love that at least Butch still has for his late wife.

In both these movies, the couples choose not to pursue a love that would have made them both very happy, had it not been for the peculiar circumstances under which they had met or come to know each other.

In the Hollywood movie, however, the sex is not something you would even think twice about; perhaps it is some leftover Orientalist in me that wants to see the Asian couple as representing a love that is above the physical.

Somewhere I think the brooding nature of the general aesthetic of In the Mood for Love would have been ruined by a trial and error approach. If they were going to separate and decide not to be together anyway, what is the point of some frustrated lovemaking?

I really must see the film again; I started writing this on a whim and maybe it shouldn’t even be on the blog without more thought, but there you have it.

Who knows. Meanwhile, if I get so perturbed at one hint of sex, i run the risk of turning into a saffron-toting Shiv Seni, or worse, the deluded Jeff Bridges in The Mirror Has Two Faces!