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A cliché of Hollywood romances, parodied innumerable times is the scene in which two lovers run towards each other on a white beach or across a sunlit meadow, arms outstretched embracingly. Their physical trajectory across the relative vastness dividing them represents their emotional coming together, the space they traverse a special place beyond the daily to-and-fro.
In the West these images portray love to viewers in terms of immediately comprehensible realities. But what happens if you inhabit a space where there are no meadows or beaches, where the light is artificial, and you live so close to your neighbour as to be little more than a changing shape on his or her retina. Then you need to create distance, desire needs space to breathe, to detach itself from the frenzy of familiar stimuli, in order to develop into romance. Here, space is calculated in centimetres, not metres, and romance grows not in leaps and bounds but tiny increments, through the smallest of gestures, and the pauses between gestures.
on In The Mood for Love
Bernard Hemingway
