In the Mood for Love Review

Wong's discipline here is total. The cheating spouses are never shown frontally, only backs of heads and voices from offscreen, so the betrayal exists purely as a fact the neighbours share. Christopher Doyle and Mark Lee Ping-bing shoot almost everything through an obstruction, a doorframe, a hallway, a mirror, a curtain, so the audience is placed permanently in the position of the building's gossips. Shigeru Umebayashi's Yumeji's Theme returns over slow-motion passages on the noodle-stall stairs until it works as punctuation rather than score.

Maggie Cheung's cheongsams change between shots within the same conversation, a calendar of days spent in the same corridor. Tony Leung plays a man whose restraint costs him visible effort. The strangest and best invention is the rehearsal, the two of them acting out confrontations with spouses they will never actually have, until the performance leaks into feeling neither will admit. Almost nothing happens by design, which is both the point and the ceiling. It ends with a secret whispered into a hole in a wall at Angkor Wat and sealed with mud.