"Better a fallen rocket than never a burst of light."
~ Tom Stoppard, The Invention of Love

Friday, May 3, 2019

Relationship Spotlight: Mrs. Chan & Mr. Chow (In the Mood for Love)


The last time I rewatched In the Mood for Love, I was struck for the umpteenth time by how much I love the connection between Mr. Chow and Mrs. Chan.  Today is all about this fantastic pair (premise spoilers for the film.)

Although Mr. Chow and Mrs. Chan have a few encounters early in the film that straddle the line between polite neighborly acknowledgment and more overt friendship – Mr. Chow is pleased to discover their shared interest in martial arts serials – they keep one another firmly in the sphere of neighbors.  Renting rooms from couples in side-by-side apartments, everyone lives on top of one another and everyone is in everybody’s business.  In such close quarters, it’s natural that the two should cross paths, but it’s even more natural that they keep everything at arms length.  At first, this isn’t so much a conscious distancing as it is simply what people do.  They’re in one another’s orbits, but those orbits are distinct.

It isn’t until both begin to suspect that their spouses are having an affair with one another that anything real starts happening between them, but this too begins with such politeness and restraint.  They dance around the issue, Mr. Chow asking where she got her handbag and Mrs. Chan asking where he got his tie, both speaking under the guise of wanting to buy one for their spouses but both knowing their spouse already has one just like it.  When the revelations they already know – “It was a gift from my husband,” “My wife buys all my ties” – are spoken aloud, the pauses are pregnant, almost like they’re swallowing sound itself.  “…I thought I was the only one who knew,” Mrs. Chan speaks out of the vacuum.

From here, they begin two separate relationships.  The first is the one they play-act, speculating as to how the affair with his wife and her husband came about.  Each takes on the part of the other’s spouse, coaching one another on how to get in character, and they continually break their hearts all over again in their mutual need to understand how it happened.  The second, though, is a “simple” friendship (more on those quotations in a second,) writing together, sharing meals, and generally finding comfort and companionship with one another.

But in this conservative time and place, in this fish bowl where they live, no friendship between a man and a woman, both of whom are married, can be simple.  This is a world in which both have to blithely pretend that their spouses are away on business or visiting sick relatives, not run off together, and despite their own protestations that they don’t care what people say, the worry creeps in.  They both wind up calling in sick to work when Mrs. Chan gets stuck in Mr. Chow’s room after the other family living in his apartment comes home unexpectedly.  Even though Mrs. Chan is a neighbor and visits often, they panic at the thought of being found alone together.

Somewhere in this swirl of role-playing an affair, forging a friendship, and fretting about whispers of impropriety, the three threads start to get tangled up in one another, and everything gets less clear.  The lines blur, and Mr. Chow and Mrs. Chan begin to lose track of it all – what’s acting, what’s friendship, what’s love, what’s gossip, what’s real – when they realize how far it’s gotten away from them. 

Such a fascinating exploration, played with such care and gentleness.  It gets me every time.

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