The assassin knows his partner, but he never sees her. She lives in the same building as the mute thief who has a penchant for breaking into businesses late at night, not to steal, but to open the businesses as though he owned them, selling to the denizens of the night. One of his customers turns out to be the assassin. If this all sounds complicated, well, it is. But Wong handles it in a way that makes it fun.
Cities are about contrasts of fast and slow, the ups and downs of people, life and death.
There is beauty to be found in ugliness, and ugliness in beauty. And people are often interrelated in ways they don't realize. But if the movie is complex in ways that occasionally defy understanding, so is the city that it captures so well.