In the mood for love

By PETER CALDER

(Herald rating: * * * * * )

An exquisite meditation on memory and desire, this tender, delicate and masterful film is, improbably, the work of the man who made the headlong, offbeat love story Chungking Express in the mid-90s.

That film was cluttered with action; in this, little happens yet so so much is about to and the result is the most tantalising love story since Brief Encounter.

The title is apt -not just because the film has such command of mood but because the central characters, two of Hong Kong's biggest stars, seem always about to fall into the liaison which is their fate from the first moment we see them.

In Hong Kong in 1962, Su Li-zhen (Cheung) rents a room in a boarding house on the same day as Chow Mo-wan (Leung), a journalist. Their respective spouses are often away on business and the two solitary souls pass on the stairs, both seeking to conceal their loneliness from each other.

Chow's sudden, almost offhand realisation that his wife and Su's husband are having an affair creates an instant bond between them. As they avoid their attraction to each other by imagining how their deceitful spouses are carrying on, their relationship takes on a profoundly sexual charge for the very reason that nothing happens.

In the hands of cinematographers Christopher Doyle and Mark Lee, the film is as visually ravishing as might be hoped for.

The camera sneaks around the lovers, framing them in doorways and following them along corridors, through rainy streets glistening with reflections.

Much of the film's rapturous sexiness derives from the fact that its lovers remain fully clothed - he in tailored suits, she in high-necked dresses (the supply seems endless) which highlight her sensuous expressiveness. As the camera tracks them through their closely contained world to the accompaniment of Nat King Cole's suggestive crooning, the sense of intimacy is alternately liberating and suffocating and the viewer is drawn into the centre of the characters' experiences.

Leung's and Cheung's performances are beautifully attuned to each other. In a scene where they sit in a cafe discussing their shared sorrow, the desire moves between them like a tide. And when he finally takes her hand in his, it's like the hand-on-the-shoulder moment in Brief Encounter, almost explosively exciting; subtle yet enormously potent and charged.

A film which shows how much more can be done with less, this is an object lesson in the power of restraint.

Cast: Maggie Cheung, Tony Leung

Director: Wong Kar-Wai

Running time: 97 mins

Rating: M

Screening: Academy