Desire is silent

Saw once again In the mood for love yesterday night.

A man and a woman who are neighbors come to realize that their respective wife and husband are cheating on them, with each other. Eager to know how it started, they try to reanact the first rendez-vous, the restaurants, the declarations. Of course, they slowly fall in love with each other : "these things happens before you realize they just did". But, too shy to fully admit their passion, pressured by social conventions (such light things breaking such strong love), they part their ways. Years later the said ways almost seem to reunite, at numerous occasions (and how much are we hoping they will meet again), but as they say : close but no cigar.

See this movie :

1- It is silent.

2- It is moody.

3- It does'nt rush itself. But yet it does not stall in lenghty dialogues.

4- Tony Leung is Humphrey Bogart.

5- Hong-Kong in the 60's, what else.

6- Maggie Cheung is beautiful.

7- It is like a secret you want to keep, and tell; tell to those who can keep it.

8- It gives you that boost you needed to tell the loved one you love him/her; it makes you glad you got him/her.

9- Everybody knows the soundtrack is gold.

10- Hands and eyes. A story needs nothing more.

11- Smoke is sexy.

12- Most of all, by their fictionnal sadness, the characters make you realize how happy you are.

Their story started on TV at 22:30 and by midnight it was over. But not in my mind.

Stranger than fiction

The movie Stranger than fiction would benefit from being studied in relation with Crime and Punishment (which is mentionned in the Movie by Hoffman's caracter as he says to Farrel that he should read it before dying) - especially the part where the paper written by Raskolnikov is discussed. The man splits people in two categories : the great men who should not be astrained to the moral beliefs of the common ones, and rank higher what they believe is right for them, and thus for humanity; and of course, the normal people (us) who should know how to fade in front of the great ones and accept our sad destiny, be it to die at the hand of the great man, or crumble in front of his will.

What Hoffman is secretly saying, it seems, is that Farrel should accept his role of normal guy, dying at the end of the greater work of a superior writer. Of course, the writer character refuses this conclusion, rejecting also in a symbolic way the shadow of a Great Work written long ago, and the vision of the critic.

Not going any further in my suggestion. But a serious analysis there would, I think, say a lot about the movie.