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Wong, Cheung, and Leung at Cannes

Tony Leung and Maggie Cheung, the great Hong Kong stars, had separately been in several earlier pictures made by the stylish filmmaker Wong Kar-wai. In the Mood for Love, in which they play married neighbors who become enamored of each other, would appear the culminating event of their long-time relationship with the distinguished film director. But at a press conference at the Cannes Film Festival last May, just minutes after the movie’s world premiere, both performers seemed out of sorts with Wong.

“Finding my character was the most difficult time, I was confused and frustrated,” said Cheung. “I thought I was doing something right and then Wong would say we’ll do it all different. I hadn’t been with him for a long time, not really 10 years. I forgot that he works with the actors forever to develop characters, that we all have to write the film together.”

“Working with him now is more and more frustrating,” Leung agreed. “He should go faster next time and not just change every day. I’d come on the set one day and my character was getting revenge. I’d come another day and my character was not getting revenge.”

Wong took the public rebuke stoically, agreeing that “this was the most difficult film in my career. We had trouble with the camera, even with subtitles. I’m very grateful to this actor and this actress because they spent a year with me so that we could sort out all stories about this affair.” And that included contradicting himself — Wong filmed a scene of Cheung and Leung making love and then decided it shouldn’t happen: “It’s possible to have an affair without having an affair.” His method also included odd improvisations in which his stars were asked to play characters other than their own, including two key persons in the drama who never appear on screen.

“We didn’t actually need their husband and wife,” he points out. “Sometimes I’d make Maggie be the wife of Tony, sometimes Tony played Maggie’s husband. Very difficult for them. We were inspired by Truffaut, Godard, Antonioni, all those masters who teach us to explore how people behave in an environment.

“My second film, Days of Being Wild, was set in Hong Kong in the early 1960s, and we never had a chance to make part two. In the Mood for Love can’t be seen as a sequel but as a continuation. Everyone in the first film was single. Here, they are more mature and married. It’s a 1962 version, in ‘mono,’ and the people are slow in the 1960s. The music from Nat King Cole is a reference to that time, and it also creates the mood. He was my mother’s favorite singer.

“It’s a time frame that I know very well from my Hong Kong childhood. People had neighbors who lived next door who they actually knew and talked to. We shot in various small apartment spaces: our characters are spied on by neighbors. By the audience. But we filmed in Bangkok, because we couldn’t find Hong Kong in Hong Kong, it’s changed so fast.”

A journalist asked Cheung whether she felt it a tragedy that her character doesn’t quite come together with this man whom she loves. “I don’t think it’s a tragedy. It happens every day in the world. I would rather call it ‘a regret.’ There are regrets in our lives, and this is one of them.”

Maybe the film became clear to the actress as the Cannes press conference went on, or maybe she became aware that the gathered critics had really appreciated In the Mood for Love — whatever the reason, as she chatted on, Cheung began to qualify her negative remarks. “Making As Days Go By was my least difficult experience with Wong Kar-wai. I was a young actress and we were like student filmmakers on an experimental movie. It was fun — but that was the end of fun! I left him for a few years, and I came back to him. He must have had some experiences to grow into the person I now know. He must have gone on a beautiful journey. Making this film, I finally overcame my anger and frustration. And there was love.”

FRENCH FILMMAKER Gaspar Noe is exactly the kind of wild, flagrantly anti-PC artist who should be featured at the David Kleiler–curated Boston Underground Film Festival; and so it’s appropriate that his volatile 1998 I Stand Alone, about a murderous butcher with incestuous designs on his daughter, will be getting its belated Boston premiere at the Fenway Cinema this weekend, on February 22, 24, and 26.

“He’s not a right-winger, he’s totally lost, a lumpen man who has anger he doesn’t know where to put,” Noe explained to me, defending his bruiser of a protagonist. Noe’s earlier movies? A short in which his father, a well-known painter, plays a killer who lived in a village at the bottom of a volcano. A short about a man who rapes his maid.

Get the idea? The last time I saw Noe, he showed me several tapes: hardcore “safe sex” prevent-AIDS mini-dramas that were produced and paid for by French television and shown on TV without incident. One of them, set at a masked orgy, is the obscene scene that everyone expected in Eyes Wide Shut but was censored. Kubrick, but with condoms.