Wong Kar Wai´s classic is another one which has been stored away in the memory box, to be revisited during this Cinemateca season. The remarkable thing about the film, often cited as one of the most romantic movies of all time, is that the couple in question never actually get it together. The ache of their reluctance to copy their respective spouses and actually commit adultery, no matter who much they want to, is an ache shared by the audience. When their surface calm finally breaks into emotion, it is devastating, for them and for us. Wai introduces the devilish conceit of the rehearsal into the film, permitting moments where the two would-be lovers role-play dramatic scenarios. The most astonishing of these is when they role-play their own final separation, the moment the dam breaks, and then the lovers and the director step away, saying with an almost sadistic nerve, don’t cry, this is only a rehearsal. Hamlet would have been proud of this self-mastery. The way the film seems to fracture towards the end, the would-be lovers’ separate lives running parallel to one another’s, never to cross again, is also astonishing, because this, surely, is how life works. The greatest love stories don’t get the Hollywood treatment, they don’t even have to be consummated, they live on forever in the what-might-have-been.
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