We live in a world where constant stimulation exists at the tip of our fingers (provided said fingers are attached to a smartphone). Bored? Watch some Netflix. Don’t want to focus a show for forty minutes? Try some YouTube. Struggling to focus for the duration of your video? There’s always TikTok. We rarely have to wait for anything, or to be more precise, we are rarely willing to wait for anything. Because waiting is hard. Because sometimes the thing you’re waiting for may never arrive.
It’s this stasis that proves the centrepiece of three of my favourite films: Wong Kar Wai’s In The Mood For Love, Céline Sciamma’s Portrait of a Lady on Fire, and Celine Song’s Past Lives. The plot of each of these (and I don’t use the word lightly) masterpieces could fit within single sentence, and yet it feels as though there are thousands of words that could be used to describe them. To me, this is because they show people with a reason to wait. That reason, as cliché as it sounds, is love. Specifically, it is a forbidden love; not in the sense of Romeo and Juliet, but rather in that it categorically cannot lead to anything. Two women of status could not run away together in eighteenth century France, nor could an up-and-coming playwright abandon New York to move back to Korea, or a married woman leave her husband in 1960s Hong Kong. The characters within these stories understand their situations, and yet they allow themselves to yearn, they allow themselves to ache.
Crucially, the filmmakers in question give them the space to do so. There is a common misconception that good writing equates to lots of writing, or that good direction equates to lots of direction. While there is a time and place for the witty rhythm of a Martin McDonagh or the bombastic camera work of a Damien Chazelle, these films are interested in the small moments that sustain those who wait. They focus on lingering silences, fleeting glances, or a momentary brushing of fingers; all actions which a visual medium is uniquely qualified to capture. In what other mode could a flick of the eye – shot in close-up – consume the entirety of the viewer’s focus, only to disappear half a second later. Cinema conveys not only the importance of these moments, but also their brevity.
What’s also notable about these films is their capacity to elicit emotion within the audience. Watching Past Lives in the cinema (twice), I found that the final lines of dialogue were muffled by the sniffles of dozens of people holding back tears. The same can be said for when I watched In the Mood for Love at The Cameo earlier this year and, although I haven’t had the pleasure of watching Portrait of a Lady on Fire on the big screen, judging by the reactions of the people I watched it with, I’m sure it had much of the same effect. To use another cliché, I think that this emotional power stems from the films within this genre being about something universal. We all have felt love – or at least something close to it – at some point in our lives. In capitalistic terms, we intrinsically understand the value of having a person, and thus we intrinsically understand the ache.
So next time you’re bored on a Thursday evening and scrolling just isn’t cutting it for you, why not put on one of these films? You’ll have to accept that they move slowly – in some ways, that’s the point. Allow yourself to fall into the lives of these characters, and you might just come to terms with the fact that some things are worth waiting for, even if what you’re waiting for isn’t guaranteed to be there.
“In the Mood For Love – Maggie Cheung” by cwangdom is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 2.0.