Wong seduces his audience into feeling the love story well before it begins. He has said that “In the Mood for Love” isn’t really a love story, it’s a story about gossip and the social structure of Hong Kong in the early 60s.

What he accomplishes in the first part of the film is getting the audience in on the gossipy vibe. It brings up memories of high school, where having a conversation with a girl just a few minutes too long could touch off a wave of speculation, leading to talk, getting back to you in the form of “I heard that you and …” Or maybe this is just my personal history talking.

The love affair in the film is broken cleanly into three parts: the audience seduction, getting viewers to yearn for their pairing before the characters have even thought about it; the play acting love affair, where the two pretend to be their spouses and play out scenes to try to figure out how it might have happened.

And then, without any clear starting point or incident, it switches over to genuine affection. Mrs. Chan hears from Ping, his strange coworker, that Mr. Chow is feeling ill and wants sesame syrup. We next see Mrs. Chan making that sesame syrup and trying to play down with the landlady what a strange thing it is for someone to make in a large batch all of a sudden at night.

Next, we see them on the street, Mr. Chow out to get noodles, asking Mrs. Chan is she wants to come along. She turns this down, but they begin to talk, first about where their spouses are now (they both seem to be in Japan) and the hopelessness of their predicaments.

But then they shift to a different register and start talking about going to movies and having hobbies and how being married takes people away sometimes from the things they enjoy doing most. Here, Wong Kar-Wai is no longer tricking the audience or following a formula, he’s letting his unconscious speak and bring out the things that make the protagonists alike.

And the best evidence that this is coming from Wong’s unconscious is Mr. Chow’s plan for the future — he’s going to work on a manga kung-fu series and he asks Mrs. Chan if she wants to collaborate. She waves off the idea at first, saying she just likes to read them and wouldn’t know the first thing about writing one.

But Mr. Chow doesn’t take the denial and tells her that it would help if she would just read them so they could talk about the project. This sounds like a creative person’s psyche speaking loudly — and it creates a place for Mr. Chow and Mrs. Chan to come together not out of some mystical longing or plotted revenge, but in shared interest and the joy of collaboration.

In a film with many repetitions, it’s here that the film breaks the pattern and creates something genuine out of a relationship the director was until now forcing upon us.