Summary
In a cab ride home from the alley where Su and Chow rehearsed Chow's departure, Su tells him she doesn't want to go home, and the scene cuts to a close-up of a radio. On the radio, a DJ announces that the next song has multiple dedications from listeners: "Mei-Yi wants to dedicate a song to her honeymooning friends ... and Mr. Chan, now on business in Japan, wants to wish his wife a happy birthday" (1:14:00). As the song plays, both Su and Chow listen in their respective apartments, separated only by a wall. Chow clutches the rice cooker Su gave him, and Su rests her head against the wall, as if listening for Chow.
The phone rings in Su's office. Offscreen, Chow can be heard saying, "If there is an extra ticket, would you come with me?" (1:16:05). Wong returns to a familiar shot, Chow waiting by the window of his apartment, looking out, lost in thought. He shuts the lights in his pied-a-terre and leaves down the long, red hallway.
Su appears to be waiting for Chow in his room—in a voice-over, she says, "It's me. If there's an extra ticket, would you go with me?" (1:18:35), though she doesn't specify where she'd be going. We then cut to a title card—"Singapore, 1963"—Chow is looking for the slippers Su left beneath his bed, but he can't find them. Instead, he finds a cigarette in the ashtray with lipstick marks around the tip, and he figures Su came and took her slippers back.
In a restaurant with his co-worker, Ping, Chow recounts how people used to offload secrets they couldn't tell anyone. They would climb up a tall mountain, find a tree, carve a hole in the bark, and whisper their secret in the hole. Afterward, they would fill the hole with soil to bury the secret securely in the tree. Ping's responds, "What a pain! I'd just go to get laid" (1:20:48). Chow maintains that not everyone is like Ping; some people believe in romance. Ping tries to coax the secret out of Chow, but Chow remains pensive and says nothing.
Back in Hong Kong, Su is restless. She took Chow's cigarette box, and though she doesn't smoke, smokes one of his cigarettes in her room. She slumps in an armchair and lounges. The next thing we see is a phone, and we hear the dial tone of an outgoing call. The office manager at the Singapore Daily picks up; the person calling wants to speak to Chow. The manager hands Chow the phone, but Su doesn't say anything. Chow seems to know from the silence that it's her on the other end of the call. After a few silent beats, Su hangs up the phone, and the camera cuts to a view from under her bed, where she picks up the slippers she once left in Chow's room.
We cut to a title card, three years later: Hong Kong, 1966. There's a knock on Mrs. Suen's door, and Su emerges. It's clear that it's been a while since Mrs. Suen saw Su, and she greets her warmly, apologizes for the mess, and invites her to dine with them. Mrs. Suen is packing up the apartment to move to the United States to help her daughter raise her children. Mrs. Suen asks Su how her husband is, and Su responds that he is well. In turn, Su asks how long Suen plans to stay in the United States. Mrs. Suen explains that if she likes it there, she would consider staying there indefinitely. She says, "My daughter worries about the situation in Hong Kong" (1:26:09). Mrs. Suen explains that since the Koos left, she's been lonely and has had no one to play mahjong with.
Su asks about Mrs. Suen's apartment, indicating that she might be interested in renting it. Su asks who lives next door, and Mrs. Suen says that she doesn't know. She further laments losing the Koos as neighbors. As Mrs. Suen reminisces about good times past, Su silently tears up as she looks out the window into the apartment where Chow used to live.
The shot fades to a man walking down the sidewalk with purpose. It's Chow, and he walks into his old building and knocks on the door that used to belong to the Koos. A man answers the door and tells Chow that the Koos moved out years ago. Chow asks if Mrs. Suen still lives next door, and the man replies, "She's gone! It's too chaotic. Everyone's running away" (1:28:08). The man tells Chow that a woman and her son live in the apartment now, and Chow looks across the way into the apartment where Su and her son are living and smiles. As he leaves, Chow pauses at the front door, behind which Su lives her life with her child.
From here, the film cuts to another title card, which reads, "The era is over. Nothing that belonged to it exists any more" (1:28:50). Su walks into a familiar living room with a young child, and out into a familiar hallway, where she and Chow used to covertly carry on their friendship. This short scene is followed by a title card that reads, "Cambodia, 1966" (1:29:11). Cambodian royals Norodom Sihanouk and Queen Sisowath Kossamak greet French general Charles de Gaulle and ride with him to Phnom Penh.
The scene changes from the documentary footage of de Gaulle's arrival in Cambodia to Chow at Angkor Wat temple in Cambodia, whispering a secret into a small hole in the side of a temple wall. Chow leaves, and when the shot returns to the hole, it is filled with soil and grass. Sweeping shots of the temple culminate in a final title card, which reads, "He remembers those vanished years. As though looking through a dusty window pane, the past is something he could see, but not touch. And everything he sees is blurred and indistinct."
Analysis
Precursors to China's Cultural Revolution were happening as early as the 1950s, but ramped up significantly with Mao Tse-tung's launch of the Socialist Education Movement in 1963—perhaps significantly, one year before the beginning of In the Mood for Love's narrative. Chow and Su are both transplants from major metropolitan centers in mainland China; though their move to Hong Kong is never explicitly discussed in political terms in the film, since the establishment of the People's Republic of China, it was not uncommon for mainlanders to migrate to Hong Kong depending on their stance on the Chinese Communist Party, especially as the Cultural Revolution became imminent. The last act of In the Mood for Love references the "chaos" and "the situation in Hong Kong" again, without ever explicitly discussing Mao, the CCP, or the Cultural Revolution; but it's clear that Wong is portraying the atmosphere of uncertainty and upheaval that was the norm in late-sixties China, as scholar Nancy Blake has argued.
When Chow and Su move into the building with their respective spouses, it may be presumed that they don't have a large community outside of their workplaces, and they are strangers to the established communities within their building and the familiar relationship between the Koos and the Suens. The relationship developed over the course of the film between Chow and Su is all the more potent because they are each the other's only source of genuine support. This is especially true for Su, who doesn't even have an acquaintance like Ping to vent to. When Chow and Su first role-play each other's spouses, it is clearly a simulation; however, as the film goes on, the true nature of their relationship grows increasingly ambiguous. Wong indicates the transformation by repeating shots and scenarios from earlier in the film—though the framing and setting may be the same, the way Chow and Su act toward each other is markedly different, generally more intimate, and this intimacy is visually established—i.e. Su holding Chow's hand whereas before she pulled her hand away—only after Chow declares that he has to leave Hong Kong, recognizing that there's no chance Su will leave her husband to be with him.
After their emotional rehearsal of Chow's departure, the film cuts to a close-up of a radio. Separated by a shared wall, Chow and Su listen to Zhou Xuan's "Age of Bloom," a 1946 song which laments the tumult in China in the first half of the twentieth century caused by Western colonialism and the Sino-Japanese War. The song imagines a future of peace, unity, and stability, an "age of blossom" to follow the "grief-stricken mists" left behind from war. Wong Kar-wai deftly expands the scope of the film's emotional content in the final act of In the Mood for Love, and "Age of Bloom" playing on the radio is a pivotal point of transition; the song reflects the desperate feeling of isolation and upheaval that characterizes the experiences of Chow and Su on a personal level while also priming the audience to consider the major political shifts in China and Cambodia that were happening during their love affair, shifts that would undoubtedly influence the experience and worldview of young people like Chow and Su. The final act of the film seems determined to show the audience that the quiet affairs between people never occur in a vacuum; stories are always pressurized by the atmosphere in which they take place. Before "Age of Bloom" plays on the radio, the DJ mentions that it is dedicated to a number of people by their loved ones—a friend of a couple on their honeymoon, a neighbor to a neighbor, and, ironically, to Su, for her birthday, from her husband who is in Japan for business. The dedication is ironic because the song plays at a particularly painful moment for Su and Chow, one in which they're mourning their relationship, which was built on the foundation of Su's husband's adulterous relationship with Chow's wife. In this way, Su's husband provides the dirge for Su and Chow's secret love for one another, which is initiated as a result of his own secret romance with Chow's wife.
After Chow leaves for Singapore, the film jumps three years into the future—Hong Kong, 1966—the start of the Cultural Revolution. When Su returns to Mrs. Suen's apartment, Mrs. Suen is in the process of packing the place up in preparation for joining her daughter in the United States, and when Su asks when she'll be back, Mrs. Suen admits that she may never come back. Her daughter is concerned about the situation in Hong Kong; doubtless this refers to the violent tensions between the CCP and the British Hong Kong government. Mrs. Suen's description of how life has been in the intervening years, isolating, chaotic, disillusioning, reflects a national mood. When Chow visits the Koos' old residence, where he used to live, he finds that they'd already moved. The new resident expresses similar sentiments when Chow asks if Mrs. Suen still lives next door: "She's gone! It's too chaotic. Everyone is running away" (1:28:07). When the new resident describes the people who moved in after the Suens as a woman and her child, Chow looks out the window across the way and smiles contentedly at what he sees. His contentment could be interpreted as acceptance—seeing Su with this child, realizing that her life is irreversibly different than it was when they knew each other, that her obligations, commitments, and priorities have evolved without him, gives Chow the evidence he needs that what they had is over—the era of their love, to reference the concluding title cards, has passed; the years are vanished.
Chow whispering his secret, presumably of his love for Su, into the wall of Angkor Wat, marks a literal and figurative burial of the past, of certain possibilities and paths that Chow and Su once imagined for themselves. The ruins of Angkor Wat, the watchful monk followed by long tracking shots through silent, hallowed halls, leaves the 21st century viewer humbled and haunted by the fate of what they know happens next. The film was made in the year 2000, but its story ends in 1966, immediately preceding the Cambodian Civil War, during which monks at Angkor Wat would be killed at their place of worship. By broadening the scope of his commentary at the end of the film, Wong demonstrates how the development of this intense love affair is a mere refraction of an entire era of culture and geopolitics that shaped generations.
