DIRECTOR/PRODUCER/SCREENPLAY: Wong Kar-wai
PRODUCTION CO: Block 2 Pictures, Jet Tone Films, Paradis Films
PHOTOGRAPHY: Christopher Doyle, Kwan Pun-Leung, Mark Lee Ping Bin
EDITOR/PRODUCTION DESIGN/COSTUME DESIGN: William Chang Suk-Ping
MUSIC: ​Michael Galasso, Umebayashi Shigeru
WITH: Maggie Cheung (Su Li-zhen - Mrs. Chan), Tony Chiu Wai Leung (Chow Mo-wan), Siu Ping Lam (Ah Ping), Rebecca Pan (Mrs. Suen), Kelly Lai Chen (Mr. Ho), Joe Cheung (Man living in Mr. Koo's apartment), Chan Man-Lei (Mr. Koo), Chin Tsi-ang (Suen's amah), Roy Cheung (Mr. Chan), Paulyn Sun (Mrs. Chow)

FESTIVALS: Best Actor, Best Cinematography, Cannes 2000; Edinburgh, Toronto

REVIEW

““In one emblematic shot, the camera hovers behind Maggie Cheung as she climbs the stairs to her apartment, her swaying hips sheathed in one of her many flowered cheongsams, her rice bucket dangling from her hand. The shot is repeated at least three times, each repetition accompanied by the same slow dissonant mazurka on the soundtrack. The music, the slo-mo, and the incongruity of the elegant dress and the clumsy rice bucket make the moment seem like a dream.

The elusive, erotically charged, dreamlike quality of the film as a whole is heightened by the way shots are framed so that we always seem to be looking through doors or windows or down corridors to see the action, such as it is. This layering of the image is expressive of the kind of layering which goes on within the characters. Drawn together when they discover their spouses are having an affair, Mr Chow and Mrs Chan disavow their own attraction to each other by playing a kind of game of acting out what they imagine Mr Chow's wife and Mrs Chan's husband do when they are together.

The film, thus, is not only a treatise on memory but also on the art of acting. What happens to Mr Chow and Mrs Chan is what happens to great actors when they have the experience of being simultaneously their real-life selves and the characters they're playing. And Cheung and Leung give the most subtle performances of their careers here. But this mixing of fantasy with a heightened sense of corporeality is also what happens in any great love affair, which, recollected after the fact, leaves one wondering where the person one was then has gone.
​
At the end of the film, the fragile hot-house world that nurtured the affair has disappeared, and we are returned to ourselves and the real world of crumbling empires with a newsreel clip of de Gaulle visiting Cambodia, and then with the visit to the ruins of Angkor Wat, which will outlive all - not only the story of Mr Chow and Mrs Chan's love and loss but its memory as embodied in this exquisite, fragile film.”

​– Amy Taubin, Sight & Sound

FILM SOCIETY SCREENINGS

Canterbury
Monday, 14 February, 7.00pm

​Wellington     
Monday, 21 February, 6.15pm 

​Auckland  
Monday, 28 February, 6.15pm

​Nelson     
Tuesday, 8 March, 6.00pm

Tauranga
​Thursday, 24 March, 6.30pm

Whanganui  
Monday, 4 April, 7.00pm

Dunedin  
Wednesday, 4 May, 7:30pm​

​Queenstown  
Tuesday, 17 May, 8.15pm​

Palmerston North
Wednesday,16 November, 6pm

Hamilton  
Monday, 28 November, 8.00pm

CLASSIC & CULT CINEMA selection >>