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Time Out's 101 Films of the Decade – Part 12, with reactions from Peter Jackson, David Fincher, Guillermo del Toro and more…
Predictable? Maybe. Deserving? Undoubtedly. Prepare to swoon and sigh with Wong Kar-Wai's sweeping romance: our favourite film of the decade.
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1. In the Mood for Love (2000)
Directed by Wong Kar-Wai
It's all too beautiful
In many respects, Wong Kar-Wai’s ‘In the Mood for Love’, the film voted Time Out’s best of the past decade, could have been made at any time in the last century. Its story of an unsought love that develops in contravention of social expectations and is frustrated by the practicalities of life, though timeless, somehow befits a period setting; in this, it anticipates ‘Brokeback Mountain’, another recent film set in the 1960s, and recalls ‘Brief Encounter’, Douglas Sirk and a whole tranche of Chinese romantic cinema, not to mention romantic literature. And Wong’s bravura technique, though adventurous, is more modernist than postmodernist, formally expressing psychological and emotional interiority rather than interrogating genre convention or audience expectations. The film, in other words, is not the radical standard-bearer for a new century so much as the superlative development of a longstanding storytelling tradition at which the movies excel.
This story begins in Hong Kong in 1962. As the Chan and Chow couples move into rooms in neighbouring shared apartments, their belongings get mixed up, foreshadowing the intermingling of their marriages: before long, amid a communal hubbub in which every meal consumed and favour exchanged bears an expressive load, we realise that Mr Chan and Mrs Chow, never more than glimpsed from behind, have become involved; with regretful, incremental delicacy, Mrs Chan (Maggie Cheung) and Mr Chow (Tony Leung) recognise this too.
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Wong too gives himself boundaries, both developing and constraining the sophisticated cinematic language he had developed on pictures like ‘Days of Being Wild’, ‘Chungking Express’ and ‘Happy Together’ with production designer William Chang and cinematographer Christopher Doyle, here sharing a credit with Mark Lee Ping-bin. Narrative is approached elliptically, through repetitions and cycles that evoke the experience of routine and memory rather than conventional dramatic progression; on occasion, the only way to chart the passage of time is through the variety of Mrs Chan’s cheongsam dresses. Consistent in cut, as restrictive as Mr Chow’s equally ubiquitous neckties, their patterns vary from lava-lamp blobs to Rorschach blots, fluctuating shimmers to bold floral prints. It’s hard not to think of a chameleon, emotions flaring across its skin even as it remains placidly poised.
The film’s technique revisits a roster of gorgeous motifs – songs, shots, encounters – to establish and vary its emotional terrain. Cropped compositions and jump cuts suggestive of incompletion and destabilisation are set against the lush patterning and luminous slow motion of romance, and this tension is echoed in the leads’ rigorously contained performances. The result is an almost trancelike state of beauty sustained and fulfilment deferred, an ecstasy of longing.
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The trailer is set to Bryan Ferry’s cover of the song that gives the film its English title but is never heard in it. (The feature offers instead the oblique pleasures of Nat King Cole singing in Spanish and the aching strings of Shigeru Umebayashi’s waltz from the 1991 film ‘Yumeji’.) As ironically loaded a title as ‘Happy Together’, the tension between song and story here is less sardonic than bittersweet. Sensuous, sinuous, sincere, Ferry’s arrangement, like Wong’s picture, winds us through the surprise, the yearning, the defiance, the submission and the wonder of love, stressing the joy to which we mustn’t allow the sadness of its possible transience to blind us. ‘Why stop to think of whether this little dream might fade? We’ve put our hearts together. Now we are one, I’m not afraid.’ BW
Read the Time Out review here
View the personal top tens here
Explore the list: |101-91 | | 90-81 | | 80-71 | | 70-61 | | 60-51 |
| 50-41 | | 40-31 | | 30-21 | | 20-11 | 10-6 | 5-2 |
User comments on this story
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- jonah said...
- INFERNAL AFFAIRS???? Posted on Jan 03 2011 00:51
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- jonah said...
- also, too much lord of the rings; they were all the same over-hyped, repetitive crap anyway! Posted on Jan 03 2011 00:50
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- jonah said...
- is anyone else appaled Mesrine and Che have been excluded from this list? Posted on Jan 03 2011 00:46
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- Evie said...
- This list a seriously lacking in Blockbusters. How about a list of Time Out 'Guilty Pleasure' films of the decade? Posted on Dec 16 2010 23:17
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- MattK said...
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No 'Departed'? The film that brought Scorcese his much deserved Oscar
No 'The Dark Knight'? The film that made the mass public take comic book movies (Semi) seriously.
No ' This Is England'? One of the best films Britain has ever produced? Posted on Nov 16 2010 18:39 - Report as inappropriate
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- s ford said...
- Managed to see this fine film at the cinema last night. Wow, what a masterpiece. It has a timeless quality to it and feels like the film could have been made at any time since the 60's. WKW is a master. Posted on Feb 23 2010 13:54
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- Rob said...
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Hi jelon. This list encompassed all kinds of films, surely, there's nothing there about it being limited to any specific categories! I don't think 'boring is good if it makes sense', what I'm arguing is that the films you're criticising are NOT boring! I thought Goodbye, Dragon Inn was a quite lovely and very engaging film and Werckmeister Harmonies was an exciting one. Of course you're free to disagree but I think you should accept that they're certainly not intended to be boring and that critics (I'm not a critic, incidentally, just a film enthusiast) who are positive about them are not 'snobbish'. I like a wide variety of films, including some you mention, such as Let the Right One In and several of Cronenberg's, and I share some of your dislikes (I'm not keen on Von Trier, for example, albeit perhaps not for quite the same reasons as you), but I think what you're saying needs countering because films by the likes of Tarr and Tsai struggle for distribution and an audience as it is - the last thing they need or deserve is to be dismissed in such a casual manner.
This seems to have become a two-way conversation by the way, apologies if anybody else reading is finding it a bit much!! Posted on Feb 17 2010 13:05 - Report as inappropriate
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- jelon said...
- Yes, Rob, there are non-narrative films, but that's not the category here for the best films of the decade. And yes, I never dismiss films offhand. Boring is good if it makes sense. What do you do if you come to a film with an open mind (I always do) and you realize you have to close it because there is really nothing there other than what some snobbish critics will make up it is.. Like you said, there are lots of riches out there,and I'd rather pick those than stare at certifiable weeds. Posted on Feb 17 2010 04:46
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- Rob said...
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M T: thanks for clarifying. I have to say I still don't understand how you can feel a film which you describe as having a 'subtle and understated narrative' makes for a 'showy & frustrating' finale to the list, but there we go...
jelon: a closed mind it is then. Meaning in film isn't conveyed simply by narrative incident, and ideas don't have to come wearing a big sign saying 'hey, this film is all about....'. There are many films packed full of action which mean very little. Films use sound, colour, lighting, editing technique etc to convey and comment on the narrative (if any! - hey, films can even be abstract!) If your only reaction to a long travelling shot, be that in Werckmeister Harmonies or anywhere else, is an automatic 'this is boring' rather than 'that's an unusual approach, why did he did he choose to shoot it like that?' then yes, you'll be bored. People who choose not to use their brains (particularly those worried, shock horror, lest they should be thought 'academic') do tend to get bored easily, I find. It's your loss, I'm afraid. Posted on Feb 16 2010 12:50 - Report as inappropriate
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- jelon said...
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Hey, Rob. My mind is open, but it closes when in Tarr's Werkmeister Harmonies a camera is fixed on a guy's head while he is walking for about 15 minutes. It closes during Sokurov's interminable single-take tour of the Hermitage. It closes when there is admittedly an expectation of a story but no semblance of narrative, excuse for a plot, or some faint idea behind it. I like to close my mind to what in my mind is unredeemably pretentious. In my 30+ years of professional film writing, I have learned not to waste my time keeping my mind open to academic drivel. That's torture and I am not a masochist.
And speaking of omissions, how could Time Out forget Cronenberg! At least 3 of his films should have made it to the upper numbers of the list. And your #1 is too slight to be there. Posted on Feb 16 2010 07:00 - Report as inappropriate
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- M T said...
- I'll agree the Greer reference was wild but I’m not saying the film itself is pretentious yet as a finale to this list I do find it showy & frustrating (I’ll also note I didn’t mention the word ‘torture’ that was jelon). Lets be clear I didn’t dismiss In the Mood for Love, I have no problem with the style of the film in terms of its subtle and understated narrative and I even enjoyed the director’s focus on the small details. But I purely found as a feature length film there was simply not enough substance and weight to the actual story. I thought it was repetitive and relied on the clever camerawork with a bizarre finale not really staying true to the burgeoning love story – which I’ll admit, was intriguing and beautiful, but didn’t go anywhere. As a piece of art it was very interesting, just a long way off the greatest piece of cinema made in the last ten years. As for some of your other comments, I’ve studied cinema, which is actually irrelevant, as surely you would agree the beauty of cinema is that we all don’t like the same films. I also don’t see why I would have to have considered ‘what cinema is and can be’ to have an open mind. Surely by simply watching films I can say what I like or what I disagree with. If someone likes Russian Ark so be it, if someone likes Jurassic Park then the same to them – I happen to like both as it stands. If we all liked the same film, what a dull world I’m sure you’d agree. Without boring anyone anymore, in the words of Daniel Plainview: ‘I’m finished’. Posted on Feb 15 2010 23:35
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- Rob said...
- In the Mood for Love does have a plot, M T, if you look above you’ll see that Time Out have handily summarised it for you there…*sighs*…on a more serious note, I am at a loss as to why M T and jelon feel the need to caricature the views of those who value different qualities in films than they do as ‘pompous’ or ‘pretentious’ – and even more so as to where Germaine Greer comes into things…if you have a problem with cinema that employs long takes and has little explicit narrative, then yes, the likes of Bela Tarr, Sokurov or even perhaps Wong Kar-Wai are probably not for you, but some of us find their films genuinely exciting. Dismissing them simply as ‘pretentious’ or ‘torture’ is the work of a closed mind: M T exhorts me to ‘think again’ without actually saying anything that’s made me feel he’s really given any thought himself to what cinema is and can be. There are such riches out there… Posted on Feb 15 2010 17:54
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- M T said...
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I am back. The original M T and not any of these impersonators talking about Kindergarten Cop. I finally watched In The Mood for Love and despite all the people that had a go at me for saying it was a pretentious end to the list - I now have to say I was right all along.
The film is an interesting understated romance with pleasing visuals, solid performances and a good focus on the small details but doesn't come close to best film made in the last ten years. There is an absence of anything close to a plot, a host of repetitive & meaningless scenes, awful music and a weak finale.
To come ahead of stunning projects like There Will Be Blood and Pan's Labyrinth is a travesty, let alone a list without films like Ameros Perros, The Dark Knight, Mystic River, The Hurt Locker and dare I say it Star Trek to name a few! I've already seen better films made this decade, A Prophet comes to mind.
Its great that lists like this help get people to see films they may never have watched and as I said before I love that films like Jesse James are high up but if people can't see that In the Mood For Love is a typically pompous end to this list, they need to put away their Guardian, pause the Fellini film & close their copy of The Female Eunuch and think again. Posted on Feb 15 2010 15:57 - Report as inappropriate
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- jelon said...
- At least Time Out list is not as snobbish and pretentious as Film Comment's where some 25% of the films are torture to watch (von Trier, Sokurov, Bela Tarr, the most horrible Goodbye, Dragon Inn, Denis' Beau Travail etc).Most glaring omisisons from your list (off the top of my head) are Akin's Edge of Heaven, Swedish Let the Right One In and Moodysson's Lilya 4-ever. What a shame! Posted on Feb 15 2010 03:02
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- JohnnyP said...
- Hellow? Annie Hall? C'mon, it's the best movie of any decade, period. Duh! A glaring omission. Posted on Feb 10 2010 18:01
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