Unforgettable

“Actually,” Wong says later, “the role of Tony in the film reminds me of Jimmy Stewart in Vertigo. There is a dark side to this character. I think it’s very interesting that most of the audience prefers to think that this is a very innocent relationship. These are the good guys, because their spouses are the first ones to be unfaithful and they refuse to be. Nobody sees any darkness in these characters -- and yet they are meeting in secret to act out fictitious scenarios of confronting their spouses and of having an affair. I think this happens because the face of Tony Leung is so sympathetic. Just imagine if it was John Malkovich playing this role. You would think, ‘This guy is really weird.’ It‘s the same in Vertigo. Everybody thinks Jimmy Stewart is a nice guy, so nobody thinks that his character is actually very sick.”

In the Mood for Love’s kinship with certain Hitchcock thrillers might have been more apparent if Wong had shaped the picture the way he originally intended: “The opening scene was going to be just these two persons together in a hotel room, and they try to have sex but they cannot. Everybody would be thinking, ‘Who are these people? What are they doing here? Are they having an affair?’ Then we would slowly discover that they are the other side of the story, they are the victims of an affair and are only re-enacting it. And that makes it a little freaky. But somehow it didn‘t work that way, so we started from the very beginning and told the whole story chronologically. The lovemaking scene was moved, and it now came much later. When I saw the film just before I sent it to Cannes, I said, ’Okay, I don‘t want to see that happening at all.’ I think the film is better without it, much more ambiguous. Do they or don‘t they? But because we did film that scene, the two actors have a feeling that they have had physical contact already. They make you feel there must be something going on, but you don’t actually see it.”

Wong rejects the notion that the alternate storylines he often tries out during production are anything more than first-draft approximations, dry runs that did not pan out. He has at times expanded a subplot cut from one picture into a new work; Fallen Angels, for instance, was originally envisioned as an additional plot thread for Chungking Express. Wong likes to keep his options open, but only to a point; he has never embraced the “alternate scenario” contrivances that have become fashionable in the post-Tarantino era. “I thought at one point that with a different choice of footage, and a new narration from Tony Leung‘s character, Happy Together could have been a totally different story. But then I thought, ’Well, too bad. The movie is finished already.‘ In a movie, things that you don’t see are things you cannot confirm. You can only guess.”