All dressed up with nowhere special to go

In the Mood for Love (PG) | Wong Kar-Wai, 98 mins

Wong Kar-Wai's In the Mood for Love has the slimmest of storylines, one made even slimmer by the fact that, though a number of potential plot options suggest themselves as one is watching the film, its director declined, doubtless for his own good reasons, to develop any of them.

Wong Kar-Wai's In the Mood for Love has the slimmest of storylines, one made even slimmer by the fact that, though a number of potential plot options suggest themselves as one is watching the film, its director declined, doubtless for his own good reasons, to develop any of them.

The setting is Hong Kong in the early 1960s. On the same day that the delicate, sensual Mrs Chan (Maggie Cheung) rents a room for herself and her (unseen) husband in an overcrowded boarding-house, Mr Chow (Tony Leung) moves in with his (equally invisible) wife. Following odd tentative encounters between the two in the corridor, on the stairs, in the street, the matchingly lonely Mrs Chan and Mr Chow eventually befriend one another and arrive at the realisation that their respective spouses are having an affair.

Half-an-hour of running time has elapsed, and we're ready for action. So what's it going to be? Is Mrs Chan going to help Mr Chow win back his wife and he her husband? Are we, the patient audience, going to be made privy to the evolution of the offscreen affair exclusively through the pooled investigation of the cuckolded couple? Are Mrs Chan and Mr Chow themselves destined to embark on a torrid liaison which will have the deliciously ironic effect of rendering the adulterers, whose own once fiery relationship has long since settled into a passionless rut, resentful and jealous? Or All of the Above?

The answer is None of the Above. Our heroes languorously drift through the film, chatting to their mah-jong-playing neighbours, dining together and rehearsing, in a series of implausible dialogues, how they plan to confront their errant partners. The operative word of In the Mood for Love is patently "mood" rather than "love".

Wong, who has been crowned "the hippest film-maker on the planet" (why, when hipness is at issue, is it invariably "the planet", never "the world", which is referred to? Why is the word "planet" hipper than the word "world"?), has always been seen in public, at whatever time of day or night, wearing dark glasses. This isn't as trivial a matter as it seems. For such directors (others have been Melville, Godard and Wenders) the world is already an image. Their glasses function as a miniature camera lens, framing and filtering the real world as though it were itself a film - not just any old film but, because theirs is a monochromatic world, virtually every old film from the medium's black-and-white past. And because they become increasingly insensitive to the distinction between the real world and their own cinematically transfigured vision of that world, the films they make tend to be peculiarly appealing to the kind of fanatical buffs whose secret craving is to enter the screen and become participants in, not mere spectators of, the action; the kind of buffs who actually wish the world were a movie. (They exist, I assure you.)

Consider In the Mood for Love. Whatever else might be claimed for it, it's an amazingly glamorous artefact, every shot of which is reminiscent of ... of what precisely? Not of any individual film, nor of any individual director: it's much too subtle for that. I propose, instead, that what it conjures up is nothing less than the distilled essence of film history. Its imagery is therefore fundamentally second-hand, but that in itself need not be a criticism, just as it would be absurd to criticise Chanel's paste jewellery for looking fake.

There is, for example, a repeated shot of Maggie Cheung returning home along a nocturnal back-street with a swaying noodle-bucket in her hand. Visually, the street is nothing to write home about, the noodles are ordinary take-away noodles and Cheung herself, even if she wears a different flower-patterned cheongsam in practically every scene (though why not? The narrative seems to be unfolding over a period of weeks), is attractive without being eye-distendingly yummy. Yet the cinema has shown us nothing as deliriously chic since a high-heeled Marlene Dietrich sashayed into the Sahara in Josef von Sternberg's rococo Morocco.

How does Wong do it? The boarding-house in which much of the story takes place is drab, its occupants are never more than averagely personable specimens of lower-middle class humanity and, were it not for certain obvious linguistic differences, the shipping office in which Mrs Chan is employed as a secretary could be transposed intact into a Ken Loach film. Yet, somehow, In the Mood for Love, shimmeringly photographed by the inevitable Christopher Doyle, is drenched in gorgeousness. It's as though the glamour traditionally invested in a star has this time been expended on an entire film; as though, in just the way other directors' cameras are said to "love" their leading actresses, Wong's camera loves the whole world. Or planet.

A film in which every shot is exquisite, however, resembles a pack of cards solely composed of kings, queens and jacks. The problem with In the Mood for Love is that its imagery has far too many face-cards and not enough twos and fives and eights, which, boring as they are, nevertheless constitute the indispensable nitty-gritty of narrative. As I mention above, the plot goes nowhere. Or, rather, in a strange closing section, it goes to Phnom Penh, for a scene in which Wong maladroitly endeavours to plug his melancholy little romance into the cosmos itself. It can be done - in the 1950s, Rossellini succeeded, movingly, with the climaxes of Stromboli and Viaggio in Italia - but Wong unquestionably botches it.

And why, on what is otherwise a very musical soundtrack, do we never once hear that lovely old standard, "In the Mood for Love"?