Probably the least successful of Wong Kar-Wai’s films. Set in
night-time Hong Kong, it explores the connecting threads in several
haunted loners’ lives, particularly a hitman (Lai) and his besotted
female colleague (Reis). Seductive visual style is pushed to a point
where it looks like a pop video, to which Wong’s work has often been
wrongly compared. Thematically, we’re in familiar territory - the
elusiveness of happiness and intimacy, the characters’ fatalistic
entrapment within predetermined genre roles and images - but the film
only truly comes alive in the tragi-comic portrayal of a mute boy
(Kaneshiro) and his father (Lei).
