So this movie starts off with a kid (well, he’s a police officer, so presumably an adult, but he reads like a teenager) who’s just been dumped, and is effectively in denial about it; and it also starts off with a woman who is engaging in some initially-confusing activities that eventually reveal themselves to be drug-related. And then they meet, have a kind of charming but distant night together, he’s kind of thinking about her, she kills a druglord, and…

… the movie takes a right turn. And tbh, it kind of lost me here, because what happens is, the cop has been at this snack counter a bunch of times over the course of the movie, and the owner has tried to set him up with various of his workers, and he does it again. And the scene then shifts to a cop (who looks older and is wearing an actual cop uniform) talking to the snack counter guy about his girlfriend.

And so of course, I’m thinking this is the same guy, and as his story progresses on, I’m getting confused about how the thing with the drug lady is fitting into all this. But it’s a DIFFERENT PERSON. The movie is effectively two separate stories stitched together, both about policemen dealing with breakups and getting involved with women who are trouble, and that first one is actually completely over, that’s all there was to it.

This confused me for longer into the movie than it should have, tbh, but also once I figured it out, it was kind of annoying, because that first story was really interesting, and the interaction of this dumbass burbling kid with an older woman whose life is clearly complicated and stressful had so much potential. But the second story… not so much. It’s basically a kinda generic handsome reserved dude and a manic pixie dream girl who breaks into his apartment and rearranges stuff, which he inexplicably finds charming and not super-creepy when he finds out about it.

Wong Kar-wai was on that great movies list with In the Mood for Love, one of only two movies from the 21st century. This is an earlier work, and it feels a lot earlier — it’s less self-assured, it’s doing stylistic tricks that come off a bit gimmicky (there’s a lot of super-blurry low-framerate motion), and the characters are just a lot flatter. My recommendation is, go ahead and watch it for the first half, but turn it off as soon as you see Tony Leung, because there’s not much to recommend the second half.