I don't know what I did this week, but it felt unusually busy.
Perhaps because I was out (of the house) so often. I went to my new office three days (watched In the Mood for Love one of those days too), met my friend Kavya once, and attended the Indie Web Club meeting on Saturday. I was out of the house five days out of seven. The last time I was out that many times (excluding vacations) was probably five years ago (before Covid struck in 2020).
In the Mood for Love
Amid all the chaos, this week's highlight was watching In the Mood for Love again. This time on a big screen at Bangalore International Center (BIC).
If I had to pick one film as my favourite, it would be this. It was my fifth viewing of the film, and somehow it grows more endearing the more I watch it.
What I love about WKW's style is that it lends itself quite naturally to densely layered narratives. With each viewing, you find new — and previously unexplored — meanings and narrative threads. Part of that comes from how WKW makes his films. The story isn’t fully written before shooting. It evolves.
When we meet a potential lover at a restaurant — as the characters in In the Mood for Love do, or as we might in our own lives — we might confess our feelings and step into a romance. Or, just as easily, we might hold back out of fear that things could go wrong… and decide to move to a different country instead (I’d choose the first option, even if my favourite characters don’t.). And if you think about it more deeply, each of these versions could branch into many others — every choice splintering into still more possibilities.
With WKW, since the narrative isn't set at the beginning, he shoots multiple versions of what could have been. The film comes together as a coherent whole only in editing — assembled from fragments of all those possibilities.
The result is a film which has an organic, almost anarchic quality to it that mirrors the experience of real life far more closely than most stories do.