Wong Kar-Wai’s most delicate and erotic film to date is a memory piece that takes place in the lost world of early-60s Hong Kong. Tony Leung and Maggie Cheung play next-door neighbours who are attracted to each other at first sight but start spending time together only when they discover their spouses are having an affair. But the film is less a narrative than a poetic evocation of the blending of fantasy and corporeality in sexual desire. Cheung’s swaying hips, Leung’s smouldering looks, fragments of Latin dance tunes and the walls of the corridors and rooms that both confine and separate the loversoeach wall as uniquely textured and coloured as an abstract expressionist paintingocombine anew in every sequence as if each scene was a fresh riff on the romantic longing that is the film’s main theme.
Hong Kong, 2000. English subtitles. Colour. Dolby digital stereo. 90 mins.