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

Wong’s characters are like zombies moving around somnambulistically in a subtropical urban landscape, abandoned to the elements by a perfidious lover

He achieves this through a combination of monologic dialogue and allowing the characters to have their own emotional space without a common thread of a plot structure

Here, history functions as a teleological process that determines the final nature of its characters and the course of events

highly carnivalesque, of a kind that incorporates a Menippean discourse (after the satirical style of the ancient Greek philosopher Menippus), a style that is both comic and tragic, as Kristeva informs us

As with so many of his works, it is invariably elegiac in tone, overladen with a pervasive sense of sadness, fatalism and resignation, though the mood is soothed by Wong’s impeccable artistry and good taste.

Wong’s cinematographers are almost as adept at rendering chiaroscuro as the great Caravaggio

Wong’s features have not vitiated to the level of MTV because of the contexts they invoke: their historical nexus with past eras, their identification with the times, their interconnectedness of the local with the global, and, above all, their depth of meaning and feeling.