Do you believe in love at first sight? – a journal (2)

In the past two months I allowed myself by "pure chance" to watch the different faces of love.

The first incarnation of love was brought to me by Wong Kar-Wai’s In the Mood for Love (Fa yeung nin wa); the silent pain of impossibility; the loneliness of two existences that try to subordinate their selves to the languid pace of their dead lives.

Covering feelings in a guise of acceptance and solitude, a journalist and a secretary set their lives shut in a small world or four walls while their spouses keep absent in work. The dominance of curiosity and loneliness drives both to form ways to see each other - on the hall that crosses their rooms or at the Mahjong games organized by the house lady.  A crescendo of chance encounters moves both characters to the juncture of shared thoughts and guilty looks –the brief meeting on the stairs where a single second and a glimpse unseen tell a whole story of two worlds set to collide (a scene brilliantly covered by the music of Shigeru Umebayashi).

Two grow suspicious of their partners’ fidelity and their constant absence coming to the conclusion that their spouses have been seeing each other. The woman wonders how their spouses' affair might have begun, and together they re-enact what they imagine might have happened. Until the world turns into a theater for a foul love.

The film's original Chinese title Fa yeung nin wa  ("the age of blossoms") is a Chinese metaphor for the fleeting time of youth, beauty and love deriving from a song  of the same name by Zhou Xuan, one of China’s seven greatest singing stars (source: Wikipedia).

The movie’s scenery set in a 1960’s Hong Kong’s is visually spirited with the 46  cheongsam dressed by actress Maggie Cheung, patterns of lurid lines and flamboyant shades, and nimble passages through lights of vivance.