A woman in a high-collared cheongsam goes out for noodles, down a narrow passage lit by a lamp somewhere above her, and the man from the next flat is coming the other way. The film slows them both down, and a waltz plays under them, plucked strings under a single violin, written in 1991 for somebody else's film.
Most of In the Mood for Love (2000) is walks like that one. Two neighbors in 1962 Hong Kong find out their spouses are sleeping together, and both of them refuse to turn into what hurt them. Wong Kar-wai never lets them say what they feel, so the color says it for them: red rationed to a few rooms and one coat, vivid dresses and wallpaper pressed against restrained faces, and doorframes that keep two people apart inside the same shot.
The In the Mood for Love color palette
Start with red, because by Christopher Doyle's account they had kept it out. Doyle, who had been shooting Wong's films since Days of Being Wild (1990), told Reverse Shot in 2004: "I've done many films where we have avoided red and that was a very conscious choice; up to In the Mood for Love, there's no red in Wong Kar-wai's films." The reason was cultural, in Chinese tradition, he said, red "means joy. It's the color for marriages, temples." Years later he told VICE what changed on this film: "we said, 'There's going to be a lot of red.' You have to be careful of red, because it is such an evocative color in Chinese culture. To put red anywhere, it really says something."
So when red does show up, it's an event. Chow rents a hotel room, number 2046, so the two of them can write a martial-arts serial away from the neighbors' eyes, the hotel corridor hangs with red curtains, and Su wears a red coat. The rest of the time the color lives on the walls and on her, and one man controlled both, William Chang Suk-ping, who was the film's production designer, its costume designer and its editor too. "The colors I am using are very vivid, to contrast with the characters' restrained emotions," he said. The room gets loud so they can stay quiet.
Most of that vivid color is in the wardrobe. Maggie Cheung changes cheongsam almost scene by scene; CNN reported that Wong and Chang had nearly 50 made, with fewer than 30 in the final cut. The corridor, the stairs, the rain and the song keep coming back, and the dress is the one thing that changes. "It becomes like a fashion show," Wong told IndieWire in 2009.
The color has also changed since 2000. Criterion and L'Immagine Ritrovata restored Wong's films from the original negatives in 2020, under his supervision, and this one came back with what Sight and Sound called a "yellow-leaning colour grading" that "freaked out many fans," and in its theatrical 1.66:1 after years of 1.85:1 on home video. Wong wrote audiences a note: "I invite the audience to join me on starting afresh, as these are not the same films, and we are no longer the same audience." So an In the Mood for Love palette depends on which master it was pulled from. The one below goes place by place, in story order.
Who shot In the Mood for Love?
Two directors of photography share the credit, Christopher Doyle and Mark Lee Ping-bin, the Taiwanese cinematographer known for his long collaboration with Hou Hsiao-hsien. The shoot ran fifteen months, stretched out by Wong's habit of finding the film while he made it and by the Asian financial crisis, and when it overran Doyle had to leave. He has said he was supposed to shoot Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon and couldn't, "since I was shooting In the Mood for Love and it kept going on forever."
The long, composed holds look like Lee's work for Hou, so the film's stillness often gets handed to him. Wong tells it differently. In a 2025 Sight and Sound interview he said: "Chris was like jazz – improvised, explosive. Mark was classical, precise. The film needed both: Chris's energy in the corridors, Mark's stillness in the close-ups." And then he gave the number: "Chris finished 80% of the film and set the tone."
Doyle, Lee and Chang shared the Grand Prix de la Commission Supérieure Technique at Cannes in 2000, the festival's technical prize, and Doyle's working rule explains how two cameramen ended up with one look. "I always felt that if it is not on the negative, it won't be in the film," he told VICE. So the color was built in front of the lens, in fabric and wallpaper and lamps, and then pushed with what he called "simple lab techniques that are very organic and very direct."
Much of that world in front of the lens wasn't in Hong Kong at all. The streets of 1962 were gone, so the production went to older neighborhoods of Bangkok, and the Hong Kong on screen is partly Bangkok, standing in for a place that wasn't there anymore.
Frames within frames: doors, corridors, mirrors
William Chang on the framing: "We're always seeing them through doors, windows, or corridors. There's no direct contact with the characters. We're looking at things from afar. It gives you space to think and feel rather than just identifying with the actors."
Wong grew up inside that geometry. His family came from Shanghai in 1963, and "We shared flats with strangers. There was no such thing as privacy," he told Sight and Sound, back when "the walls were thin and the connections were thick." He names Rear Window for the neighbors who watch, and then the line that tells you where the camera stands: "The real crime isn't the betrayal; it's being seen."
So the camera stands where a neighbor would, looking past a door jamb, down a corridor, into a mirror, and every one of those is a frame inside the frame that takes a little more room away from the two people inside it. Wong treats the rooms as characters. "I had to know the apartments and the streets intimately," he said. "They are the silent witness to the whole story."
A century earlier, in the grey Copenhagen flat he shared with his wife Ida, Vilhelm Hammershøi painted a woman in black from behind, seen through an open doorway with more open doors around her. The Städel Museum's note on the picture could caption half of Wong's shots: "Closed in by the open doors in the adjacent room, she is fixed at the centre of the painting – like an object."
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Where you stand
The painting puts you in an empty room: a chair against the wall, a door swung open on the right, bare floorboards running toward her. Nobody looks back. You are the neighbor.
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The first frame
The doorway and its moulding cut a second rectangle into the canvas, and its open leaf narrows it again on the left.
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A room past the room
Through the left of the doorway, another open door and a window: a frame inside the frame inside the frame.
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The figure
She stands at the center with her back turned, held by every rectangle around her. The Städel’s word for what that does to her is “object.”
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The door that stays open
The white door on the right stands open in your room, the biggest shape in the picture. Nobody walks through it.
Slow motion and Yumeji's Theme
The slow-motion passages all ride one piece of music, "Yumeji's Theme," which Shigeru Umebayashi composed for Seijun Suzuki's Yumeji (1991), the last film of Suzuki's Taishō trilogy, and Wong lifted it whole. Writing for Take One, Lewis Brindle counts nine appearances, the first one four minutes in, each taking up several minutes and "often forcing the film into slow motion." Wong told Sight and Sound the plucked string motif "felt like a heartbeat," and he explained why it keeps coming back: "Repetition is how memory works. The same song, the same stairs – each time, the meaning changes. It's not nostalgia; it's haunting."
This slow motion is overcranking: the camera runs faster than the projector, so a walk that took three seconds on set takes six when shot at 48 frames per second and shown at 24. Every frame is a fresh exposure, so the movement stays smooth and full of detail.
The extra time is for the hands. "Hands betray what faces hide. A touch, a hesitation," Wong said. "I told Tony and Maggie to let their hands speak. The cigarette, the letter, the hem of a dress… desire lives in those details, and hands don't lie like faces do." Slowed down, a hand on a doorframe has time to say a whole sentence while the faces stay composed.
Step printing: the Chungking Express look
Six years earlier, on Chungking Express (1994), Wong and Doyle had bent time the other way. They shot at low frame rates and printed each frame several times, so the action plays at normal speed but moves in smeared, stuttering jumps, and a man can stand still at a snack-bar counter while the crowd tears past him in streaks. How that step printing works, shutter and arithmetic included, is taken apart in Fallen Angels and Chungking Express.
Happy Together and 2046: color you can't go back to
Happy Together (1997) uses color as a state of mind more openly than anything else Wong made. Doyle shot it in Buenos Aires, and much of the first act is black and white. Color breaks in with the Iguazu Falls, the waterfall the couple set out to see together and never reached, seen the way Lai imagines it, and midway, in Sight and Sound's words, "the movie explodes into colour." At the end Lai stands at the falls alone.
The credits list the first and second camera assistants as Lai Yiu-Fai and Ho Po-Wing, which are the names of the two lovers.
2046 (2004) takes its title from that hotel room in In the Mood for Love. In Film Comment, Nathan Lee noted it was the first time Wong framed in CinemaScope and called the look "hieratic, frieze-like, neo-classical," with heads filling the frame "like marble busts." After it Doyle and Wong went separate ways.
The color of longing
In the Mood for Love itself ends somewhere else. It jumps to 1966 and to Angkor Wat in Cambodia, where Chow whispers into a hollow in the temple wall and seals it with mud while a monk watches, and after all those dark Hong Kong corridors the screen is suddenly stone and daylight. Wong cut a love scene and a whole 1970s section on the way to that ending, and twenty-five years later he says he'd cut them again: "The film is about absence. What's missing is as important as what's there."
That line describes the palette too. Red is rationed, so every time it appears it reads as want. The dress changes and the corridor never does, so the one thing that moves on screen is the thing neither of them can say. The doorways hold two people apart inside the same shot, and the slow motion stretches exactly the moments in which nothing is allowed to happen.
SURRENDER, The Interval of Becoming is built the way Wong builds a shot, one frame stacked on another: a figure in electric blue with the head thrown back, then a hard black band where a face in red profile meets the blue rising from a throat. Its statement asks a moment to hold, "Time forgets to count," which is what the slow motion does to a walk down a corridor.
Frequently asked questions
What colors are in the In the Mood for Love color palette?
Read from the sets and costumes: saturated red, used sparingly and concentrated around the hotel and room 2046; greens and patterned papers in the apartments; warm lamp and streetlight amber at night; stone and daylight in the 1966 Angkor Wat coda. Any palette built from the 2020 restoration will run warmer than one built from older releases.
Who was the cinematographer of In the Mood for Love?
Christopher Doyle and Mark Lee Ping-bin share the credit, and shared the Cannes technical prize with William Chang. By Wong's account, Doyle shot 80% of the film and set its tone before the overrun forced him out, and Lee brought "stillness in the close-ups."
What is the music in the In the Mood for Love slow-motion scenes?
Shigeru Umebayashi's "Yumeji's Theme," written for Seijun Suzuki's Yumeji (1991). The soundtrack also carries Nat King Cole singing in Spanish, including "Quizás, Quizás, Quizás," which Wong said brought "longing for somewhere else," and the English title comes from Bryan Ferry's recording of "I'm in the Mood for Love."
Read next
- Fallen Angels and Chungking Express, the same partnership after dark: neon, fluorescent green, step printing and an ultra-wide lens.
- Color in film, the hub of this series: how hue and light become feeling on screen.
- Vittorio Storaro and the meaning of color, a theory Doyle has openly argued with: "It's not as simple as Storaro and other people claim."
- Teal and orange, the grade that took over the multiplex.
References
- Sam Wigley, "Wong Kar Wai on In the Mood for Love at 25," Sight and Sound, BFI, 20 May 2025: bfi.org.uk
- Vicente Rodriguez-Ortega, "Zen Palette: An Interview with Christopher Doyle," Reverse Shot, 27 August 2004: reverseshot.org
- David Feinberg, interview with Christopher Doyle, VICE, 31 August 2009: vice.com
- Wong Kar Wai, director's note on the World of Wong Kar Wai restorations, 2020, as reproduced by The Film Stage: thefilmstage.com
- Jeremy Arnold, "In the Mood for Love (2000)," TCM, 13 December 2016 (William Chang and Wong quotes; shoot length; Bangkok): tcm.com
- Nathan Lee, "Elusive Objects of Desire: 2046," Film Comment, July–August 2005: filmcomment.com
- BFI Southbank programme notes, Happy Together (Tony Rayns, Charlotte O'Sullivan, full credits): bfidatadigipres.github.io
- Jessica Rapp, "Remember when Maggie Cheung enraptured audiences with her colorful cheongsams?," CNN Style, 2020: cnn.com
- James Balmont, "In The Mood For Love: A guide to Wong Kar-wai's dreamy masterpiece," Dazed, 21 May 2024 (Wong to IndieWire, 2009): dazeddigital.com
- Lewis Brindle, "A Deeper Understanding: In the Mood for Love and 'Yumeji's Theme'," Take One, 2019: takeonecinema.net
- Städel Museum, Vilhelm Hammershøi, Interior. Strandgade 30, 1901: staedelmuseum.de