On the corridor scene.

There is a moment, about forty-two minutes into In the Mood for Love, when Maggie Cheung walks down a corridor with a thermos of noodles, and Tony Leung passes her going the other way, and neither of them looks at the other, and the entire film collapses into eighty seconds of slow motion set to Shigeru Umebayashi’s Yumeji’s Theme.

I have watched this scene perhaps two hundred times. Once a year, around April, I go back to it. It is the only piece of cinema I treat like a piece of music: not as something to be followed, but as something to be played.

What I want to write about, in this letter, is what the corridor scene does — mechanically, formally, almost engineering-wise — and why it works in a way that almost nothing else in cinema works.

The geometry.

The corridor is narrow. It has to be. Wong shoots this scene with the camera placed roughly at the height of Cheung’s elbow, framed so that the two of them, when they pass, must do so in a way that requires acknowledgement. They are physically forced into a register of choice: look, or do not look. In the scene as filmed, both of them do not look. This is the whole moral position of the film, geometrized into a hallway.

There are other tools at work — the colour palette (every wall in this building is some shade of dim ochre), the wallpaper (which I’ll come back to), the score, the slowing-down of the frame rate. But none of those would matter if the corridor weren’t the wrong width.

The music.

Umebayashi’s theme appears, in the finished film, ten times. It is, by some accounts, the single most-used piece of music in any film of the last fifty years. By the corridor scene — its sixth appearance — the theme has become inseparable from the act of waiting: of standing very still in a hallway, of holding a thermos that has cooled, of not quite saying something.

The theme is, structurally, a waltz. Three beats. The corridor scene is shot in slow motion at a frame rate that matches the waltz’s three-beat pulse. Cheung and Leung pass each other on the downbeat. The whole eighty seconds is a perfectly orchestrated pas de deux in which the two dancers never touch and never even look.

The wallpaper.

I told you I would come back to it. The wallpaper in the corridor is a complicated thing — overlapping floral, slightly faded, the kind of pattern that exists in real apartment buildings in Hong Kong from the 1960s. Wong, who is famously meticulous about set design, has said in interviews that he chose this paper because it represented regret.

I do not entirely believe him. I think he chose it because it provides a static background against which the two figures, moving in slow motion, are more lonely. The wallpaper does not move. The clock does not move. Only the two of them move, and they move away from each other, in the smallest, most polite increments.

A corridor is the architecture of almost. Everything that happens in it could just as easily have happened in a room. But it didn’t — and that is the whole point.

Why I return.

Every April for the last six years, I have re-watched this scene. I do not always re-watch the film. Sometimes I only watch the corridor. It is roughly eighty seconds long, and in those eighty seconds I am reminded of something I keep forgetting: that the most important moments in any life are the ones you almost did not have, and that politeness — or restraint, or whatever you want to call it — is sometimes the most powerful thing a body can do.

I do not have a thesis here. I have a recurrence. The corridor scene is the only piece of art I know that recurs in my life the way a season recurs. It belongs to April for me the way certain birdcalls do. I am writing this letter on the morning of the fifth viewing of 2026.

If you have not seen In the Mood for Love, watch it. If you have, go back to the corridor. Watch it once, slowly, with the sound. Then watch it again, with the sound off. Watch the way Cheung’s eyes do not move. Watch the wallpaper. Watch the absence of clock.

Tell me, if you would, what you noticed.

— M.