William Chang authored it twice

Wong shot for months without a finished script, which is the detail everyone repeats. The detail that gets left out is what happens to a film made that way: it is not authored during production. It is authored afterwards, in the edit, by whoever decides which of the hundreds of hours means something.

That was William Chang. He also designed the production and the costumes, which on this film is not a separate job — the qipao is the calendar, the thing that tells you time is passing when nothing else in the frame will.

Two cinematographers shot it, and even that is contested in the telling. What is not contested is that one person cut it and dressed it, and that the film's most quoted quality — its sense of restrained, deferred, formally beautiful longing — lives almost entirely in those two decisions.