Jude Law and Norah Jones during the filming of “My Blueberry Nights,” directed by Wong Kar-wai.  [Macall Polay/Jet Tone Films]

By DENNIS LIM

ON a SoHo film set last August, Jude Law and Norah Jones were getting intimate. Repeatedly intimate. To be precise, they had kissed upwards of 150 times in the past three days. 　

The occasion for this outbreak of passion was “My Blueberry Nights,” the first English-language film by Wong Kar-wai, the maverick Hong Kong director turned avatar of cosmopolitan cool. This particular night was stifling as the crew spilled out of Palacinka, a small cafe on Grand Street that was the principal New York location, preparing for yet another take of the scene known as “the Kiss.” 　　

It’s closing time, and Ms. Jones, the only remaining customer, is slumped on the counter, her eyes shut. A smudge of cream rests on her upper lip, the telltale sign of a dessert binge. Mr. Law, cleaning up behind the bar, gazes at her, slowly leans in and steals a lingering kiss. When he surfaces, the cream on her lip is gone. 　　

The shot lasted less than a minute, but the number of permutations that Mr. Wong and his cinematographer, Darius Khondji, devised — 15 set-ups, by the count of the script supervisor — suggested it would play a central role in the finished film. The Kiss was being shot at different film speeds and from a multitude of angles: a wide shot, his point of view, hers, through windows, with objects in the foreground. 　　

“I’ve never worked with someone who’s put so much emphasis on a single moment,” Mr. Law said between takes one night. “It’s extraordinary how he’ll take a moment and replay it and slice it up.” 　　

The consecration of a fleeting, fugitive moment is one of Mr. Wong’s specialties. Perhaps more than any filmmaker since Alain Resnais, his great subject is time — or more specifically lost time. His rhapsodic movies, haunted by voice-over ruminations and swathed in lush regret, seem to transpire in the realm of memory. People and places are mourned even as they are captured on camera. 　

Mr. Wong, 48, is keen to describe “My Blueberry Nights,” a road movie shot in New York, Memphis, Las Vegas and Ely, Nev., with a cast that also includes Natalie Portman, Rachel Weisz and David Strathairn, as a new beginning. His last film, “2046,” was planned as science fiction but demonstrated the gravitational pull of the past as well, succumbing to the hothouse delirium of 1960s Hong Kong. A kaleidoscopic head rush, “2046” quoted so extensively from Mr. Wong’s earlier work that it felt like a midcareer retrospective unto itself. 　　

To a notorious degree Mr. Wong finds his way as he goes, often plunging into production with little more than an outline. His exploratory method gives his films a unique shape and intensity; the result is inseparable from the process. 　　

In the mid-1990s, with Hong Kong’s reversion to Chinese sovereignty looming, Mr. Wong directed three films — “Chungking Express,” “Fallen Angels” and “Happy Together” — in quick succession. Made as if on deadline, they have a brash Polaroid-like immediacy. The films that followed, “In the Mood for Love” and “2046,” are period reveries rooted in the melancholy of transience. It’s only fitting that he had a hard time letting go; each took a seeming eternity to complete. “In five years you can make five films, but I spent five years making one,” he said in his Manhattan hotel room soon after the shoot, referring to “2046.”