In the Mood for Love (25th Anniversary)
I was just scrolling on my phone when I came across a photo of my partner and me in a movie theatre, watching a 25th-anniversary screening of In the Mood for Love. We were at the Hayden Orpheum, one of the loveliest cinemas in Sydney, and probably in Australia.
When we entered the theatre, we were greeted with a choice of champagne or cola. Of course, we chose champagne. It felt more romantic. There was no assigned seating, so we picked seats closer to the back, where it was quieter and less crowded. While waiting for the movie to start, we began noticing how many other couples were around us. There were couples in all different stages of their relationships. There were different kinds of banter, familiar glances, small gestures of affection. We even amused ourselves by guessing who was following whose instructions about where to sit. Before the movie had even started, the theatre already felt full of different versions of love.
When the movie started, I was taken in by the beauty of everything: Hong Kong's landscape in the 1960s, Maggie Cheung's incredible performance and beautifully crafted dresses, and, obviously, Tony Leung's dreamy eyes. The film somehow makes even cramped apartments, narrow hallways and ordinary streets feel elegant. Yet the beauty is also strangely confining. Su Li-zhen and Chow Mo-wan are constantly moving through tight corridors, doorways and crowded spaces, as though even the world around them is reminding them of the limits placed on their relationship.
What stayed with me most from that night was not even the surprise short film shown afterward, In the Mood for Love 2001, which was definitely a shift in the mood of the movie. Somewhere during the film, I had become unusually conscious of my partner sitting beside me.
Su and Chow become close while trying to piece together the affair between their spouses. Their love begins through painful circumstances, almost without either of them intending it to happen. They spend time together, rehearse conversations, eat together and slowly become important to one another. Watching them, I could feel myself willing for them to be together.
But they are also determined not to become like their spouses. Their restraint protects them, but it also keeps them apart. They repeatedly come close to choosing one another, only for timing, circumstance or hesitation to get in the way.
When Su finally decides to go with Chow to Singapore, she arrives too late. They continue with their lives, still carrying something for each other, but never quite managing to have each other.
Sitting beside Pranav, I could not help thinking about us.
Pranav and I were both international students, but we had come to Sydney from completely different countries: me from the Philippines and him from India. Neither of us arrived expecting to find the other. I certainly did not imagine that I would come to Sydney and fall in love. Yet, among tens of thousands of students at the University of Sydney, we somehow met each other and ended up in the same classes.
There was something about Su and Chow's relationship that felt familiar to me because theirs, like ours, began so naturally. Nothing was planned or forced. Proximity simply kept bringing two people into each other's lives until something changed. They became close because they lived in the same building and because of the painful circumstances they shared. Pranav and I became close because we kept seeing each other in class, spending more time together, and slowly finding more reasons to stay in each other's lives.
But our lives were uncertain too. We were young, living far from our families, and neither of us knew what our careers would look like. We still don't. We did not even know whether we would be able to stay in Australia beyond our temporary visas. We still don't know that either. Falling in love was one thing; deciding to build a relationship around so much uncertainty was another.
I understood the fear of committing to someone when you cannot clearly see what the future will look like. What if one of us had to leave? What if our careers took us to different countries? What would it mean to plan a life together when neither of us knew exactly where that life would be?
And yet, we chose to try.
Of all countries, of all years, we had to arrive in the same city, at the same university, at the right time to meet each other. There is something extraordinary about that. But I don't think chance alone is what makes our relationship special. Chance may explain how we met. What matters more is the decision to commit and to keep choosing each other in the ordinary days that follow an uncertain future.
Perhaps that is why In the Mood for Love affected me so deeply. Su and Chow found something rare in one another, but finding love and being able to live that love are not always the same thing. Their story made me realise how easily timing, circumstance and hesitation can turn something real into something remembered.
And then I was back on my phone, looking at that photograph again.
There we were, sitting together in the Hayden Orpheum with our champagne, surrounded by strangers and their own versions of love, watching two people on a screen who could never quite choose a life together. Pranav and I may have met because of chance. But being together is something we continue to choose.
Maybe that is what makes love so precious.