The Fifth Desk · Evaluation
Act I · The Map
Wong Kar-wai · a film · 2000 · about 98 minutes · in Cantonese and Shanghainese
Mode
Chamber drama of manners made into a grammar of longing; a melodrama with its central events withheld
Mythos
The chaste lovers kept apart by honour; the doubled couples and the mask; the secret whispered into a hollow and sealed
Phase
Hong Kong in 1962, Singapore in 1963, Cambodia in 1966; the body of the film in two neighbouring rooms, the coda in a temple ruin
Presentation
Feature film in colour, about 98 minutes, Cantonese and Shanghainese; two principal roles, their spouses kept off screen or seen from behind; an opening and a closing intertitle
Register
From the landlady’s mahjong table to the silence of Angkor; slow motion on a borrowed waltz, and a different dress in almost every scene
Scale
Two people, two rooms, a building that watches, a secret buried in stone
Governing Proposition
In Hong Kong in 1962 a man and a woman, neighbours in rented rooms, find that their spouses are lovers, and resolve not to become what wronged them. They meet, rehearse, write together and part, and the affair at the centre of the plot is never shown. The wager of the film is that a love can be made entirely of what is not done and not seen, and that two people’s decency and the loss of the one thing they might have had can be shown as a single act.
Act II · The Essay
Movement I
An intertitle opens the film, and then a building. In Hong Kong in 1962 two couples take rooms in neighbouring flats of a crowded building of Shanghainese émigrés. Chow Mo-wan, played by Tony Leung Chiu-wai, works at a newspaper. Su Li-zhen, Mrs Chan, played by Maggie Cheung, works in a shipping office as secretary to a man who keeps a mistress. Their spouses are kept off screen or seen only from behind: a voice, a back turned to the camera. The film begins as it means to go on, with the people who will matter most to the plot kept out of view.
The building is a world of landladies, neighbours, food and mahjong, Shanghainese spoken among Cantonese, everyone at close quarters and everyone watching. Corridors are narrow and walls are thin. The camera takes its place in this world as one more neighbour: it looks through doorframes, past bars, around half-drawn curtains, so that the two figures it follows are enclosed by the frame as they will be enclosed by propriety. What the building sees, the film sees; what it does not see, the film will not show.
Wong Kar-wai wrote and directed the film. Christopher Doyle and Mark Lee Ping-bing photographed it, and William Chang Suk-ping designed the production and the costumes and edited it. The music is Michael Galasso’s, with Shigeru Umebayashi’s “Yumeji’s Theme”, taken from Seijun Suzuki’s Yumeji (1991), three Spanish-language songs sung by Nat King Cole, and the Zhou Xuan song from which the Chinese title, 花樣年華, is taken. It runs about 98 minutes, in Cantonese and Shanghainese. It was shown in competition at Cannes in May 2000, where Tony Leung was named best actor.
Movement II
Su goes down to the noodle stall with a thermos. The film slows her descent, and “Yumeji’s Theme”, a borrowed waltz, plays over it. On the narrow stair she passes Chow, and they almost touch. The walk, the stair and the passing return again and again, on the same music, each time in a different dress. Routine is raised to ceremony, and the repetition is the content: this is how the film counts time, and how it shows two people circling something they have not yet named.
The dresses are the film’s only clock. Su wears a different one in almost every scene, and the cuts skip days or months between two shots of the same stair. The film makes time a loop, the way obsession lives it, and the viewer learns that weeks have passed only because the dress has changed. Maggie Cheung’s performance is made of posture and walk; Tony Leung’s of a man who almost speaks.
It rains. The two wait under an awning for it to stop, and do not want it to. Doyle and Lee light the street and the rooms in deep reds and greens, with faces held at the edges of frames and light coming through smoke and rain. Nothing has happened between them, and nothing will happen in the sense that a plot requires. The heights of the film are already rising out of what is not done: a walk, a stair, a shower of rain.
Movement III
A handbag and a tie give it away. Su carries a bag that is the double of one Chow’s wife has, and Chow wears a tie that is the double of her husband’s. The discovery is made through doubled objects, and it is the hinge of the film: their spouses are lovers. The affair at the centre of the plot is never shown. The film gives no scene to the wronging pair, and keeps them as voices and backs; it has no interest in them except as the reason two other people meet.
Chow and Su begin to meet. They agree, in a line the film says once in words, that they will not be like their spouses. The bargain is stated, and everything after it shows its price. The refusal is their decency, and it is also the loss of the one thing they might have had. The film does not choose between the two: virtue and self-betrayal are one act, and it is the act on which the whole story turns.
They rehearse. Su plays the scene of confronting her husband, and Chow takes the husband’s part. Pretence becomes feeling as they play it. The rehearsals are a form inside the form, and they put on the old masks of the doubled couples: two people learn what they feel by acting out what others felt, until they no longer know where the playing stops. The film never says.
Movement IV
One night Su is in Chow’s room when the landlady’s mahjong game begins in the flat. She cannot leave without being seen, and so she stays, trapped, until it ends. The camera holds the two inside the small room as the building holds them, and the hours pass in what is not done; nothing is said that a neighbour could repeat, and nothing happens that the film is willing to show. The community’s gaze becomes a wall, and the comedy of the mahjong table, loud Shanghainese gossip across a crowded flat, is the same law as everything else in the film: what matters is kept from view.
Chow writes martial-arts serials, a second life beside the newspaper, and in room 2046 the two write them together. Smoke curls under a lamp. In a taxi a hand is reached for and withdrawn. Whether they became lovers the film permits and withholds, and it has not been settled since. The form refuses to answer because the answer would turn the knowledge into a plot. The serials are a second life, a world of swordsmen written by two people who will not act in their own; the writing is one more rehearsal, and one more way of being together without being seen.
In an alley they rehearse their farewell, and Su weeps on his shoulder. The parting is acted before it happens, as the confrontation was acted, and the acting is where the feeling shows. Then the film moves from Hong Kong in 1962 to Singapore in 1963, and the chamber drama that has held two rooms for most of its length begins to widen.
Movement V
In Singapore Chow tells his friend Ah Ping an old custom: a man with a secret goes up a mountain, finds a tree, cuts a hollow in it, whispers the secret into the hollow and seals it with mud. Ah Ping is played as relief, and the Singapore section is the thinnest of the film. By 1966 Su has a child, and the film does not say whose. Newsreel shows de Gaulle’s visit to Phnom Penh, and history enters from outside, pasted rather than formed.
At Angkor Wat Chow whispers into a hole in the stone of the temple and seals it, while a young monk watches. The camera pulls back over the ruin. The myth told in Singapore is enacted, and the film’s last summit is a man burying what he never said in a place built for the sacred. What the secret is the film does not tell. A closing intertitle turns the years just shown into a past that can be seen and not reached, and the film ends in stone.
Wong took up the names and the room number again in 2046 (2004), and with Days of Being Wild (1990) the film has come to be read as one panel of a cycle. Its look and its slow motion on music passed into a generation’s film, and its standing among critics has risen since its release; it has been read as a memory of a Shanghainese Hong Kong already gone, made three years after the handover, and as a study of the gaze. What has lasted is a shape: a love made of what is not done, a building that watches, and a secret sealed into a temple wall.
Act III · The Twelve
Judged on structure and the cut. What was kept resists the subtractive test, because the repetitions are the content: the walk to the noodle stall, the passing on the stairs and the rain return, each in a different dress, and they are how the film counts time and shows two people circling what they will not do. The discovery through a handbag and a tie, each the double of a spouse’s, is the hinge. The rehearsals, where the pretence becomes the feeling, are required; the night trapped by the neighbours’ mahjong makes the building’s gaze a wall; and the coda is required, since a secret needs a place to be buried. What gives is the thin Singapore section and the employer’s affair, which doubles a theme the main story has already made.
Score: 8.9 / 10
The disclosure can be stated, and it holds: two people wronged by their spouses refuse to become what wronged them, and the refusal, which is their decency, is also the loss of the one thing they might have had. Virtue and self-betrayal are one act. The film says the bargain once in words and spends the rest showing its price. A second truth is given in image: in a crowded building of émigrés every act is watched, propriety is enforced by landladies and corridors more than by conscience, and the camera takes the neighbour’s place. A third lives in the rehearsals: feeling learned by acting out another’s becomes one’s own. Held below the top because much of the power is mood, and the history of the coda is glimpsed, not opened.
Score: 9.0 / 10
Elevation is frequent, and the method is to make it recur. Su goes down to the noodle stall with a thermos, in slow motion, under “Yumeji’s Theme”, and a routine is raised to ceremony; the two pass on a narrow stair, almost touching; rain falls on an awning while they wait for it to stop and do not want it to; smoke curls under a lamp in room 2046; a hand is reached for and withdrawn in a taxi; the farewell is rehearsed in an alley. The summit is the coda: Chow whispering into a hole in the stone at Angkor Wat and sealing it, watched by a young monk. Held below the top because frequency is bought partly by repetition, and the later returns of the theme lift less than the first.
Score: 8.8 / 10
The archetype is the chaste lovers kept apart by honour, the sword between Tristan and Iseult, the courtly love made by its refusal, and it is load-bearing: the main story is entirely the not-doing. The film builds a second myth in plain sight. Chow tells his friend Ah Ping the old custom of carrying a secret to a mountain, whispering it into a hollow in a tree and sealing it with mud; at Angkor he does it in a ruined temple, and the told myth is enacted at the end. The doubled couples carry the old matter of masks. The limit stands: the body of the film is a chamber drama of manners, and the sacred enters only in the coda. The Vita Nuova, at 9.2, builds the archetype the film inherits.
Score: 8.8 / 10
The inheritance is the Hong Kong and Shanghai melodrama, Fei Mu’s Spring in a Small Town (1948) among it; the film of the love not taken, Brief Encounter (1945) above all; and Wong’s own manner of the 1990s, the handheld camera, step-printing and voice-over of Chungking Express (1994) and Fallen Angels (1995). The turn is double. Against the genre, the spouses are kept off screen, so the affair at the centre of the plot is never seen. Against the manner that had made Wong’s name, the film chose stillness, composed frames and period restraint, and told its story by repetition and costume; the stake was that name. Held below the top because the genre turn returns to a path Brief Encounter proved, and Days of Being Wild (1990) had already set Wong in this decade and mood.
Score: 8.8 / 10
Change the form and the film loses what it knows: that this love exists in what is not done and not seen. The form is made of the not-seen: the spouses without faces, the affair offscreen, the question whether the two ever slept together left unanswered. The camera stands behind doorframes, corridors, bars and half-drawn curtains, so the viewer is the neighbour, watching as the building watches, and the frames enclose the two as their propriety does. The repetitions on the same music make time a loop, as obsession lives it, and the dresses are the only clock. Shown as a conventional melodrama, with the affair seen and the spouses given faces, the knowledge would become a plot. Held below the top where the coda’s newsreel is pasted rather than formed.
Score: 9.1 / 10
Evidence rather than promise, over twenty-six years. The film’s questions have stayed open and argued: whether the two became lovers, which the film permits and withholds; whose child Su has in 1966; where rehearsal ends and feeling begins; what the secret at Angkor is. Readings beyond the love story have accumulated: the film as a memory of a Shanghainese Hong Kong already gone, made three years after the handover; as a study of the gaze and of propriety; as one panel of a cycle with Days of Being Wild and 2046 (2004). The form yields on return, in shots doubled across the two rooms and the variations of each repeated walk. Held by span, and because part of the return is to texture rather than meaning, which renews less than a question does.
Score: 8.6 / 10
Released in 2000, so force and reach are scored together, and the field is the cinema of its decade. The intrinsic force is a grammar of longing made from repetition, slow motion, music and framing, and the demonstration that a love story can be carried with its central events absent. It perfected a manner more than it reorganised what cinema could do, and that keeps force a step below reach. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: it is wide, wider than most art films reach. The film’s look and its slow motion on music passed into a generation’s film, and beyond film into advertising and music video, which is noted as breadth and not weighed; Wong’s own 2046 answers it; and its standing among critics has risen since its release.
Score: 8.9 / 10
Weighed on form, presence, then fabric, across twenty-six years. The film as released survives whole. Its presence has been as wide as that of any art film of its year: continuous exhibition, re-releases, a place in common visual reference, and a standing among critics that has risen. That earns the highest figure a span of twenty-five to twenty-nine years allows. The surface is not fixed to its making: the film is set in 1962 and dressed as a memory, so nothing in it dates to 2000. Against all this stands only the span. Twenty-six years is a short demonstration beside centuries, and the figure says so; Persona, with sixty years behind it, stands at 8.8.
Score: 8.6 / 10
The making is load-bearing in every department. Christopher Doyle and Mark Lee Ping-bing’s photography: deep reds and greens, faces at the edges of frames, light through smoke and rain, a camera never at ease in the narrow rooms. William Chang Suk-ping’s design and editing: dresses that keep time, rooms that rhyme across the corridor, cuts that skip months between two shots of a stair. Tony Leung Chiu-wai’s restraint, a man who almost speaks, and Maggie Cheung’s carriage, a performance made of posture and walk. The music placed as a recurring event rather than a commentary. The costs: the seams of the assembly show in the Singapore section and in the coda’s change of scale; the borrowed theme returns so often that its later entries are automatic; and Ah Ping is played as relief.
Score: 9.0 / 10
Take the two most distant elements: the landlady’s mahjong table, loud and comic, and the silent stone of Angkor where Chow buries his secret. One law governs both: what matters is kept from view, and the world is a set of walls between people and what they want. The mahjong table is one of those walls; the temple is the last. The rehearsals, the rain, room 2046 and the handbag and tie obey it, and the film’s coldness to the spouses, who never get a face, is the law applied without exception. The strain is in the coda’s newsreel of de Gaulle, which brings history in from outside rather than through the law, and in Ah Ping’s broad comedy. The range is narrow, and narrowness earns nothing; the coda widens it, and mostly holds.
Score: 8.8 / 10
Judged on what a film of about ninety-eight minutes holds. Two consciousnesses, each in restraint; marriage, an absent order the whole film obeys; the émigré community, Shanghainese in Cantonese Hong Kong, with its landladies, mahjong and food; labour, in a shipping office and a newspaper, and the writing of martial-arts serials as a second life; the city, in crowded tenements and streets in rain; history, in Hong Kong in 1962, in Singapore, and in Cambodia during de Gaulle’s visit; the sacred, in a temple and a monk. They are held through the two, and that holds the axis lowest: history and the sacred are set at the edge as frame and coda, labour is a set of desks, and the state appears only in a newsreel.
Score: 7.6 / 10
Act IV · The Reckoning
8.7 / 10 · Final Average
Placement: Tier IV · Canonical
Strongest Dimensions
The Living Form at 9.1, then The Unconcealment and The Made at 9.0, then The Inevitable and Pressure on Tradition at 8.9. A form made of the not-seen, in which the viewer stands where the building stands; a disclosure that decency and self-betrayal are one act; a making in which photography, design, editing, performance and music each bear weight; repetitions that are the content; and a grammar of longing that passed into a generation’s film.
Limiting Dimension
The Encompassed at 7.6: two consciousnesses, marriage, the émigré community, labour, the city, history and the sacred are held through the two, with history and the sacred set at the edge as frame and coda, labour a set of desks and the state a newsreel. Above it, The Bottomless Well and The Imperishable at 8.6: twenty-six years of open questions and wide presence, a short span, with part of the return to texture rather than meaning.
The Necessity Cap clears at 8.9 against a threshold of 7.5. The Coherence Floor clears with room: The Living Form at 9.1, The Made at 9.0, The Inner Law at 8.8, each against 7.0. The Epochal Gate is met on all five: The Unconcealment at 9.0, The Archetypal Deep at 8.8, Pressure on Tradition at 8.9 and The Swerve at 8.8 clear the bar of 8.5, and The Imperishable at 8.6 clears it by a tenth. The Universal Minimum is met: of the eleven axes it covers, none falls below 8.6, against 7.5. The Encompassed, which it exempts, clears its own floor of 6.0 at 7.6. Every summit condition is met; the work is held below the summit by its aggregate alone, 8.7 against the 9.0 that Tier V requires.
Basis · a reading from knowledge of In the Mood for Love (Fa yeung nin wa, 花樣年華) as released in 2000, about 98 minutes, colour, from the opening intertitle to the closing one at Angkor: written and directed by Wong Kar-wai, photographed by Christopher Doyle and Mark Lee Ping-bing, designed and edited by William Chang Suk-ping, with music by Michael Galasso and Shigeru Umebayashi’s “Yumeji’s Theme”, shown in competition at Cannes in May 2000. One version circulates as a cut, and it is the object; later releases bear on The Imperishable only. No print, script or subtitle file was consulted. Every axis is judged on the original film, in Cantonese and Shanghainese; English renderings are a reader’s aid rather than the object, and nothing here is charged to them. No dialogue or intertitle is quoted, since no line’s exact words could be certified, and speech is given in substance; songs are named by title alone. The Singapore section and the employer’s affair are described only in outline. Facts that could not be verified, among them the length and manner of the shoot and its locations, the date the film was finished, prizes beyond the acting prize, any later regrading of the image, poll placings and acknowledgements by later film-makers, together with the scene and shot counts and the share of the dialogue, are not given.