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The film, therefore, is effectively the first of Wong’s mood pieces where character prevails over story. The mood casts the characters adrift in a sea of melancholia and spiritual ennui. The film takes place mostly at night. The landscape is one of vacant stairways, doorways and alleyways, where st…

Wah decides to chase after Ngor by making the trip to Lantau, where he discovers that she is being courted by a young doctor. Disheartened, he waits to depart on the ferry. But Ngor then leaves a message on his pager (a marker of the times before mobile phones became the norm) asking him to wait at…

The romance plot is really the lynchpin of the picture, and it determines the diachronic structure of the narrative.

[...] Wong had his own rationale for the emotional relationships in the film:

It’s very difficult to describe why a man likes a woman, and the deep feelings
between two brothers, and so on. They are all very subtle. But I wanted to put
forward the proposition that time is the biggest factor.…

It is perhaps best to see Wong’s slow and protracted production sched-
ules through the looking-glass of a style of film-making that has a time-
honoured line: one could cite Erich von Stroheim and the making of Greed
(1925), Orson Welles’s Othello (1952) and Don Quixote (1957), and King Hu’s
A…