I didn't actually like Wong Kar-wai's film 'In the Mood for Love'. (I have to hide this fact from most movie-minded people I know, but it's well and truly out there now!)

The movie and me, we just didn't gel. Yes, yes, it was all soulful, moody staring off into darkened corners, and unspoken pain and longing and love and loneliness, but I still just wanted to check my watch much of the time.

What an unrepentant philistine!

But Hong Kong - the city - now here is a place that could convert me to the soulfulness of 'In the Mood for Love' in an instant.

Something about this city makes me forget all my objections to that film, and makes me recall instantly the hauntingly mod Hong Kong of darkened alleyways and dimly-lit shophouses and faint strains of incense that it so impeccably evoked.

Hong Kong, for me, is an impossibly affecting place - its high-tech neon sits alongside crumbling sixties Chinese-style decor, and tiny noodlehouses and old men dozing on benches. It helps, of course, that everything on Hong Kong island is set on such high, tumble-down mountains, and that it has a vast, aching harbour at its feet.

The crammed, crowded, hemmed-in feel that such high-rise living evokes reminds me a little of parts of Sydney that I also love - the bits like Potts Point which scramble down the hillside to the harbour, and have all the glamour of art deco, with a decent edge of dirtiness.

But Hong Kong straddles the glamour and the pain of high-rise living as Sydney never could: Sydney is too much a city devoted to the good life. It's all crisp, dry whites, and cold beer and sunny winters. There's none of the edge of loneliness and desolation that Hong Kong captures so artfully in every bowl of congee gulped down fast and alone in a back alley, or in the messy mass of washing and tangled lives that dangles from every apartment's pitiful window allotment.

Kings Cross in Sydney looks like a kindergarten outing when you compare it to Mongkok. Mongkok is neon and electrics and sex gone mad; a wired, pumping frenetic mass of blinking signange, super-saturated billboards and rampant lust. If you don't find your salvation in the bins of bargain-basement VCDs, or reflected in the screen of a tinny, tiny mobile phone, perhaps you'll find it curled in the arms of a hooker like a cat on a cold night.

And then there's Tsim Sha Tsui. My heart nearly stopped when I went to Chungking Mansions for the first time. The sheer insanity of the place floored me. It's the backpacker mecca in Hong Kong, but so much more besides.

Ethiopians and Syrians and Pakistanis hang outside on the street, chilling with guys fresh from the Keralan backwaters. It's a kind of halfway house for lost souls and people looking for a better life, with scammers and con-artists and decent people eddying in between. A giant vortex that exerts its force on every stray soul in town and enjoins them to come on in.

Nothing can prepare you for Chungking. It's a giant, crumbling rabbit warren of poor plumbing and concrete cancer and dingy hallways. A highrise given over to semi-squalid conditions - or so it seems at first. But behind every doorway, there's a secret world, often brightly lit and comforting: here, an Indian restaurant that's serving up soulfood to men who wonder how their families are doing; there, an immaculately maintained guesthouse with IDD phones in every room, and slippers under every bed.

You never can tell when it comes to Hong Kong, you never can tell.

After all, this is a city audacious enough to install an escalator on a mountainside - it runs down in the morning and up at night, carrying Hong Kong's denizens to their working lives and then home again. A massive escalator outside on a mountain? It's Magic Faraway Tree sort of stuff.

So it shouldn't shock me to learn that Wong Kar-wai actually filmed 'In the Mood for Love' in Bangkok.

But it does, and I'm astounded.

His movie somehow touches the core of a particular notion of Hong Kong, and you can feel it in the air when you're here.

I decide it doesn't matter where it was filmed - it's a movie about the dreamlife of a city, and the nostalgia of past emotion, and all of that is here in the city of Nine Dragons.