But both begin to realize that something is wrong with their marriages. The travel agent's husband is out of town more frequently, and the journalist's wife comes home with unexplained presents. When the neighbors finally figure out that their respective spouses are cheating, they are crushed. When they discover that they are cheating with each other, the abandoned spouses feel drawn together. Wong's film is a haunting study of tentativeness and uncertainty, where two people who want to be together hold back because of what other people might think.
Polite society dictates that they deny themselves to save themselves.
He also crafts his films with a claustrophobia that reflects the interior workings of a mind. His camera is an affectionate voyeur that hides in the shadows to capture fleeting moments that in the real world would be overlooked as unimportant. He builds subtle layer upon subtle layer, but not at a pace that many American audiences would prefer.