NOTALGIA NECKLACE

Mrs. Chan descends the stairs and waits, decorously, at the food stall. The alley is bleak, barely lit by a spotlight in front of which Mr. Chow will now come down to eat his noodles. The music intertwines with light and shadow. Everything is there, between the oval windows, the wisps of smoke, the slow-motion rain: the pleasure that envelops melancholy, the air of nostalgia of someone waiting for a kiss that never comes, the certainty of an impossible love. The film unfolds an overwhelming beauty sustained in emptiness. Like love, it can fall like nothingness. And the higher it is, the greater the risk of loss. No, we won't have it forever.

" IN THE MOOD FOR LOVE "

One of the saddest films ever made: that of two strangers who, lacerated

by their partners' infidelity, are content with the simple desire to love each other.

Two decades later, Wong Kar-Wai's masterpiece still gives us goosebumps, scene by scene, shot by shot, with frames that look like canvases torn from a museum. Amidst red curtains and beautiful patterned walls, to the sound of Nat King Cole's boleros and Umebayashi's hypnotic waltz, here we are, in a Hong Kong boarding house, ecstatic at the swaying of Mrs. Chan and her collection of Chinese qipaos repeatedly crossing paths with her neighbor, the exquisite Mr. Chow, pretending to ignore each other while passion devours them from within. She always waits for her husband. He for his wife. Over time they discover that both are having an affair and there they begin their particular complicit infidelity, first in glances, in brushes, in arbitrary encounters and then in intimate dates that never culminate.