Giorgio Biancorosso, School of Humanities, University of Hong Kong
Andrew Jones, East Asian Languages and Cultures, UC Berkeley, discussant
Wong Kar-wai’s film "In the Mood for Love" (2000) is set in Hong Kong in the early 1960s and explores the predicament and reactions of a female character (So Lai-chen) who experiences a personal crisis at a time of political turmoil. For all the casual tone with which it is presented, the backdrop of the 1966 riots is a shivering revelation of the social and political conditions that have made possible the protagonists’ solipsistic absorption in their feelings as well as the fragility of Hong Kong’s status as a geographical and political island. Like that other great film about passion and solipsism, Nagisa Oshima’s Ai no corrida (1976), "In the Mood for Love" poses as a mere love story only to open up, in a brilliantly off-handed fashion, a scenario of political devastation against which romance becomes all but impossible.