Smitten With the City of His Memories

“Sooner or later most filmmakers want to make a film about their childhood,” muses Hong Kong filmmaker Wong Kar-wai, sitting on a balcony of a Los Angeles hotel and languidly puffing a cigarette. “The 1960s was the era in which I grew up.”

And how fondly he remembers it. Born in Shanghai, Wong landed in Hong Kong in 1962, at the age of 5. To this day he recalls the early rhythms of his adopted city--the radio with its stream of Chinese and Western music, the women decked out in glamorous cheongsams (high-collared Chinese dresses), and, perhaps most of all, the way people were involved in one another’s lives.

His latest film, “In the Mood for Love,” which opens in Los Angeles on Friday, incorporates these elements and more, filtered through the gaze of the urban romantic that he is. The story revolves around an adulterous love affair--well, sort of.

“I don’t think this film is about love but about the mood of love,” he says. A tall, lanky man with short-cropped hair, he wears his signature dark glasses while being interviewed during a visit here. “I wanted to create a situation for those things to happen.”

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Hong Kong’s best-known art filmmaker, Wong, 42, has been a cult figure since his earliest films “As Tears Go By” (1988) and “Days of Being Wild” (1991). He then hit a wider audience in Asia and in Europe with “Chungking Express” (1994), a wry, multi-storied film shot in a kinetic, MTV style.

Fluidity is key to his creations. Writing his own scripts and often acting as his own producer, he qualifies as one of Asia’s genuine auteurs. “When I wrote scripts for others, I made them very detailed,” he says. ‘Writing for myself, I make them very simple.”

“In the Mood for Love” evolved out of a couple of other films he began, then abandoned in their original form. The plot is simple although not straightforward. In the crowded Hong Kong of the early 1960s, a man (Tony Chiu-Wai Leung) and a woman (Maggie Cheung) move into adjoining apartments in a neighborhood populated by recent immigrants from Shanghai. They are married to other people, who seem to operate on completely different work schedules and whom we never see.

Over time, out of loneliness and out of proximity, the man and woman become friends. They share meals; they visit each other in their rooms. Both suspect their respective spouses are having an affair with one another; they wonder, should they have one too?

All this is told against the backdrop of intrusive neighbors, noisy mah-jongg games, clandestine meetings and rainy nights. The camera often offers obstructed views, through doorways and windows, down narrow passages. Rooms are filled with period furnishings and highly patterned walls, draperies and rugs. Both protagonists are meticulously groomed. Leung has his hair slicked back, and wears crisp white shirts and narrow-cut suits; Cheung is sleek and elegant in a series of gorgeous, eye-popping and highly fitted cheongsams.

Because the times were financially lean, many were forced to rent out rooms in their flats to strangers. (Shooting was done in older sections of Central and Tsimshatsui Hong Kong, as well as Bangkok, Thailand, which had the right period look for the alleyways and offices where Leung and Cheung work).

In the film, the neighbors live atop one another but maintain a certain gentility as they greet each other in passing, offer bowls of soup or issue invitations to join an ongoing mah-jongg game.

“That’s one of the reasons I wanted to make this film,” Wong admits. “We don’t know our neighbors now. I wanted to make a film about neighbors, about a community, days when people had closer relationships. Even though they have to share the same kitchen or lack privacy, still I feel warm about that.”

As usual for Wong’s films, music has an important role. Playing repeatedly in the background is a languorously romantic Spanish-language Nat King Cole song, “Quizas, Quizas, Quizas” (Perhaps, Perhaps, Perhaps). In preparation for shooting, similar tunes were played for the cast to put them in the right mood. Wong points out that many musicians in Hong Kong in the 1960s were Filipinos who played Latin-inflected music.

“We’re trying to re-create the 1962 of Hong Kong from our memory,” he says. “I wanted to capture all these things in the film--the dress, the look, the space, even the writing.” He is referring to the quotes by a popular period writer about life in those days that are occasionally flashed on screen.

“The image in the film is extremely beautiful because it is from memories,” he adds. “You always remember something which is better than reality.”

Wong believes the filmmaker’s job is to create, not to re-create. “I’m not very fond of realism,” he admits. “Actually, my films don’t show Hong Kong in reality. it’s the Hong Kong I want to exist--it’s my projection. I want the place to be more quiet, less populated, more spacious. This is my point of view.”

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While Wong starts with a basic story, he often picks up elements of his characters from the actors. “That’s why he doesn’t have a script,” says Leung, a veteran of five Wong films. “He’s continuously observing us and developing the script from what he discovers.”

At Cannes last May, the film won two awards. One, the Grand Prix de la Technique, was for the extraordinary look of the film; it was given to cinematographers Christopher Doyle, a longtime collaborator, and Mark Li and art director William Chang. The other was the best actor prize to the normally restrained Leung, who said, upon receiving the award, “I’m in the mood to shout!”

Leung’s first film with Wong was “Days of Being Wild,” in which he appeared at the end, rather mysteriously, as a gambler grooming himself and gathering his personal effects. His character appears and disappears without explanation; he was to have been featured in a sequel to “Days” that was never made. After many working experiences with the director, Leung views such twists and turns with equanimity.

“When you make a Wong Kar-wai film, you basically start with the exterior of the character,” says Leung, a thin, wiry man with a low-key manner. “You just know your name and your profession and the costume you wear. The rest you develop on the set, so we’re shooting and developing our characters at the same time.”

For Cheung too, the appearance of her character had much to do with how she began to define her. “It’s the first time I’ve played such a grown-up woman--and such a feminine one,” notes Cheung, whose parents are from Shanghai. “But there’s something about wearing a cheongsam, its restrictions and how you have to hold your body, how you have to sit, how you have to walk, that created my character.”

Of course, Leung says, there is often some confusion at the beginning of each film, but one day Wong pulled him aside and said, “Why don’t you play [him as] the bad guy? Using the situation as a form of revenge?”

“Well, from that moment, I developed a more complex character,” Leung says. “Otherwise it would just have been an ordinary love story.”

Wong acknowledges that he instructed Leung to look to the dark side of his character, likening the role to James Stewart’s obsessive detective in Alfred Hitchcock’s “Vertigo.” “He looks so clean-cut and decent, doesn’t he?” Wong says. “But, in fact, you have to look more closely.”

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The director plans to keep living and working in Hong Kong indefinitely, unlike some Hong Kong filmmaking talents who keep trying to break into Hollywood. (And, of course, some, like John Woo, have made it.)

“Actually, the process of making a film is the same everywhere,” Wong says. “Those people who went to work in Hollywood and then came back to Hong Kong, they’re telling me the same story--it’s the same case, just different sizes.”

Wong’s next project is “2046,” his first film set in the future. He explains the title: “In 1997, Hong Kong changed status and the Chinese government promised Hong Kong ’50 years unchanged,’ so 2046 will be the last year of this promise. We want to make a film about promise, we want to explore anything that might be changed.”

And where there is change there is nostalgia. “I think we’re living in a way which is so fast, we all want to hold onto something,” he says. “You can be nostalgic about things that happened 30 years ago or nostalgic about things that happened three seconds ago. There’s always a sense of loss.”

Will that element also be in his new film? “I don’t intend to do that,” he says with a smile, “but somehow in the end, people will say I created nostalgia in the future.”

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Film Revives a Fashion

* In Shanghai, “In the Mood for Love” sparks a fad for cheongsams. E1