The film takes place in Hong Kong, 1962. Chow Mo-wan (TonyLeung), a journalist, rents a room in an apartment of a building on the sameday as Su Li-zhen (Maggie Cheung), a secretary from a shipping company. Theybecome next-door neighbors. Each has a spouse who works and often leaves themalone on overtime shifts. Despite the presence of a friendly Shanghaineselandlady, Mrs. Suen, and bustling, mahjong-playing neighbors, Chow and Su oftenfind themselves alone in their rooms. Their lives continue to intersect ineveryday situations: a recurring motif in this film is the loneliness of eatingalone, and the film documents the leads' chance encounters, each making theirindividual trek to the street noodle stall.
Chow and Su each nurse suspicions about their own spouse'sfidelity; each comes to the conclusion that their spouses have been seeing eachother. Su wonders aloud how their spouse's affair might have began, andtogether, Su and Chow re-enact what they imagine might have happened.
Chow soon invites Su to help him write a martial artsserial for the papers. As their relationship develops, their neighbors begin totake notice. In the context of a socially conservative 1960s' Hong Kong,friendships between men and women bear scrutiny. Chow rents a hotel room awayfrom the apartment where he and Su can work together without attractingattention. The relationship between Chow and Su is platonic, and defiantly so,as there is the suggestion that they would be degraded if they stooped to thelevel of their spouses. As time passes, however, they acknowledge that theyhave developed feelings for each other.
