Summary
After Su rejects Chow's proposal of working together in a separate apartment, we see Chow walk down the hallway of a new building and enter a room with bright, red lighting. He leans against the wall, seemingly exhausted. Su calls Chow's office and his boss answers. His boss tells Su that Chow hasn't been in for three days, and that they're looking for him, too. He asks if he can take a message for her. Another day, Chow calls Su at work and tells her where he's been staying. Su takes a cab to his new building, walks through the lobby, up the stairs, pauses at the top of the stairs, and walks back down. Finally, she's standing at Chow's door, asking how she can help, what she can bring him. As she's leaving, Chow tells her to call him when she arrives back home. "Let it ring three times, then hang up," he says (55:13).
He confesses that he didn't think she would actually show up. Su says, "We won't be like them," referring to their spouses. Then she tells him that she'd see him the next day.
The subsequent montage shows Chow and Su working diligently on the martial arts serial in Chow's new apartment, smiling, and enjoying each other's company. They share meals and exchange notes, stand over each other's shoulders, and have in-depth discussions. The montage leads into another bit of roleplay between Su and Chow over a meal. They are rehearsing confronting their spouses about their affairs. Chow pretends to be Su's husband, and Su asks him to tell her frankly whether or not he's having an affair. Chow coaches Su through the interaction, telling her, "if he admits it outright, let him have it!" (58:47). Su admits that she didn't imagine him admitting it so easily. The second time they rehearse it, Su breaks down crying, saying that she didn't expect it to hurt so much, hearing him admit he's having the affair. She cries into Chow's shoulder as he tries to comfort her by saying that this is just a rehearsal, and that "he won't admit it so easily" (1:01:15).
This scene leads into a scene at Mrs. Suen's apartment, where Su lives. Suen is lecturing Su about how often she's out and away from the apartment. "It's right to enjoy yourself while you're young, but don't overdo it." (1:01:25). Suen tells Su not to let her husband travel so much in the future, and strongly suggests that Su and her husband are not acting properly as a married couple. Su politely nods in agreement through Suen's lecture, but by the time she turns the corner to return to her room, she's crying.
The next day, Chow calls Su to set a time for them to continue work on the serial because his editor is hounding him for the next installment, and he needs her help. Su tells Chow that they really shouldn't be seeing each other as much as they have been. She tells him about Suen lecturing her. Chow wants to know what Suen said, but Su would rather not repeat it. When she hangs up, she goes into the shared kitchen, where one of her housemates asks her if she's going out for noodles again. Su replies that she'll be staying in, and the housemate invites her to have vegetable won-tons with the rest of the house. Su agrees. Su stands around the table of older women as they play mahjong, sipping her drink.
From Su at the window, the scene cuts to Chow in his office, smoking with his colleagues, laughing and conversing, until he turns his back to them and becomes pensive. Back at Su's office, her boss Mr. Ho informs her that someone named Chow called for her. Later the same evening, Chow runs through the pouring rain to meet Su outside of her building. He runs off to grab an umbrella and offers to escort her back to the building. She turns him down on the grounds that they shouldn't be seen together. When he offers her the umbrella, she turns it down on the grounds that if she's seen with his umbrella, it will raise suspicions.
They stand under the awning in the rain in silence, until Su asks Chow if he tried calling her at work. He admits that he didn't think she got his message. He asks her to get him a ticket to Singapore through her agency. His friend Ping tells him that they're short-staffed out there, and Chow feels that there's nothing keeping him in Hong Kong anymore. When Su asks him why he's rushing off to Singapore, he says, "A change of scene. I've had enough of the gossip" (1:08:45). Chow admits that despite their goal to "not be like their spouses," he has feelings for her, and it's clear to him that she will not leave her husband. Su admits that she wasn't expecting him to fall in love with her, and Chow says that he wasn't expecting it either.
In their discussion, Chow reflects on how what he really wanted to figure out was how the affair began between his wife and Su's husband. Chow tells Su that after falling for her, he understands how it happened between their spouses. "Feelings can just creep up like that," he admits (1:09:40). Chow requests that before he leaves, they rehearse his leaving.
In an alley nearby Su's building, she and Chow practice saying their farewells so that Chow feels prepared when it's time to leave. Su breaks down and weeps in his arms, and he comforts her, reminding her that it isn't real yet; it's only practice. On the cab ride home, she tells Chow that she doesn't want to go home. They hold hands and she rests her head on his shoulder.
Analysis
Chow moving to a new building demonstrates once again the gendered imbalance of his courtship with Su and the circumstances and surveillance to which they are respectively subject. Chow has the freedom to get his own place, the freedom to keep his old place and come and go there without being questioned about where he's been and with whom he's been spending time. Su, on the other hand, is constantly scrutinized. Even visiting Chow on supposedly neutral grounds—his new apartment, which he secured in the hopes that they could spend time there away from prying eyes—Su is regarded with curiosity and suspicion by the building attendant in the lobby as she debates whether or not to go upstairs (54:08). Even Chow imposes a measure of surveillance on Su when he tells her to ring his phone when she arrives back at her apartment.
But as they speak in the doorway of Chow's apartment, the rift between them caused by Chow's offer to secure an apartment for them to work together, and Su's initial rejection of the idea, seems to dissipate. Su assures him that she'll be by the next day to work on the serial, and before she leaves, she repeats the phrase that has become somewhat of a mantra between them: "We won't be like them" (55:33), them of course referring to their unfaithful spouses. But as the film goes on, the meaning of this promise becomes increasingly obscured. Whereas at first it seemed clear—that they would not be unfaithful to their spouses like their spouses were unfaithful to them—at this point in the narrative, their relationship defies traditional definitions of romance, friendship, and intimacy in general. Su and Chow rely on each other for company; Chow clearly has romantic feelings for Su, though it is unclear how Su feels about Chow in that regard. In any case, the simple fact that they have not crossed the line into physical intimacy seems less important as they grow increasingly dependent on their platonic relationship which is built on the foundation of their spouses' affair.
The montage that follows their first encounter in Chow's new apartment portrays Su and Chow in a distinctly domestic arrangement with one another. They're working on a project together, a partnership of equals, toward a common goal. Their expressions range from intense concentration to frustration to delight. They laugh together, they focus together, they challenge each other, and also provide each other with the relief and satisfaction of familiar company at the end of a long day. Notably, though, many of the shots of Chow and Su in this montage capture them as reflections in mirrors rather than directly. This repeated framing of their faces in mirrors strongly suggests that the partnership we're seeing, the harmony on display, is distorted or refracted in a way that prevents it from being fully "real." While Chow and Su's relationship may resemble or reflect a harmonious domestic partnership, as long as they refuse to "be like them," i.e. their spouses, and commit to straying outside the contract of their marriage, their relationship will always fall short of the "real thing."
Another example of the obscuring line between "real" and simulation in Chow and Su's relationship is their effort to rehearse confronting their spouses about their infidelities. When Chow plays the role of Su's husband, he's forced into the dissonant position of being judge and accused at the same time—when he, as Su's husband, admits to having a mistress and Su slaps him, he's also the one telling her that she's underreacting. When he, as Su's husband, admits the second time that he was cheating on her, and Su breaks down crying, he's also the one comforting her, assuring her that her husband surely won't admit to it so easily. Their ritual of roleplay and rehearsal distances them from the reality of their spouses' relationship; it makes reality seem more malleable than it really is, and grants them a sense of control that they don't actually have. After Chow urges Su to really "let him have it," her introverted response to him confirming that he has a mistress also demonstrates the unpredictability of the emergence of feelings and genuine emotional response. Both Chow and Su imagined that the "genuine" response to her husband admitting to cheating would be anger and rage, a loud, spectacular reaction. Instead, Su's genuine response was quiet, internal, but no less devastated.
In the course of working on the serial together at Chow's place, away from the prying eyes of their neighbors, they grow more familiar and more dependent on each other's company to feel any sort of human connection in their otherwise siloed lives; but after Mrs. Suen's lecture about how she's away from home too much—Suen's suggestion being that Su either is engaging in, or is allowing people to conclude that she's engaging in, some sort of untoward behavior—Su acquiesces and stays home, again compelled to place the opinions of people she barely knows before her own needs and desires for the sake of conforming to societal standards. Suen and the other women Su lives with take for granted the notion that Su can simply enter into their group because she is also a married woman; they don't consider that her marriage is in trouble, or, even if it is in trouble, that Su would dare to think about leaving her marriage and venturing outside of her prescribed domestic role, an assumption that precedes Suen's lecture. In staying home, Su clearly remains on the margins of the household. Because she, at no fault of her own, is in a dysfunctional marriage, she cannot fit neatly into the domestic role consigned to her and the other women of the household. So she sips her drink by the window, looking out. Framing her once again by a window, camera positioned outside of the window, suggests that she is penned in. Cutting to Chow at work juxtaposes her circumstance with his. He gets on well with his coworkers, smiling and laughing; nonetheless, he mourns the restrictions on his relationship with Su. The juxtaposition of Chow's work environment and Su's continues to emphasize how, no matter where Su goes in her life, she's being watched and judged. For example, her boss, Mr. Ho, looks at Su with a fleeting sense of suspicion after telling her that a man called for her. Whereas when Su called for Chow at his place of work, his boss didn't give it a second thought.
When Chow finally asks Su for a ticket to Singapore to leave Honk Kong, he attempts to demonstrate how he can no longer claim not to be like his wife or her husband, because he's in love with her, and he can't deny his feelings. He says that he's tired of the rumors, and when Su rebuts that they both know the "rumors" aren't true, Chow admits that they are, at least from an emotional standpoint. Chow almost absolves their spouses of wrongdoing when he says that feelings can just creep up. And his suggestion that the character of their relationship has changed is confirmed by several repeated shots after they rehearse his leaving. In the cab ride home, the same shot of their hands across the back seat appears, but this time, instead of pulling her hand away, Su grips Chow's hand tighter. When Chow assures her, when she weeps in his arms, that his leaving is just a rehearsal, it harkens back to when they rehearsed her confrontation with her husband over his infidelity. At some point in the course of their relationship, the roleplay because real, and the simulation transformed into that which they were attempting to signify—a genuine loving relationship.
