Nostalgia folding in upon itself: A visit to Wong Kar-wai’s Bangkok

Having settled into Bangkok — establishing a greetings-based rhythm with the laundromat auntie next door — I decided to look into film locations to visit during my stay. I knew that that awful Bridget Jones sequel had been partly filmed there, and that James Bond movie with Michelle Yeoh, but then, the search results turned up In the Mood for Love.

As any aspiring film buff or Sinophone diasporic will know, Wong Kar-wai’s filmography has been fundamental in constructing the popular imagination of what Hong Kong is, was, or could be. This imagination is delineated by Hong Kong’s distinct political predicament as a former British colony, initially permitted 50 years of sovereign purgatory before its formal handover to mainland China. Just as the city’s fate has been treated like a geopolitical chess piece, the cinema of Hong Kong has responded in kind — with films preoccupied with a past long gone, stunted by an unknown future.

Doused with cultural symbols that harken back to a pre-modernised Hong Kong, Wong’s auteurial signature emanates from his family background as a first generation Shanghainese immigrant to Hong Kong, his family seeking refuge from the cultural revolution. Accents and dialects intermingle and co-exist in his works, Mandarin Chinese conversing with Cantonese in dialogue with Shanghainese, an homage to the melting pot that he romanticises as the city of his childhood. There is an interrelatability and exchangeability that purports to exist beyond geopolitical conflict or dynamics of labour and class, for that matter.

In the Mood for Love is no exception, having evolved from a romance musical set in Beijing. After facing pushback from the mainland Chinese censors, the concept was relocated to Hong Kong and became a triptych, with one chapter revolving around a man and a woman connecting furtively over food in the 1960s. Production was once more brought to a halt as it became clear that filming outdoors would be impossible: the city had changed too much. Wong, strictly against building sets and preferring to shoot on location, found the 1990s high-rise boom impossible to dream from; the Hong Kong of old he longed to remember was no longer to be found in the city.

It was while scouting locations for his subsequent film 2046 that he and cinematographer Christopher Doyle visited Bangkok’s Bangrak district. In one of the side streets — or sois, as they’re called in Bangkok — trickling off of Charoenkrung Road, Wong was revisited by that elusive feeling he had been searching for in Hong Kong. This location ended up serving as the street outside the building where Tony Leung’s Mr. Chow and Maggie Cheung’s Mrs. Chan live. It is where the two protagonists shelter from the rain, testing the boundaries between friendship, romance, and companionship. Illuminated by amber street light, Mr. Chow and Mrs. Chan loiter, finding more privacy outdoors than at home, away from the prying eyes of nosy neighbours.

Above: Still from In The Mood For Love

I clambered onto the motorbike’s passenger seat. After 21 minutes of weaving through traffic, I thanked the driver and hopped off, only to realise that I had input the wrong address in the Grab app and that I was about 10 blocks away. It was five in the afternoon as I wandered my way forward, periodically checking the route on my phone, passing by groups of uniformed teenagers and currents of salary workers.

A few minutes away from my destination, the noise stopped, both sonic and visual. The streets were now paved with a concrete that made the roads look freshly glazed. Tentatively stepping through a parking lot, I glanced down to confirm that I had arrived. Looking back up, I was met with an austere face of corrugated iron much taller than me.

This was a transitory place, a site whose only purpose was to become something else. The most permanent thing welcoming me was a utility post, its generator guarded by a structure reminiscent of a military checkpoint. In an ironic twist of fate, the street which had passed as pre-modernised 1960s Hong Kong was itself being subjected to redevelopment, three decades later. I was surprised to find that I had been expecting an illusion, cobbled together from the film and from my memories of watching it — a mirage that was completely disjointed from the street’s material reality, as if it could be untouched by the world outside the film in the first place. Taking a moment to recalibrate, I backed away from the fence, and noticed a flash of brightness among all the hues of grey.

Peeking out behind the utility post’s towering arms was a window, contrastingly ornate. Its sealed shutters vibrated a friendly sage green, its arched top fanned out in a symmetrical art deco sunbeam, extending an invitation to be beheld that punctured the construction site’s steely functional frame. This sole trace of the street’s past as a major, if uncredited, actor in In the Mood for Love waved at me. It was like the first time meeting a family member who I remembered from spotting them in photographs, rather than from any present memory.

The window appeared so much newer in front of me than the street does onscreen. In the film, the alleyway’s paint is peeling off like a flaky pastry, with deep cracks wrinkling the walls. Nothing is smooth or even. You can almost smell the rust when the camera peeks out behind bent window grills to glimpse Mr. Chow and Mrs. Chan whispering to each other, heads tilted. Here, the coat was painted so uniformly, the window beaming a saturated glow as if recently decorated by caring hands.

Top: Still from In The Mood For Love. Middle: Photos by author. Bottom: Screenshot from Google Streetview, dated June 2019, showing the beginning of construction and the windows looking much older than when the author visited the location. 

It wasn’t clear to me what future was being projected onto this patch of land — maybe this street, once host to Wong Kar-wai’s elegiac nostalgia, will come to host an office building, or luxury condos, or a quaint rustic shopping district. I had learned from my friend Kritti that Charoenkrung Road and its surrounding streets have been subject to gentrification in the last few years — wear and tear repackaged as photo op authenticity. Perhaps this unexpected disconnect between on- and off-screen was less a twist of irony and more so the fact of existing in an economic system that builds atop histories as a strategy to churn out new trends for consumers to crave. Arguably, Wong’s desire to emulate a distant past by projecting 1960s Hong Kong onto 1990s Bangkok was also a form of spatial displacement, motivated by pining for a lost past rather than chasing a profitable future. Were Wong to visit the same street today, I’m sure he would not have deemed it a suitable nostalgic container for his wistful fantasies.

I stood there in the late afternoon’s dwindling heat, gazing upon the construction site, imagining Wong’s cast and crew moving around the space. Did they know that they were marking this site to be frozen in a state of yearnful haunting? Did they know that as long as someone is watching In the Mood for Love this soi off of Charoenkrung Road will be trapped onscreen as a ghostly manifestation of Wong Kar-wai’s mourning for the Hong Kong of his childhood? As the closing title card of the film laments, “He remembers those vanished years. As though looking through a dusty window pane, the past is something he could see, but not touch.” Those that choose to visit this street might find themselves trapped in yet another cycle of looking back — to when the street could even be read as anything but a construction site, let alone passing as 1960s Hong Kong.

Top: Screenshot from Google Streetview, dated September 2017. Bottom: Still from In The Mood For Love.