When their spouses run off together to Japan, we expect their formal attitudes to thaw, but instead they find solace in each other s unapproachability. Repelled by their spouses indiscretion, they find themselves in a world where illicit sex mocks them at every corner. Our protagonists comply without protest, helping others commit that which they would never do. Their bottled-up sexuality plays tricks on their minds, inverting the chronology of crucial events. Her secret visit to his room takes place after he discovers her lip-sticked cigarette on his ashtray.
Imagination supersedes reality.
Wong s camera is in search of what it can t see, that sweaty anticipation or elusive frisson that courses through us when romance, or the memory of it, is near. Approximating love s incoherence, Wong s sense of time progresses fitfully, impatiently and impulsively. A day occupies the same space as a week. As their relationship attenuates towards the inevitable, time takes even bigger strides. The final sequences, set in such places as Singapore and French Cambodia, are separated by months, then a year, and then three years.