Wong is familiar with the mood; few in his films consummate their longings. They get close — up to “0.01 centimeters” in Chungking Express (1994) — but no cigar. Certainly the title of his previous film, Happy Together (1997), about gay lovers bruised and adrift in Buenos Aires, was meant ironically. Tony Leung Chiu-wai, the hopeless romantic in those two films and the hero of the director’s Days of Being Wild (1991) and Ashes of Time (1994), returns for more hangdog romantic dissatisfaction in In the Mood for Love.

He’s Chow Mo-wan, a hardworking journalist in 1962 Hong Kong who bumps into the love of his life, Su Li-zhen (Maggie Cheung Man-yuk), as they move into the same apartment building. Both are married, but their partners aren’t around to help, and neither will they appear on screen for the rest of the movie, only as glimpses of backs or limbs or voices from outside the frame. So Mo-wan and Li-zhen have to sort out their belongings, which the movers keep delivering to the wrong apartments, themselves.

Among the items that never get sorted out are their spouses. Mo-wan’s wife works late as a hotel receptionist; Li-zhen’s husband is often out of town on business. At some point, perhaps at a mah-jongg game at their genial, nosy landlady’s place, the two must have been drawn to each other. Gradually it dawns on Mo-wan and Li-zhen that the reason they spend so much time alone isn’t just that their significant others are working late. After crossing paths repeatedly on their way to solitary meals, they agree to have dinner together. Ostensibly, it’s to discuss where to get a tie or a handbag that has grabbed his or her eye. In fact, it is to confirm their suspicions of infidelity.

This is a marvelous scene, seething with ambiguity and tension beneath a plastered surface and awkward courtesies, and food and clothing and indirection figure in its resolution, as it does in the two cuckolds’ subsequent romance. Not since David Lean’s Brief Encounter have would-be lovers been so buttoned-up. Mo-wan’s worried little head nearly vanishes beneath his lacquered hair, tightly knotted tie, and unforgiving jackets. In her high-collared form-fitting cheongsams, Li-zhen embodies restrained passion. Her dresses’ floral patterns match the floral interiors (at one point her outfit’s flowered print blooms alongside flowers patterned on the lampshade, curtains, and wallpaper) or the even more suffocating exteriors (the alley adorned with torn posters where she passes Mo-wan on the way to the noodle shop, usually in the rain). When a glimpse of the sky finally comes, it’s like the liberation of total loss.

Mood is a fetishistic movie, a love story enacted more by its set design and costumes than by its characters. When the characters do act, it’s in the role of their absent partners as they try to re-create the scene in which they first fell in love. And in so doing, do they fall themselves? If you pay attention, Li-zhen says in one scene to her employer when she sees him wearing a new tie (it’s for his mistress), you notice things. We never see the deed itself, but we notice things too; vague signs, such as the blowing red curtains in a hall, a pair of slippers, a child. The mystery of desire is lost in the objects that can never take its place.

Lost, too, in time. Transience dooms their love as much as their own paralysis (a Spanish version of Nat King Cole’s “Perhaps, Perhaps, Perhaps” recurrently mocks them on the soundtrack) or the disapproval of neighbors (a scene in which Li-zhen is trapped in Mo-wan’s apartment while the neighbors participate in a mah-jongg marathon is one of the film’s few comic moments). For Wong, the mood for love is at best nostalgia; even when consummated, love is gone before you know it, an absence never filled.

In previous films Wong has captured the immediacy of experience and passing time with a jagged, kinetic style that’s been compared to early Godard. Godard is recalled here again in the phrases on title cards quoted from pulp novels of the period (in a subplot that needs more integration, Mo-wan and Li-zhen collaborate on writing one of these). In Mood, though, Wong doesn’t dwell on time’s kaleidoscopic flux as much as he does on its palimpsest of loss and regret. He is more akin to New Wavers Alain Resnais in his layering of memory and grief and Eric Rohmer in his play of bewildered desire and social decorum. None of those influences accounts for Mood’s wrenching coda, however, in which words of longing whispered into a hole and sealed with mud sum up not only unrequited love but the human condition itself.