"Mood for Love" Recreates Lost Hong Kong

Wong's rushed "Mood for Love" recreates lost Hong Kong

Hong Kong director Wong Kar-Wai brought two of Asia's biggest stars with him for his return to the Cannes Film Festival where he Saturday presented "In the Mood for Love" in an unfinished version produced in a race against time, according to report of China Daily.

Maggie Cheung and Tony Leung Chiu-Wai star in Wong's story of infidelity for which, as he admitted to reporters, he "only finished the sub-titles yesterday."

A further handicap for the film's chances of taking one of the Cannes awards, due to be announced Sunday, is the unmixed soundtrack.

His latest film, set in 1962 among Hong Kong's Shanghai-ese community, was shot mostly in Bangkok "because Hong Kong has changed so much since the 1960s and it's impossible to find the old Hong Kong there any more," he said.

The Shanghai-born director found the locations he wanted while he was visiting Bangkok for work on another film, the science-fiction movie "2046", that he has been preparing at the same time as "In the Mood for Love".

The film, virtually a two-hander, is a story about adultery in which there are no sex scenes and the characters' married partners remain unseen.

Cheung has been a Wong regular since appearing in his first film, the 1988 "As Tears Go By", while Leung was in Wong's second feature, "Days of Being Wild", made in 1991.

One Taiwanese reporter at Cannes said he believed Wong would have done better to have taken his time over the film and presented it at the Venice festival in September.