Here's In The Mood For Love's quietly devastating ending scene explained. Wong Kar-wai is arguably best known for 1994's Chunking Express, a Hong Kong set romance that was acclaimed for its dreamy atmosphere and cinematography. A yearning for romance is at the core of most of the filmmaker's work, including Chunking Express "sequel" Fallen Angels, Happy Together or his only English language movie to date My Blueberry Nights, starring Jude Law (The Young Pope) and Natalie Portman.
Wong Kar-wai's work is often set in intimate, urban locations but he's branched out to other genres, such as the somewhat messy but still visually gorgeous epic Ashes Of Time or The Grandmaster, his martial arts movie based on the life of Ip Man. The director's filmography is an embarrassment of riches, with 2000's In The Mood For Love often being his most critically acclaimed. This 1960s set romance stars Maggie Cheung and Tony Leung as Su and Chow, two neighbors who discover their respective spouses are having an affair together.
In The Mood For Love than charts their unusual way of coping with this betrayal, as they roleplay each other's partner and try to imagine how the affair began. Of course, over time this turns into genuine emotion but they both repress their true desires. In The Mood For Love has been hailed as one of the first masterpieces of the 21st Century, and features Wong Kar-wai's recurring trademarks of love and loss, painterly cinematography and a story more concerned with emotion than narrative structure. The movie's ending is the purest crystallization of its themes.
In short, it becomes clear that any romance between Su and Chow will never be. The latter tells Su he loves her and when he has to leave for a new job, he asks her to come with him; he waits but eventually leaves, and she arrives too late. In the years that follow, they almost run into each other a couple of times, with neither being aware of it. In The Mood For Love's ending sees Chow visiting the Angkor Wat temple in Cambodia.
Earlier in the movie, he explains to a friend that in the past when someone had to share a secret they could never speak of, they'd go to a tree hollow and whisper it, then seal the hole. In The Mood For Love's final scene shows Chow whispering something into a hole in the temple wall, before leaving and sealing it with clay. Viewers aren't privy to his words, but it's likely his confession of love for Su and his true desires, which he never could - and never will - reveal to anyone else. It's a quietly haunting ending and one that sticks with audiences long after the credits roll.