Time Out's 101 Films of the Decade – Part 12, with reactions from Peter Jackson, David Fincher, Guillermo del Toro and more…

This is an archived page.

Predictable? Maybe. Deserving? Undoubtedly. Prepare to swoon and sigh with Wong Kar-Wai's sweeping romance: our favourite film of the decade.

Time Out's 101 Films of the Decade – Part 12, with reactions from Peter Jackson, David Fincher, Guillermo del Toro and more…

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 |

1. In the Mood for Love (2000)

Directed by Wong Kar-WaiIt's all too beautifulIn 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.

Their initial commiseration is bounded by the watchfulness of neighbours, the attraction it husbands bounded by propriety and shame, and the tentative tenderness that develops between them is a model of sublimation. They collaborate idyllically on a fantasy writing project and take to playacting, rehearsing in diners and on the street scenarios exploring how their spouses’ affair might have begun; how they might confront them about it; how, in the end, they might take their leave of one another without great pain. Each ‘Vertigo’-like attempt can only be in vain.

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.

It’s apt, then, that two of the most stirring components of this film about emotional displacement are not to be found in the film itself. They are found in its trailer, an impressionistic distillation of the picture’s aesthetic and psychological contours that qualifies as a beautiful short film in its own right. It offers a shot from one of the diner scenes in which Mrs Chan enfolds Mr Chow’s hand, closed around his fork, in hers; he withdraws, leaving her fingers splayed on the table. Intimate, frustrated, lasting less than three seconds, it’s more skin contact than the pair are permitted in the entire feature and jolts the heart.

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 |

Share your thoughts

Your rating
Name *
Email *
Comment *
* mandatory fields
Tick to receive relevant updates from Time Out including news, events, offers and competitions.

Comments & ratings

(0 ratings)

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.

jelon Tue Feb 16 2010
Report
1. Name *
2. Email *
3. Reason *
I'll agree the Greer reference was wild but Iâ€™m not saying the film itself is pretentious yet as a finale to this list I do find it showy & frustrating (Iâ€™ll also note I didnâ€™t mention the word â€˜tortureâ€™ that was jelon). Lets be clear I didnâ€™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 directorâ€™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 â€“ which Iâ€™ll admit, was intriguing and beautiful, but didnâ€™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, Iâ€™ve studied cinema, which is actually irrelevant, as surely you would agree the beauty of cinema is that we all donâ€™t like the same films. I also donâ€™t see why I would have to have considered â€˜what cinema is and can beâ€™ 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 â€“ I happen to like both as it stands. If we all liked the same film, what a dull world Iâ€™m sure youâ€™d agree. Without boring anyone anymore, in the words of Daniel Plainview: â€˜Iâ€™m finishedâ€™.

M T Mon Feb 15 2010
Report
1. Name *
2. Email *
3. Reason *
In the Mood for Love does have a plot, M T, if you look above youâ€™ll see that Time Out have handily summarised it for you thereâ€¦*sighs*â€¦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 â€˜pompousâ€™ or â€˜pretentiousâ€™ â€“ and even more so as to where Germaine Greer comes into thingsâ€¦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 â€˜pretentiousâ€™ or â€˜tortureâ€™ is the work of a closed mind: M T exhorts me to â€˜think againâ€™ without actually saying anything thatâ€™s made me feel heâ€™s really given any thought himself to what cinema is and can be. There are such riches out thereâ€¦

Rob Mon Feb 15 2010
Report
1. Name *
2. Email *
3. Reason *
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.

M T Mon Feb 15 2010
Report
1. Name *
2. Email *
3. Reason *
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!

jelon Mon Feb 15 2010
Report
1. Name *
2. Email *
3. Reason *
Hellow? Annie Hall? C'mon, it's the best movie of any decade, period. Duh! A glaring omission.

JohnnyP Wed Feb 10 2010
Report
1. Name *
2. Email *
3. Reason *
Will 2nd '4 months 3 weeks and 2 days' , seems a glaring omission. You could easily take out one of Mike Leigh's to include this. Never worked out why 'Live of Others' is rated so highly. The above film is a also a compelling insight into life under communism

Mr T Mon Jan 18 2010
Report
1. Name *
2. Email *
3. Reason *
Congratulations with your list! Your capsule reviews of each film were right on target. And I could not agree more with your top 10. Indeed, considering the quite large number of films to consider it will really be hard assessing which are the best. I guess it all boils down to your favorites.

rmandgreat Wed Jan 6 2010
Report
1. Name *
2. Email *
3. Reason *
A Very Long Engagement - ???

Rosebud Sat Jan 2 2010
Report
1. Name *
2. Email *
3. Reason *
Superbad??? what were you taking when you included that in the list???

cats59 Fri Jan 1 2010
Report
1. Name *
2. Email *
3. Reason *