Mrs. Chan and Mr. Chow are well-dressed, well-mannered, and are shown to be nothing but dedicated to their spouses. When they become neighbors in a cramped Hong Kong apartment complex, their exchanges are casual and do not definitively exhibit the signs of attraction. It is only when they begin to suspect that their partners are cheating on them—with each other—that the possibility of their own entanglement emerges. And then something like Mrs. Chan and Mr. Chow’s fuller selves, hidden underneath all that civility and exceedingly neat composure, meticulously unfold; although it is melancholy that pervades the twosome’s rendezvous, not the pleasure of illicitness, because it is fidelity betrayed, and not desire consummated, that serves as the dominant theme of what they find themselves partaking in.

How writer-director Wong Kar-wai sets the scene of their affaire de cœur is one of In the Mood for Love’s (its original Chinese title something like Flower-like Years) defining and brilliantly stylized attributes, and by keeping Mrs. Chan and Mr. Chow’s adulterous partners faceless throughout, he de-prioritizes aspects of these narrative-types that lesser artists would opt not to, in their urge to titillate the viewer.

By focusing on the cuckolded pair, Kar-wai is trying to tell a subtler story; a story less about coveting one’s neighbor’s wife/husband, but about the conditions after such a betrayal has occurred, when one must rebuild some sense of self (and sense of love, if not love outright) with a stranger-cum-acquaintance through the fellowship of mutual loss. […]