In the Mood for Love (2001) — Short Digest

Review: In the Mood for Love (2001) – A Stolen Glance in Miniature

Director: Wong Kar-wai
Starring: Tony Leung Chiu-wai, Faye Wong (stock footage/echoes of 2046)
Runtime: Approx. 6-8 minutes

To step into Wong Kar-wai’s 2001 short film (often mislabeled as a simple trailer or deleted scene) is to press your nose against a rain-streaked window: you recognize the apartment, the cheongsam, the unbearable ache of nearness—but everything has fractured into a dream.

This is not a sequel to the 2000 masterpiece, but a ghost of it. Where the feature unfolded with languorous, almost suffocating restraint, the short compresses longing into a feverish haiku. We see Tony Leung’s Chow Mo-wan again, but the narrative has slipped its moorings. There is no Maggie Cheung’s Mrs. Chan. Instead, the frame is haunted by the suggestion of Faye Wong (reprising her ethereal quality from Chungking Express), and the plot dissolves into a loop of hotel corridors, unanswered phone calls, and the rustle of silk.

Why it’s remarkable

• Emotional precision: The film converts small gestures — a shared meal, a look across a hallway, a repeated tune — into profound emotional currency. It’s less about events than about the accumulation of unspoken feeling.
• Visual poetry: Christopher Doyle’s cinematography and Wong’s fragmented, elliptical editing create a sense of time folding in on itself. Narrow corridors, shafts of light, and mirror reflections make the city feel both intimate and claustrophobic.
• Sound as memory: The score (notably Nat King Cole’s Spanish songs) and recurring musical motifs act like mnemonic threads, linking moments and magnifying longing.
• Performance economy: Tony Leung and Maggie Cheung convey complex, contradictory interior lives through micro-expressions and silence, making restraint a form of eloquence.
• Design and period detail: The film’s costume design (especially the cheongsams), color palette (deep reds and greens), and production design immerse you in an era while reinforcing the characters’ emotional states.

Plot Summary: The Room That Never Existed

The In the Mood for Love 2001 short film picks up at an ambiguous point. Mr. Chow (Tony Leung) is now a successful writer living in a sterile, modern apartment. The traditional Chinese music has been replaced by the hum of a refrigerator and distant traffic.

One night, he receives a call. It is Mrs. Chan (Maggie Cheung), but her voice is distorted by time. She asks to meet him at a hotel—the same hotel from the original film where they rehearsed their spouses’ affair. When Chow arrives, the setting has changed. The walls are now a muted grey. The red curtains are gone. In perhaps the most iconic sequence of the 2001 short film, they sit in silence. There are no rehearsals. No "let’s pretend."

Instead, the director employs a radical narrative device: the removal of dialogue. For nearly six minutes, the two lovers simply stare at a malfunctioning wall clock. The second hand ticks backwards. Wong Kar-wai suggests that in 2001, time has literally reversed for them. They are no longer hiding from their spouses; they are hiding from the future they missed.