In the Mood for Love

Hong Kong, 1962. A man and a woman rent rooms in the same crowded building and slowly work out that their absent spouses are having an affair with each other. So they meet, ostensibly to figure out how it started, and the meetings become the thing. Wong Kar-wai keeps the cheating couple offscreen the whole time and films only the two who were left behind, which inverts the usual love-triangle. The restraint is the point. They never act on what is obvious, partly out of pride, partly because acting on it would make them no better than the people who hurt them.