Caught a 25th anniversary screening at the Colonial Theather, with a bonus of the In the Mood for Love 2001 short. ITMFL 2001 is an interesting artifact, stylistically closer to Chungking Express — I think they made the right decision in the end to scrap the other scenarios and focus on the one that became the main film. Still, Maggie Cheung is bucket hat inspo for the Gen Z/Alpha kids scouting late 90s/early 00s style.
As for the main film itself: wonderful to see it on the big screen again, and I picked up so many small details that I had forgotten or never registered. The older I get the more I feel that the two of them did have a physical affair, and they are lying to themselves when they insist that “we won’t be like them”. Writing the martial-arts serial is the sex, for sure, but sex is also the sex. Do you think, for more than a second, that two people this hot and magnetic would be chaste? C’mon now. (I do like that the film leaves it ambiguous, fwiw.)