Between Tradition and Transformation

Michelangelo Antonioni’s La Notte and Wong Kar Wai’s In the Mood for Love exemplify how cinema can be a vehicle for reflecting and reconciling societal transformations. Emerging from parallel yet distinct historical and cultural junctures—post-war Italy’s economic boom and post-handover Hong Kong—both films employ tropes of the drama genre to explore societies suspended in liminality, situated between tradition and transformation. Whilst both films explore the notion that change and modernization can perpetuate uncertainty and alienation, their varying sociopolitical contexts allow for nuanced exploration of these concerns. Through analyzing cinematography, sound design, and mise-en-scène, this essay will focus specifically on how drama films use the dramatic trope of tragedy to heighten emotional tension and convey meaning in respect to the film's cultural context.

In both Italy and Hong Kong, the respective economic and political changes created a deep sense of alienation between individuals. La Notte was created during the 1960s, when Italy experienced an economic boom that led to a change in social behavior, spearheaded by the rise of a materialist and capitalist mindset. Italy's transformation from being a peasant country to one of the major industrial nations of the West exposed society to large parties, gatherings, and an ability to spend. In contrast, Wong’s In the Mood for Love (2000) reflects Hong Kong’s identity crisis following its 1997 handover from British to Chinese rule. Native Hong Kongers, severed from their colonial identity yet unable to fully assimilate into a Chinese one, found themselves in a state of liminality, devoid of stable cultural footing.

This liminal identity is reflected in both directors’ effective use of architectural elements, as they place characters amidst imposing windows, looming doorways, and winding staircases, visually trapping them in in-between spaces. In In the Mood for Love, the camera pans to reveal a circular frame in which Mrs. Chan is conversing with her husband on the phone. The prop of the phone foreshadows implications of modern technology that threaten to corrupt the formation of authentic relationships, whilst her framing amidst the frame renders her alone in the physical realm. Similarly, in La Notte, the alienating physicality of the cityscape, with its hard lines and cold surfaces, reflects Lydia’s entrapment and loneliness. When Lydia observes Giovanni, her husband, at a dinner party, the camera shoots from behind her, positioning Giovanni behind a large window pane. Here, Antonioni lays the groundwork for a stifled relationship, highlighting Lydia’s inability to connect and communicate with him. Antonioni’s interest in architecture is also apparent in his use of negative space, where buildings often consume most of the frame. As Lydia walks by a large building, it takes up seven-eighths of the frame as she cuts across the corner, dwarfed and marginalized to the periphery. Although she is merely crossing the street, Antonioni’s technique renders these moments striking visual metaphors for the overwhelming dominance of modernity that his film aims to explore.

In both films, infidelity serves as a thematic device that illuminates the personal and cultural tensions of both films. Through cinematography, both directors explore infidelity from diametric poles—Wong critiques the societal pressures tied to it while Antonioni highlights its transactional nature. In In the Mood for Love, Wong portrays the restricted relationship between Mrs. Chan and Mr. Chow, who, despite having spouses of their own, long for deeper emotional connections that they could potentially find in each other. When both characters discuss their spouses’ affair, the frame is truncated by bars. Visually, Wong posits how both characters are unable to leave behind their old relationships to embrace this new one due to societal constraints, thus remaining physically isolated and alienated from one another. Ultimately, both characters choose not to explore their budding romance, which Wong represents in the last scene of the film, where the shadow of the prison bar still persists over the characters. On the other hand, the infidelity in La Notte symbolizes Giovanni's relentless desire for the new. While portraying Giovanni’s affair, Antonioni maintains a static camera, moving it up and down as Giovanni’s mistress performs physical acts that fulfill Giovanni sexually. In avoiding Giovanni’s face and employing robotic pans, Antonioni frames a relationship that is stripped of genuine human connection, rendering it a transactional interaction that critiques Giovanni’s privileging of short-term lust and sexual fulfillment over long-term emotional intimacy. The affair reflects Italy’s cultural shift toward a materialistic mindset, which corrodes possibilities of authentic human connections. Here, Antonioni skillfully reveals the ugly underbelly of Italy's economic boom.

Sound plays a key role in dramatizing and enhancing the tragedy of the failed romances in both films. Created in the 1960s, La Notte followed the wave of neorealist films in Italy that captured the post-war hardships of the working class. Antonioni’s sound design adopts a similar realist approach, using synthetic sounds from the soundscape to depict the overwhelming and disorienting streets of Italy in the 1960s. In the Mood for Love followed an era of cinematic success in Hong Kong's 1980s, where Hong Kong was dubbed the Hollywood of the East. Adopting a commercial and international appearance, Wong doesn't shy away from the grandiose of Hong Kong’s cinematic glory days, employing iconic, transnational, and popularized sound motifs to bring forth the tragic romance between Mrs. Chan and Mr. Chow. La Notte contains practically no score. The development of the city is portrayed as chaotic and disruptive through synthetic sound. Right from the opening sequence, noises of construction, cars beeping, and ambulance sirens are blended together, producing an eerie tone. In the opening sequence, the underlying tempo is a clamoring of a mechanical track, as far-off and seemingly arbitrary musical notes are played. Here, the audience is at once immersed into the raw soundscape of a city undergoing rapid development and industrialization. Antonioni punctuates the film with diegetic sounds connotated with development that often acoustically crashes onto the protagonist, leading to the romantic tragedy of Lydia and Giovanni. In the beginning scene, the sound of a loud airplane disrupts a conversation between Lydia, Giovanni, and Tommaso. Here, the sonic juxtaposition of the airplane turbine and talking highlights how technological advances serve to disrupt human communication. In the rest of the film, the music is unempathetic, which enhances the film's cold and isolating tone. As Antonioni explains in an interview, he believes that music should not play the role of external comment, one designed to create a connection between music and viewer. Rather, he values music's relationship with the movie. This outlook creates a sonic experience that purposely excludes the audience, placing two technological objects, the movie and sound engineering, center stage, which coincides with the notion of how modernization and technology disrupt genuine human connections and emotion. Conversely, in In the Mood for Love, instead of a natural soundscape, Wong uses lyrics and curated sound motifs to convey the tragedy between the characters. A sound motif that frequently underscores the scene is “Yumeji’s Theme,” a recurring melody drawn from the famous Japanese movie, played nine times throughout the film, reflecting the cyclical and unresolved nature of Mrs. Chan and Mr. Chow’s relationship. The first time the motif is introduced is when Mrs. Chan and Mr. Chow pass by each other on the stairwell, marking the beginning of the two protagonists’ budding romance. Yet as the narrative progresses, the same theme plays without progression, with no crescendo, no change in tune or melody. The repetition exposes the poignant truth that the two characters, despite seemingly moving forward in plot, will never advance romantically. Whenever the music is played, the characters are edited in slow motion, which only dramatizes the irony that despite having sufficient opportunity and time, they will never take action to pursue their budding romance. Additionally, Wong incorporates Nat King Cole’s Spanish ballads, such as “Aquellos Ojos Verdes,” whose lyrics foreshadow the lovers’ ultimate separation. Wong, known to leverage language as a marker of time and identity, uses Spanish to represent the character’s inability to commit fully to English or Chinese, accentuating their emotional ambivalence. The song’s lyrics, particularly the final verse—“those green eyes that I will never kiss”—serve as a poignant metaphor for Mrs. Chan and Mr. Chow’s unfulfilled relationship, as the foreign language furnishes the scene with an additional layer of irony: if the characters were not trapped in their indecision, both culturally and emotionally, they might understand the lyrics and find clarity and resolution in their relationship.

Through mise-en-scène, particularly color, costume, and props, both films further underscore their respective cultural anxieties. La Notte is filmed in black and white, a choice that not only  pays homage to Italy’s neorealist cinema, which privileges authenticity over opulence, but more importantly reveals the bleak emptiness underlying the grandeur and glamour of the social settings presented. Large parties filled with guests, alcohol, and decorations are reduced into two tones, positioning viewers that they should see beyond the deceptive and saturated color of extravagant social trends. In the Mood for Love is shot on the Airflex 35 BL Four camera, using film rather than a digital camera, to create a nostalgic tone and color, reinforcing that the film doesn't belong to a specific time or place. The choice of camera also draws attention to the color red. Red is generally connoted with lust and love in this film. Red takes on its conventional meaning but is also used to dramatize the brewing romance between the characters to heighten elements of tragedy. Red can be seen everywhere, from Mrs. Chan's bedsheets to her red lipstick. Mr. Chow is also heavily associated with red. For instance, his hotel curtains are bright red. Not only does this harbor an emotional linkage between him and Mrs. Chan, but also symbolizes that the only way to pursue this relationship is to peel back the red curtains, so that he can let the natural light in to find clarity and fulfillment.

Both films effectively use costume to enhance the characterization of each character, as they come to embody the very anxieties of the societies in which they belong. Wong uses costume to convey the transition Hong Kong is going through between Western and Eastern ideologies. Mrs. Chan wears a traditional cheongsam, the dominant code of dress in 1960 Hong Kong. However, Wong and costume designer William Chang juxtapose this with Mr. Chow’s Westernized suit. The costumes are symbolic of Hong Kong liminality, perpetuated by the handover from British to Chinese rule. Further, the cheongsam, with its high collar and form-fitting shape, can symbolize the restricted conventions that Mrs. Chan is entrapped by, characteristic of the drama genre. In La Notte, Antonioni also uses characters and their costumes to symbolize the negative, materialistic culture that is the aftermath of Italy's economic boom. The choice of a simple black dress for both Valentina and Lydia seems repetitive, but the laced and frilly borders of Valentina’s dress construct her as a new ideal that Giovanni pursues sexually, reflecting Italy’s march towards modernization and material novelty.

In both films, clocks are a frequently used prop that reinforces time as a central motif. In the year 2000, Hong Kong's handover back to China looms large, and so the concept of time here is connoted with anxiety and uncertainty. In La Notte, time is a symbol of the lack of presence that rising consumerism brings. Wong frames the clock with a close-up shot, creating a looming and claustrophobic effect. It is positioned above the characters, and sometimes even invades parts of the frame to declare its unwavering presence. In portraying time as a controlling and looming motif, Wong highlights how it becomes an oppressive force that places pressure on Hong Kongers. By contrast, Antonioni highlights the motif of time through editing, presenting it as deeply fractured and lacking continuity. Antonioni highlights how the new glamorous social life of the elite perpetuates a sense of alienation and incoherence between characters. They are moving through time together, but their emotions are not in sync. Antonioni juxtaposes a broken clock motif with imagery of the past, deteriorating buildings, a crying baby, and a wedding ring. Combined, the other props give meaning to the broken clock to represent Lydia’s search for the past and lost time in her relationship with Giovanni. However, in revisiting the old, Lydia is unable to deal with the present and future. On the other hand, Giovanni, whose wall is filled with clocks, is unable to see the past or present as he becomes preoccupied by future plans and tempted by materialistic novelties. Thus, Giovanni and Lydia are driven away from each other by their opposite interpretations of time, creating a dramatic irony that reinforces the couple’s downfall and hgiehtens La Notte’s tragedy.

Both films navigate the liminal space between tradition and transformation, employing the thematic trope of tragedy to explore the political, social, and emotional tensions of their respective times. Through cinematography, sound design, mise-en-scène, and motifs such as time and architecture, both Wong and Antonioni convey the alienation and ambiguity surrounding rapid modernization and social change. Whilst Antonioni focuses his efforts on critiquing post-war Italy’s materialism and its corrosive effects on human connection, Wong navigates Hong Kong’s liminality, portraying a society deeply conflicted by polarizing Eastern and Western influences. Both films’ success comes from how both directors reflect these cultural anxieties onto the personal relationships of characters, from Giovanni and Lydia’s fractured marriage to Mrs. Chan and Mr. Chow’s unfulfilled romance. In doing so, both paint a striking image of how progress can alienate individuals from their past, their identities, and even each other.