Over the years, plenty of forgettable movies have been hawked in the hallways of the American Film Market, but there have also been some indelible classics — among the most notable, Wong Kar-wai’s swooningly seductive In the Mood for Love, which has consistently topped critics’ polls as one of the best films of all time.
Set in 1960s Hong Kong — though it was actually shot in neighboring Macau and Bangkok over the course of a year — the film stars Tony Leung as Mr. Chow and Maggie Cheung as Mrs. Chan, neighbors in a crowded and shadowy apartment building who gradually come to realize that their respective spouses are having an affair. They then fall into an impossible love with each other themselves.
In setting the stage for the drama, Wong drew upon memories of his own childhood in Hong Kong, to which his family moved after emigrating from Shanghai. “We shared flats with strangers,” he recalled years later in an interview with the British Film Institute. “There was no such thing as privacy; your life was an open book that everyone read over your shoulder. Today, we barely know who lives next door. But in those days the walls were thin and the connections were thick. The characters in In the Mood for Love are inventions, but the world they move through came straight from my childhood memory.”
Fortissimo Films acquired worldwide distribution rights to the $16 million project, produced by the filmmakers’ own Block 2 Pictures and Paris-based Paradis Films. USA Films, a forerunner of today’s Focus Features, picked up U.S. distribution. And Wong had to rush to complete the film in time for its debut in May 2000 at the 53rd Cannes Film Festival, where it was an immediate sensation and Leung took the best actor prize. The film would eventually gross more than $16 million worldwide while securing Wong’s reputation as one of cinema’s great sensualists.