How uneasy it is to observe Vanda’s life through a lens that more than ever takes the shape of a peephole. And what a strange feeling going back to mine after having somehow experienced hers.
Clearing my throat to say nothing. Feeling cold because it’s late, or warm after putting on a jumper. Drinking water. Anything I do echos what I have just seen on screen and goes further, deep into my own memories—those little gestures, the routine, unbearable and comforting at once.
Costa’s dantesque semidocumentary portrait can’t but have a different impact on anyone who suffered from some form of addiction. In the core, they are all the same. And they all make feel as some old constructions are being demolished, havoc eating and closing in. But the annihilation Costa tells of has a broader meaning—social, cultural, equally physical, and global. Through dust and cracks and doors ajar, No Quarto da Vanda lets a pale light in, on the deprived population of shantytowns. It takes us to the forbidden rooms of the unwanted who get removed like dirt from the floor or, thinking of a striking image from the film, like dried wax from a table. Well, they exist.
Vanda’s misery made me cringe—for her, for me. Perhaps I felt a sense a guilt, or relief. I am alive and sound, but what about her, them. It is what we want, says Vanda to a friend, to do drugs. But it’s what we are bound to want, says he raising the ominous side of determinism that always scared me. And yet there’s some sort of distorted poetry in it, and in Costa’s stunningly brutal work. Intimidating and brilliant, addictive in itself.

To see its title in capitals on a cinema letterboard is something special that keeps me for a minute although I’m late. I wonder how it felt to compose it from the top of a ladder one letter at a time—I am sure up close they are bigger than one would imagine.
Moments later I take a pew in my favourite seat right in the middle, at a distance dictated by my shortsighted eyes. The seats, the walls, the curtains—everything seems redder tonight. I don’t even know if that’s the dominant colour of the screening room but so it is in my memory as I try to write something about it.
Whatever spell brought In the Mood for Love to the end of its troubled production is the same I am put under as the beautiful Cantonese text card appears on screen, and subtitled I read—Hong Kong 1962.
The first part of the film is paced by intimate angles, slow motion scenes, the music masterfully alternating a seducing waltz and a couple of Nat King Cole’s suave Latin detours. Wong Kar-wai’s love for his characters is palpable and contagious—we are soon in love too. Framed by claustrophobic urban interiors and narrow city corners, life flows almost unseen, muffled behind misted windows, steamy kitchens, the pouring rain. I wonder if Saul Leiter was ever a reference or an inspiration. The second part takes a different tone as if dried up by stranded feelings, secrets too long kept, or simply time. Reality brutally interferes. Dreams become memories. What wasn’t said will stay unheard forever.