I’ve written previously about how “In the Mood for Love” seduces the audience first, building a romantic atmosphere, while director Wong Kar-Wai’s dual protagonists are having their hearts broken.

The process of making this film was difficult. A financial crisis hit Asian economies while “In the Mood for Love” was in production and Wong’s budget was in flux throughout. He finally happened up on a solution — the same one Kieslowski used for The Dekalog — making a deal for creating a second film, “2046,” set in the same universe as “In the Mood for Love,” then creatively shuffling scenes between those two movies.

So Wong ended up shooting quite a bit more footage for the movie than he ended up using. The deleted scenes for “In the Mood for Love” includes a scene at a hotel, in that mythical room 2046, where Mr. Chow and Mrs. Chan play act the affair of their spouses — but the scene gets too intense and Mrs. Chan decides to cut it off. Some of the same ideas were transferred to a restaurant scene.

But “In the Mood for Love” includes a remnant of that original room 2046 scene during that play acting segment. It comes and goes in a flash — a first time viewer would have no idea what it means — and I’m sure Wong left it in there purely to keep building the romantic atmosphere.

The success of any film includes a great deal of luck. Today, we can look at this Wong scene and call it a flash forward. But that’s only because the movie is so beloved. We assume Wong made no mistakes when making this film. If the movie had been a flop? We’d all consider the 2046 scene early in the film to be a continuity error.

So, this segment of the film comes in the wake of two important milestones in the relationship between Mr. Chow and Mrs. Chan — their work together on this collaborative project and the time they spent together in the room trying to wait out the neighbors. And these milestones had an effect on them.

Mr. Chow decides to rent a room, room 2046, as a place where he can work on his manga stories in peace. He asks Mrs. Chan to join him and says that they have no reason to feel guilty about it because they’re doing nothing wrong. This doesn’t completely convince Mrs. Chan. She refused to take any of the royalty check that Mr. Chow received and offered to her, saying that all she did was read his story and make some comments. But Mr. Chow tells her how important her contributions were.

Later, after trying to contact her husband at work and finding out yet again that he out of the office without her knowledge, she gives Mr. Chow a call and offers to help again. He invites her to room 2046.

What follows is a manic scene of Mrs. Chan going up and down stairs, approaching, then changing her mind. She clearly has a great deal of anxiety about what she is doing, even if it is nothing more than extending their collaboration.

And this is important for two reasons. First, it’s the film’s first evidence that Mrs. Chan is not acting on social constraints anymore, she’s reacting to her feelings and those strong feelings scare her. She now does feel something for Mr. Chow and she doesn’t know what to do with those feelings.

Also, it’s proof that the collaboration means something to her, she feels its an essential part of their bond. Going to the hotel room to work on a project is sanctifying their relationship.

When she arrives at the room, Mr. Chow doesn’t let her in. He says that he’s not feeling well — maybe they can try again tomorrow. So the manic energy she was releasing on the stairwell he was feeling in the pit of his stomach.

The scene closes with Mrs. Chan saying “we won’t be like them.” But we already know that. What their spouses did was tawdry, illicit, dishonest. What Mr. Chow and Mrs. Chan have is hard earned and restrained. They didn’t get swept away by the romantic clues the film dropped. They simply discovered, over time, that they need each other’s company.

And we, the audience, are sitting there waiting for them, because we bought into their love story long before it began.