#media/movie#media/movie#drama film from Wong Kar Wai
A wrenching film from Wong Kar Wai that demonstrates the tension of people who have feelings for each other at the wrong times and how thet intersection of love is so rare to find and so hard to act on. It really captures the difficulty of making something real happen.
This same theme is explored at a more modern and light level in strangers never again, where they talk about the “right person at the wrong time” and the often ignored flip of “wrong person at the right time.”
From a letterboxd review:
We don’t need to see them to trust that they’re real. Likewise, Li-zhen and Mo-wan don’t need to fuck in order for it to feel like they’re cheating. Some cab rides can be more intimate than entire marriages; a lipstick-stained cigarette butt left behind by an unseen intruder can say more than a kiss; a shared desire can be more transgressive than any tryst.
Touch is finite. Scientific. Touch is fleeting, and there’s no present tense in the world of Wong Kar Wai — the only valuable currency in his movies is the memory of what might have been.
Wong Kar Wai is really good at demonstrating that “out of reach” feeling, where something feels so close yet so far, where feelings burn so strongly yet there’s no path to release them in, where absurdity courts reality to the point that what’s real is imaginary.