Dir. Wong Kar Wai, 2004, China , 129 mins
Cast: Tony Leung, Gong Li, Ziyi Zhang
Fans of Wong Kar Wai's singular oeuvre will be familiar with his particular brand of cinema: his is a hyper sensual, retina-ravishing aesthetic of colour, mood and emotion that seduces the viewer with a sensory intensity rarely found in contemporary film. Again collaborating with cinematographer Christopher Doyle (who seems to have shot every film of note coming out of Asian cinema in the last ten years), the long awaited and much delayed 2046 is a visually stunning meditation on love and sex, impulse and memory, set simultaneously in both late 60's Hong Kong and the imagined future-world of 2046, a parallel reality where people journey to recapture their lost dreams.
This is Wong Kar Wai's follow up to his deliriously beautiful In The Mood For Love (2000) in much the same way as Fallen Angels (1995) was a companion piece to 1994's Chungking Express. Not a sequel exactly, more of a 'shadow film', an opportunity to reprise and riff on certain themes, images and concerns from the earlier work, while employing a more fluid, improvisational style. The director has spoken of his method in which he aims to "find the film", working with a regular team of collaborators, often without the safety net of a script. 2046 definitely fits that freewheeling mould and the production history has been a stop-start affair spanning five years of re-shoots, re-cuts and re-evaluations, right up to a frantic, last minute edit completed literally hours before the Cannes premiere. Even that cut has been revised into the version we are now presented with, and it is almost inevitable that this organic process will continue in the form of future special edition DVD releases.
The film continues the romantic misadventures of Chow Mo Wan (Tony Leung), picking up a few years after his ephemeral, unconsummated affair with the married Su Li-Zhen from In The Mood For Love. Emotionally bruised by his experience, Chow re-invents himself as a no-strings playboy during a series of affairs with four very different women he meets in and around the cheap hotel in which he lives, moving in next door to room 2046 - the very room where his earlier brief encounter had taken place. Chow's relationships form an emotional cycle ranging in tone from the humorous alliance with Jingwen (Faye Wong), and the torrid sexual liaisons with Miss Bai (Ziyi Zhang) to the tragic encounters with doomed bargirl LuLu and the mysterious Cambodian gambler (Gong Li). Yet however distant he attempts to remain from his emotions, his past love haunts each new relationship that he tumbles into. Meanwhile, Chow attempts to write a science fiction novel - also called '2046' - in which ciphers representing his various romantic entanglements appear, as sexually confused androids or lovesick travellers, all hurtling forward on a globe spanning hi-tech railway, towards the mythic utopia where they can exorcise their unresolved pain and reclaim their lost memories.
The production design and cinematography is, as you'd expect, simply breathtaking: 60's Hong Kong presented as a claustrophobic, series of night scenes and moody interiors; while the future world of 2046 is more abstracted and expansive - ravishing tableaux's of saturated loneliness, with its own unknowable codes and rituals.
In contrasting Chow's real and imagined lives, Kar-Wai weaves this enigmatic and fascinating futuristic strand throughout the film, utilising the science fiction setting as a mental space in which Chow can work through his emotional demons. This system can be disorientating and confusing in terms of narrative, yet resonates strongly on a deeper emotional level. However, at the films end there is a nagging feeling that this project is somehow unfinished, that there is more to be examined and experienced in Chow's story.
Maybe Kar-Wai will reinstate some of the futuristic sequences in a subsequent version - for my money, this aspect of the film is underused. Still, this remains an endlessly fascinating and playfully open-ended cinematic experience that, for the viewer (as well as the director) is difficult to leave behind.
Gus Alvarez
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