Wong Kar-Wai manipulates us in numerous ways throughout “In the Mood for Love.” The greatest trick he pulls on us is giving viewers the impression that Mr. Chow and Mrs. Chan are alone together.

Because we never see them with their romantic partners, it feels to us like the connection is fictional, a rumor of a relationship more than something tangible. It’s like the stories you used to hear in college, people who had long-distant relationships with people in other countries who never showed up and never called.

Except in this case it’s even worse because these are distant, hidden marriages and our dual protagonists are being wronged. So they meet for lunch and go right back into speaking in code about various gifts given, the subtext becoming ever closer to the surface with each detail. Wong’s camera rapidly zooms to faces when the clearest clues land.

All of this is fine when Wong is just establishing a sense of loneliness and despair for them both, but now as we see the two protagonists together at a restaurant a new subtext is emerging — he is conjuring up their love story. And, of course, they must be in love because we keep seeing them in the same places and going through the same moods.

This is all a lie, however. There is no relationship between these two people and no reason for the audience to think that they long for one another. They experience loneliness over their existing relationships, the ones Wong hides from us, not from one another.

They naturally slip into this new role where they become actors and mouth the lines they assume their partners would say — trying to figure out how it all could have happened between them. Except romance is nothing but a play that two people perform endless, and there is no difference between acting a scene and being “in love” this way. It’s all projection, all fantasy.

So it feels heartbreaking and deeply romantic at the same time and it helps that Nat King Cole sings in the background, the 60s mise en scene is vivid, the costumes are impeccable. But they are not the ones being seduced, we are. We’re being sold a romance through the packaging of cinema.

We return to those words from Benny Safdie about cinema’s evil. We don’t experience what real relationships are like in these cinematic moments: what it would actually mean for these two people to live through the pain of separation and then begin something new that would no longer be about slow motion walks down stairwells and furtive glances, it would be about logistics, date nights, budgets and talks about children. No. We short circuit all of that and enter a dreamy world of romantic longing.

If cinema is evil, “In the Mood for Love” is a cursed totem, a haunted painting one cannot look away from … a symphony of siren calls. Two people have been ripped apart by the cruelty of love, and the audience is tricked into finding it all deeply romantic. How diabolical.