“IN THE MOOD FOR LOVE“: Saw this last night. Incredibly lush Wong Kar-Wai film about two neighbors who realize that their respective spouses are having an affair with one another.

This is just an astonishingly sensual, longing, aching movie–drenched in color, attentive to surfaces and textures, giving you lots of slow movements, lots of disconnection and half-communication between the characters, so that you’re keyed up to an intense pitch and then just left there. The movie replicates the way that repressing and concealing and intentionally stifling or redirecting intense desires can make the entire world seem almost feverishly sensual. You’re constantly on edge, constantly watching–watching to see how others react to you, how they react to everything around them, so you can mimic the appropriate responses and avoid giving yourself away–and at once paranoid and intensely alive to the physical world. You notice.

“ITMFL” also has a very strong, obvious theme of role-playing, which you may, possibly, perhaps have noticed I am very moderately obsessed with. One of the good points in Laura Kipnis’s seriously messed-up, occasionally stump-dumb, but intermittently insightful Against Love: A Polemic was her observation that adultery is often about who you want to be, and who you want to pretend to be. (Fans of New X-Men will recognize the scene: “You be Scott. And I’ll be Jean…”)

This is a great movie, one I will definitely watch again. (The music is perfect, too. See it with someone who knows Spanish; the lyrics matter, and they’re not in the subtitles.) There’s only one problem, one place where the director goes too far with his whole hothouse atmosphere.

The one difficulty: In a book I read as a kid (and I think this also may happen in Matilda, but not with this name?), there’s a thing called the Choclishment. Basically, this kid loves chocolate, and as a punishment for something or other he has to eat nothing but chocolate until he’s completely and thoroughly sick of it. Well, “ITMFL” kind of does a Choclishment with Maggie Cheung’s behind. (Her clothes do stay on in these shots. In fact, they cling for dear life.) So yeah… that gets to be too much of a muchness. But what a muchness!