In the Mood for Love Letters

by Amie Mai

Rainbow Chan, Marcus Whale and Eugene Choi speak with Amie Mai about In the Mood – A Love Letter to Wong Kar-wai & Hong Kong, their latest commissioned performance from the Sydney Opera House.

This year marks the 20th anniversary of In the Mood For Love, when did you first watch the film and what impressions did it make on you?

Marcus Whale: Embarrassingly, I only watched it for the first time six weeks ago, when we were asked to do this performance. I’ve loved all his other films that I’ve seen, particularly Chungking Express, but had never gotten around to In The Mood for Love. I was blown away. I identified with this melodramatic mode in which the style takes on the many many things that are unspeakable in the action of the film. Like Chow and Su, I also feel sometimes like connecting with another person fully is an impossible task, in spite of my deep longing to do so.

Rainbow Chan: I’m a huge Wong Kar-Wai fan. I even considered doing a masters on his oeuvre at one point! Like Marcus, Chungking Express has always been my favourite film of his. But the more I watch In the Mood for Love, the more I am finding new meanings in the film’s restraint.

How did this dream team come together? Can you tell us about the collaborative process in creating this piece?

Marcus: Alister Hill, the producer from the Sydney Opera House who also came up with the concept, put this lineup together, perhaps knowing we’d worked together before. Making the work involved sitting around Eugene’s dining table or in Eugene’s studio, watching the film, talking about how it made us feel and about our own lives. Then Rainbow and I went away to arrange or write songs, while Eugene honed the text. Finally, we brought it all together in rehearsal at Eugene’s studio, where Eugene took on a kind of directorial role. There’s little tension when we work together. When we share ideas and perspectives, it’s always very loving.

You’re all based out of Sydney, was this the first time you’ve worked together? How do you all know each other?

Marcus: We’ve all known each other for many years. I met Rainbow at her 21st birthday! Eugene, Rainbow and I have worked together several times before, in performances by our friend Ivan Cheng, as well as in a performance by Agatha Gothe-Snape called Rhetorical Chorus, and we’ve all separately worked with each other in duos in various capacities over the years.

Rainbow: I feel like this project was super special because it embodies our decade (well, almost) of friendship and collaboration. We’ve been through our twenties together and now I’m looking forward to seeing what happens in our thirties as artists and as people.

The performance is penned as a love letter to Wong Kar-wai and Hong Kong, a yearning for a shared ancestral homeland. Can you describe your relationship to Hong Kong? What is home for you?

Rainbow: Hong Kong is my birthplace. I migrated to Australia at the age of six, so I was old enough to have vivid memories of Hong Kong. For instance, the mixture of humidity and shopping mall air-conditioning hits me in a visceral manner and takes me right back. Rides on the Star Ferry, eating curry fish balls on a stick, snacking on fluffy egg waffles after school, yum cha on Sunday mornings, hills that have been concreted over, the fragrance of joss sticks, the sound of my grandma’s shuffling feet. Nearly all of my relatives still live there so I try to visit Hong Kong regularly. But I am uncertain how often I will be able to go back in the future. My mum is Weitou, the indigenous people of Hong Kong who first settled in the New Territories around 900 AD. Through my mum, I have very real and concrete ties to the land but Weitou culture is on the brink of disappearance. The significance of Hong Kong for me has been redefined through my current research into Weitou women’s oral histories and folk music.

In the Mood for Love’s parting words are ‘That era is past, nothing that belonged to it exists anymore.’ In many ways we’re all yearning for the ‘before-times,’ knowing we can’t go back. How does memory and nostalgia inform your work?

Marcus: I think it’s important to remember that for all the nostalgic sheen, glamour and exquisite sadness of In the Mood for Love, many of the picturesque dilemmas faced by the characters exist because of the highly restrictive social codes in place at that time. It’s similar for me, thinking about the queer experience of the recent past, where we’d have to keep our affections hidden or coded in some way – while it generated some incredible methods for getting around public strictures and social policing, I don’t wish to go back to that either. Stressful! So, while I enjoyed doing business-drag as Tony Leung, I in no way would want to go back to that situation.

Rainbow: I would say my entire practice is based on nostalgic longing. Whether it’s my music or my visual art practice. I draw on deeply personal tales of love, loss and liminality.

The legacy of the costuming in In the Mood for Love twenty years on is undeniable, as is Wong Kar Wai’s evocative palette for the film. What role does colour and clothing play in your artistic practise?

Marcus: This project has really allowed us to explore, through paying homage to Wong Kar-Wai’s style, how colour, lights, sets and costume can evoke complex and layered feelings that remain inexpressible in action. Of course, we don’t have the budget or skills to emulate the epic production design of the film, but that provided an interesting limitation that generated how the performance looks – we create a memory of the film only through a selection of objects and setting that are mounted on scaffolding, the way that a film is only remembered in scant bits that we re-construct.

Everyone is all at once navigating distance, closeness and communication in these strange times, what has been keeping you connected?

Marcus: Especially in the early months I’d call up my friends and we’d coordinate watching movies (to the second – we’d count down and press play at the same time).

Rainbow: My parents have been sending many photo updates on the progress of their garden via Whatsapp. They also send audio recordings of music that they are played off an iPad, so the fidelity of the sound is inadvertently super low (which I love).

We have to talk about the photos by Daniel Boud! You’re all serving looks. What was it like stepping into the mood and character for this shoot?

Marcus: The day itself was super fun, it felt like we were kids dressing up. And Daniel did an incredible job on those photos. Each time he showed us the photos on his camera after taking them, we were completely shocked and excited by what he’d captured – they looked way better than we’d imagined, to a point where I was worried the performance wouldn’t live up to his shots.

Rainbow: It’s true, we gasped many times.

The event has been live-streamed from the Opera House and be made available for viewing on demand afterward. What has it been like preparing to perform for this new format? Does playing for a digital audience change your process compared to a live one?

Marcus: From the beginning we conceived of this work entirely as a screen work – the stage could easily have been a sound stage or a photography studio rather than the Joan Sutherland Theatre. We even wrote a shot-list for it. I personally found it really liberating to be able to think about the performance as a series of shots in different settings and I realised during the process how differently it feels to try and put together a performance in which the audience views from a single perspective. You can get away with a lot more and a lot less in different ways – for instance, every movement is more powerful in a close-up shot, but also under more scrutiny.

Rainbow, you are previewing some new work from your upcoming third album during In The Mood, can you tell us about its release?

Rainbow: I’m still in the process of writing the songs, so there is nothing concrete about its release yet. I’ve been listening to a lot of old school East Asian artists like Zhou Xuan, Teresa Teng and Hako Yamasaki. Like many other musicians I’ve talked to, COVID has changed the nature of my songwriting. The songs seem to be quieter, more pensive and reflective of isolation. I’ve also started composing on guitar again, which I haven’t played for almost a decade.

And Marcus—your second solo album, Lucifer, was launched in July this year. What has the experience of releasing music been like during this time?

Marcus: The pace, like everything else, has been a lot slower and less intense – there’s no launch shows to organise, and I also feel quite distanced from the response to the album. In some ways it’s a little bit deflating, but at the same time the stakes feel lower. I’m thinking of, in the summer, putting together some kind of stage performance of the album, maybe in collaboration with Athena Thebus who does the Lucifer performances with me, in place of ‘launch shows’ per se.

Eugene, I’m obsessed with this video you posted on instagram of you laughing and tumbling about swathed in a white robe, I actually have it saved for when I need to break out of a mood. Was this in development of a piece/What inspired it? What is coming up for you?

Eugene: I absolutely love that. In fact, I actually posted it to break myself out of a mood! I performed this work Biscuit Betrayal for my dear friend Ivan Cheng (Marcus has mentioned him already) at Campbelltown Arts Centre in 2018. We also collaborated with artist Hyun Lee. To me, the work was very complex and very difficult to understand… there was a gravitation towards language as force, humorous tension, improvisation around jazz standards and a crisp rosé personified. I was the rosé. There are a few things that are in the works, but the most exciting thing is starting an engineering degree next year.

The first title of In the Mood for Love was ‘A Story About Food’. Wong Kar Wai’s original idea was to tell a love story through different courses. What is your favourite food to get in the mood?

Marcus: Right now? Mangoes. I get so excited eating the first mangoes of spring.

Eugene: There are so many different foods coming to mind, I don’t know what to mention. So I will tell you what I snacked on before the show: rice crackers, mixed nuts (almonds, cashews, peanuts) and beetroot chips. All from the Opera House vending machines.

Rainbow: Beef brisket and rice noodle soup is my undoing. RIP me.