In the Mood for Love works on you cumulatively in a way that I find genuinely hard to describe.

The Nat King Cole songs in Spanish. The slow motion sequences. The compressed stairway. The camera that shows you everything except the thing you most want to see.

Wong Kar-wai is a filmmaker who is fundamentally interested in time — not the passage of time but the weight of specific moments. In the Mood for Love is full of moments that feel preserved in amber: the repetition of the staircase shot isn't repetition, it's accumulation. Each time you see it, the shot carries more weight than it did before.

The film is also about desire that cannot act on itself, and the form is an expression of that desire. Every composition is slightly off-center, slightly cropped, slightly wrong — and the wrongness is what produces the longing.

I watched it during lockdown and it was almost unbearable. I watched it last year at a proper cinema and it was almost too full.