These Chinese-Australian artists are bringing the “romantic doom” of Wong Kar-Wai to the Opera House stage

Musically and aesthetically, how have you approached recreating the sensuality of the film?

“That era is past, nothing that belonged to it exists anymore” – How do you interpret that within the film, and how has its meaning developed?

RW: The film is as much a story about forbidden love as it is a farewell letter to Hong Kong. Needless to say, much has changed since the making of this film. You can feel this sense of tension, longing and homesickness through the artistic framing in the film where human bodies are obscured by retro furniture and objects, steel bars, shadows or mirrors. It’s Chinese melodrama at its best, fetishising a nostalgic time and space that never truly existed.

MW: A feeling of romantic doom pervades In The Mood for Love. So much is left unsaid and undone, so much is impossible. In this sense, the period setting of the movie for me echoes the romantic tensions of the film in that we're watching this idealised, inaccessible, past version of Hong Kong. The way the film is stylised – the melodramatic shot and lighting choices in particular – is always telling us that it's highly constructed. So I think that quote is about the fictionality of our memories, how totally ill-equipped we are to reconstruct a previous time, place or love affair out of the ghosts we have available to us in the present. And yet, we can make something beautiful out of our yearning for that past in the process.

What are your memories of Hong Kong?

RC: Family, home, egg waffles, cha chaan teng, curry fishball stands, humidity, ubiquitous air-conditioning, verticality, paradox, rushing bodies, hills, greenery growing through cracked concrete.

MW: I have never been to Hong Kong and have no relatives there, so my memory is entirely based on films and TV. The first Hong Kong film that I remember watching and loving is this Fruit Chan film, Hollywood Hong Kong, which was set in Tai Hom village, the oldest shantytown in Hong Kong before it was demolished. So, my conception of Hong Kong is extremely distant, but by way of this film, I imagine it as a place of colliding time and culture. For instance, in the film, a brand new luxury shopping plaza and apartment complex named Hollywood Plaza and themed on the American Hollywood (with all the aspirations that contains) looms over the village, foreshadowing the future dismantling of this community and the inexorable march of capitalist progress.