In the Mood For Love (花样年华)
Tonight at 7:30 7:00 (oops)
Harvard Film Archive (Carpenter Center, 24 Quincy Street, Cambridge)
Free admission!

For anyone looking to launch a pre-Valentine's Day attack, Bostonist recommends tonight's free screening of Wong Kar-Wai's In The Mood For Love. This is a cheap date that says, I am sensitive (but not in an Eat, Pray, Love way). I am stylish (but not in a leggings-and-Uggs way). I can put up with subtitles.

Wong Kar-Wai makes films in which nothing happens, and it's always a gorgeous, gorgeous nothing. In this one, it's Maggie Cheung and Tony Leung passing like (elegantly-coiffed) ships in the (1960s Hong Kong) night, and until they (very slowly) fall in love over martial arts serials and sesame syrup and Nat King Cole records in Spanish. They rehearse lines for their not-affair, ride in taxis not-holding hands, and take pains to cover up their not-trysts (and have incredible not-sex). Their less scrupulous spouses take frequent "business trips" to Japan and carry on the actual affair, which one imagines to be not a fraction as intense.

They are surrounded, at all times, by a David Lynch level of attention to detail and to atmosphere: period-appropriate clocks, ominous light fixtures, grungy staircases, drapery-lined corridors, wallpaper coordinated with Maggie Cheung's stiff-collared, perfectly-fitted cheongsams. As much as we covet her dresses, though, and as much as we want her stockings with the seams up the back, and her red trenchcoat, what Bostonist wants more is the way she wears them, and the way she climbs the stairs, and the sway of the turquoise thermos she carries to the noodle shop.

The only trouble with this film is that, in the aftermath, your date won't be thinking about you. Which is okay, because, vice versa: you'll probably be thinking about Maggie Cheung, too. Or Tony Leung, and the way his suits get soaked in slow-motion rainstorms, and the way he leans against a wall. If we could smoke cigarettes the way Tony Leung smokes cigarettes over his vintage typewriter, we'd reconsider our aversion to lung cancer.

The author of this post admits to plagiarizing shamelessly from an entry on her own blog.