Apertures of Unbelonging: The Documentary Impulse in In the Mood for Love and Parasite

By Osman Arslan Cinematography February 3, 2026

Apertures of Unbelonging: The Documentary Impulse in In the Mood for Love and Parasite

We should, perhaps, begin in a hallway. Not just any hallway, but the cramped, perpetually shadowed corridor of a 1960s Hong Kong apartment building, a space so precisely rendered in Wong Kar-wai's In the Mood for Love that one can almost feel the humid air cling to the skin. It is here that Mr. Chow and Mrs. Chan, played with devastating restraint by Tony Leung and Maggie Cheung, pass one another in a silent ballet of missed connections. Christopher Doyle's camera does not grant us a clear, objective view. Instead, it peers through doorways, past floral curtains, and over shoulders, rendering the other person, the object of a nascent and forbidden affection, as a soft, luminous blur. For decades, the critical consensus has celebrated this shallow depth of field as the supreme visual correlative for romantic longing, for the isolation of two souls adrift in a sea of social convention. But I believe this reading, while true, remains incomplete. It mistakes the frame for the entire canvas. What if this signature technique is not merely a flourish of romanticism but a profound epistemological tool, one that fundamentally reconfigures the film's relationship to reality?

I argue that while shallow depth of field is conventionally celebrated as a stylistic device isolating romantic longing or class tension in In the Mood for Love and Bong Joon-ho's Parasite, its more radical function is to provocatively blur documentary and fictional boundaries. This technique renders exile and diaspora not as abstract political backdrops but as tactile, fragmented "realities" that infiltrate the most intimate pockets of personal life. It challenges the very notion that these films are pure fiction by exposing their diasporic subjects as involuntary documentarians of their own displacement, forced to record their existence in the piercingly sharp, yet painfully narrow, focus of the present moment. In this view, the blurred background is not an absence but a presence: the overwhelming, illegible text of history, a documented world from which the characters have been exiled. They are adrift not only from their spouses but from their own historical narratives, and the camera's limited focus becomes the only form of testimony they can offer.

Optical Exile as Documentary Intrusion

Wong Kar-wai's cinema has long been interpreted through the lens of memory and nostalgia, a reading that, while powerful, often domesticates its political sting. In the Mood for Love is set in 1962, a waypoint in time for its Shanghainese émigré characters, who exist in a Hong Kong that is itself a temporary state, a British colony awaiting its eventual return to China. This is the context of diaspora that the scholar Ackbar Abbas, in his seminal work on Hong Kong culture, terms a "politics of disappearance." Identity is not stable; it is a fleeting image about to be overwritten. The film's aesthetic, I contend, is not simply memorializing a lost past but is actively documenting this process of disappearance in real time.

Consider the celebrated sequences in the noodle shop. Mr. Chow and Mrs. Chan sit in their lonely booths, the camera holding them in a crisp, shallow focus. Behind them, the hazy, out-of-focus street scene bustles with anonymous energy. A conventional romantic reading sees this as a visual cocoon, insulating them from the world. But if we adopt a documentary framework, the shot becomes something else entirely. The sharp, saturated foreground becomes a fictional reenactment, a staging of private feeling, while the blurred background becomes a kind of verité "found footage" of 1960s Hong Kong. The shallow depth of field acts as a membrane between these two modes. It insists that the historical reality (the diaspora, the colonial context) is always present, always pressing in, even if it remains indecipherable. The characters are held in a state of 'optical exile', caught between their sharply-felt personal sorrow and a blurred history they can no longer fully access or belong to.

This is a technique with roots in the formal innovations of the French New Wave, yet Wong and Doyle push it toward a new, phenomenological end. Where Godard might have used a jump cut to disrupt narrative illusion, Wong uses a shift in focus to question the very texture of remembered reality. The goal, as one senses watching his work, was to capture a feeling rather than a perfectly composed image, an approach that evokes the subjective capture of Impressionist painting. In doing so, the film becomes a hybrid object: a fictional narrative built from what feel like documentary fragments. The recurring shots of clocks, of rain on windows, of smoke curling in the air, framed with this same selective focus, cease to be mere mood-setting. They become ethnographic details, artifacts of a transient existence being documented before it vanishes. Mrs. Chan's cheongsams, each a new pattern in a repeating emotional cycle, are not just costumes; they are the documented evidence of a life lived in the beautiful confinement of the present tense, the only tense available to the exiled.

The Rack-Focus of Class Diaspora

Nearly twenty years later, Bong Joon-ho's Parasite took this aesthetic of selective focus and weaponized it for a different kind of diaspora: the internal, economic exile of the Kim family. While Wong's Hong Kong is a site of geopolitical transience, Bong's Seoul is a landscape of violent class stratification, a nation-state in which a significant portion of the populace is exiled from economic participation. This is a condition born from the ashes of the 1997 Asian financial crisis, which created a generation of Koreans living, like the Kims, in a state of permanent precarity. Bong, a master of genre, uses the grammar of the thriller to stage this social reality, but his crucial tool is the precise, often brutal, use of shallow depth of field and the rack focus.

Throughout Parasite, cinematographer Hong Kyung-pyo's lens constantly re-adjudicates what is and is not important within the frame. When the Kim family first infiltrates the opulent Park residence, the background is a soft, dreamlike bokeh of modernist furniture and sun-drenched gardens, the textural fantasy of wealth. But as the film progresses, the rack focus becomes an instrument of documentary revelation. In the pivotal sequence where the former housekeeper, Moon-gwang, returns, a pull of focus takes us from a mundane domestic scene to the terrifying discovery of the hidden basement. The shift is not simply a dramatic effect; it is a documentary act. It is the camera saying, "Look closer. The reality you see is not the whole story." This technique rips through the fictional veneer of the Parks' perfect life to document the repressed truth living literally beneath their feet. The film's most virtuosic moments are not its deep-focus spectacles, but these shallow-focus shifts, which mimic the investigative, truth-seeking gesture of a documentarian. The increasing sophistication and precision of lens technology grants modern filmmakers surgical control over focus pulling, a capability that Bong and Hong exploit to its fullest narrative potential, making the focus itself a character in the story.

This connects Bong's work to the tradition of "accented cinema" theorized by Hamid Naficy, which describes films made by diasporic and exilic filmmakers. Though Bong is not an émigré, he adopts what Naficy calls "exilic optics" to portray the Kim family's intra-national displacement. Their world is defined by what they can see with crystalline clarity (the immediate hustle, the water-stained walls of their semi-basement) versus what remains a tantalizing, out-of-focus dream (the Parks' life). The shallow depth of field documents their phenomenological reality. The blurred world is the one they are shut out of, and the crisp foreground is their prison. When Ki-woo stares at the scholar's rock in the film's final moments, the focus pulls to the fantasy of him buying the house, a dream rendered in sharp, poignant detail. It is a fiction. The film then returns him to the crushing reality of his basement, his face held in a tight, sharp frame against a blurred, indifferent world. He is documenting his own false hope, a final, heartbreaking act of testimony.

Ritual and the Ethnography of Unbelonging

Both films amplify this documentary impulse through the use of repetition and ritual, turning their fictional narratives into something approaching a pseudo-ethnographic record. The cyclical nature of life in exile, the performance of routines that create a semblance of stability in a transient world, is a theme central to both works. Wong and Bong use shallow depth of field not only to isolate their subjects in space, but also to trap them in time.

In In the Mood for Love, we see Mrs. Chan and Mr. Chow walk up and down the same flight of stairs, pass in the same corridor, and order from the same noodle stall, again and again. Each repetition is slightly different, marking a subtle shift in their relationship, but the framing remains insistently shallow. This aesthetic choice, as some scholars like Song Hwee Lim have suggested in different contexts, creates a sense of non-resolution. It blurs the temporal boundaries between one moment and the next, suggesting a perpetual, unchanging present. The narrative is not progressing in a linear fashion so much as it is deepening, spiraling around a core of unarticulated sorrow. The film is no longer a story being told but a ritual being observed. We are not watching a plot unfold; we are watching the ethnographic evidence of two lives caught in a loop, their unbelonging documented through the recurrence of beautifully framed gestures. The intimate framing required for these repeating, tight shots often necessitates smaller, more flexible camera setups, a challenge that cinematographers have perennially faced. It is precisely this demand for expressive and spatially specific cinematography that enables the camera to become an intimate participant in these confined, ritualistic spaces.

Similarly, in Parasite, the vertical axis becomes a ritualistic path of ascent and descent. The Kims' journey up the hill to the Park house and their frantic, flooded descent back to their basement is the film's central visual motif. Bong shoots these sequences with a dynamic camera that frequently uses shallow focus to emphasize the claustrophobia of the journey. The ascent is a climb into a blurry dream; the descent is a fall into sharp, filthy reality. By repeating this vertical movement, Bong turns it into a social ritual, the Sisyphean struggle of the underclass. It becomes a documented pattern of behavior, an ethnographic study of class mobility as a cruel illusion. The blurred backgrounds during these frantic movements suggest a world that is moving too fast, a society whose structures are too vast and indistinct for the individual to grasp. Like the ritualistic use of form in the Indian Parallel Cinema of a director like Kumar Shahani, where stylized gestures document social realities, Bong's formal repetitions document the ingrained, inescapable choreographies of capitalism.

Conclusion: The Clarity of the Blur

To view the cinemas of Wong Kar-wai and Bong Joon-ho through this lens is to see them not as masters of stylistic excess but as radical realists, practitioners of a new kind of documentary impulse fit for a fractured, globalized modernity. Their use of shallow depth of field is far more than an aesthetic choice; it is a philosophical position. It proposes that the most authentic way to represent the experience of exile, whether geopolitical or economic, is not through the objective, deep-focus clarity of classical realism, but through the subjective, fragmented, and painfully intimate vision of the displaced themselves. They embrace what André Bazin might have called an "ontology of the blur," where the out-of-focus elements of the frame are as crucial to the image's truth as the sharp ones.

In an era saturated with images, where the line between staged content and spontaneous reality has all but dissolved on our streaming feeds and social media, these films feel more prescient than ever. They anticipated a world in which personal testimony is filtered through aesthetic lenses, and where the documentation of one's own life is an act of constant curation and fragmentation. They offer a powerful counter-narrative to the idea that realism requires a totalizing, all-seeing perspective. Instead, they find a more profound truth in incompleteness. They suggest that to understand the condition of unbelonging, we must abandon the ambition of seeing everything at once and instead learn to see as the exiled see: with piercing clarity for the immediate, painful detail, and with a peripheral blur for the lost world that remains, forever, just out of reach.

This is the paradoxical wisdom that haunts their frames, a wisdom reminiscent of the mystics like Rumi who understood that a wound can be a doorway, that loss can be a form of sight. The narrow aperture, the sliver of the world held in focus, does not limit our understanding. On the contrary, it forces us to confront the vastness of all that is lost. It is in the gauzy, indistinct shapes of a Hong Kong street or the bokeh-blasted lights of a wealthy Seoul home that the true scale of the characters' exile is documented. The story is not just in what is sharp, but in the ache of the blur, the silent testimony of an unfocused present. It is through these apertures of unbelonging that we are granted a glimpse, however fleeting, of a deeper, more fractured, and more human truth.

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