"You must be waiting for things to happen/Expecting something to happen/But nothing ever happens." So goes the refrain of one of my favorite obscure new-wave songs of the '80s, "Original Love," by the Feelies. I'm not rehearsing for Rock & Roll Jeopardy! here; it's just that those words are a pretty apt précis, in a way, of director Wong Kar-wai's ravishing, confounding In the Mood for Love, a picture that's about the spaces between people, the emotional connections not made, the cataclysmic effect of one hand withdrawing from another. In other words, not the most plot-driven picture ever made. Set in early '60s Hong Kong, Love puts actors Maggie Cheung and Tony Leung in a romance that's defined by its tentativeness. They play neighbors whose never-seen spouses are themselves conducting an affair. So they turn to each other for information, advice, and solace. The emotional grounding of the film is deliberately quite slippery; we think we're watching, say, a breakup scene, and then Cheung and Leung break out of character, as it were, and reveal that they were merely play-acting what they imagined the other couple might be doing. And all the while, the characters never break through to each other. It's frustrating but hypnotic, and the clothes and settings and endlessly repeated bits of music all contribute to an odd, suspended-in-time feel. If you're willing to go with it, you may be reminded of yet another new-wave chorus, this one from the Talking Heads: "Heaven; is a place/A place where nothing; nothing ever happens."