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 streetlights cast sharp shadows. So Lai-chen and the cop who befriends her wan- der, Antonioni-like, through this lonely landscape, their faces reflecting the lights of traffic passing by; an empty telephone kiosk shining like a beacon in the night assumes poignant significance (Lau waits for Lai-chen’s call by this kiosk). Time is spent waiting for lovers who never come. Yuddy’s rudderless existence shows itself by his favoured body postures: either reclining in chairs or on the bed. Even in the love scenes with So Lai-chen and Lulu, he is not shown actively making love, but always post-coitus, lying prone on the bed. But there is a violence that lurks behind this placid exterior: witness the scene where he attacks the gigolo for stealing Auntie’s earrings. [...]

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 richer inner life that he might provide, she has surrendered to her life of shrunken horizons and sunk back into its depths. Similarly imprisoned in a life of small possibilities is Lulu. In the scene where she confronts Lai-chen in the canteen, she grips the wire fence in anguish, and it is clear to the viewer that the two girls are in some sort of mental prison, as stifling and confining as the real one.

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