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Yet, for all its elegance in re-creating the past and in capturing nostalgia, the idea of change over time is marked with an iron brand that makes the film somewhat cool and distant. The key in unlocking the secret that Tony Leung whispers into the hole in the wall lies, I believe, with the Maggie …

The film portrays human life as one of limited possibilities. We can imagine So Lai-chen spending the rest of her days collecting Coke bottles and stamping admission tickets, and sympathetically wish better things for her. It is as if by giving up on her lover and the imagined possibilities of a ri…

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…

[...] 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.…