Keswick Film Club - Reviews - In The Mood For Love

Keswick Film Club joined forces with the MINT Chinese Film Festival to screen ‘In the Mood for Love’, one of the first films ever shown by Keswick Film club in 2001. Winner of more than 40 awards when it was released in 2000, including best actor and cinematography at Cannes, it still features at number 5 on Sight & Sound's 'Greatest Films Ever Made' list.

Hong Kong Director Wong Kar Wai's film is set in Hong Kong in 1962. When two new neighbours realise their partners are having an affair, they're drawn to each other, sharing the humiliation and lonliness of their experience. They find companionship and understanding: they do not have an affair themselves, although the film is a sensually hypnotic affair, "sumptuously shot in tight corners, cramped corridors and tiny alleyways for maximum intimacy, the unspoken longing of the star-crossed lovers is both palpable and poignant" - Alan Jones, Radio Times.

The MINT Chinese Film Festival marks Carol Rennie's last week at the Alhambra Cinema, and the Chinese Film Festival, bringing well over 1000 admissions to 29 screenings and a host of associated events at venues around the town, was a fitting event to mark the tenure of someone who has put the Keswick Alhambra firmly in the heart of the community since she arrived in 2017.

Carol selected this, her favourite film, for the dresses, for the music (Nat King Cole and Shigeru Umebayashi Yumeji's unforgettable theme), and because, in Alhambra staff member John Porter's words: "every frame is perfect."