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Review

After five years and three cinematographers, 2046 reached its final cut, and the result still feels like a work-in-progress—a succession of images and sounds that has been built and torn apart for so long that even in its completion, its themes, motifs, and ideas seem to be in flux. The film—which is a glorious product of Hong Kong director Wong Kar-Wai’s evolving stream-of-consciousness—is a pleasure to watch: not so much for its billowing smoke, furious score, and stunning light patterns as it is for the suspense of seeing one of the world’s greatest directors pull five years of celluloid scraps together one by one until he has woven a work that is (if not cohesive, per say) consistent in its visual logic. Wong, who has previously enjoyed the process of shooting until he runs out of film and molding it in the editing room, may have gone overboard this time, but he yields an exceptional product—a quintessential Wong film—in which, frame by frame, his artistic process is startlingly tangible. In addition, 2046 may be essential postmodern filmmaking—self reflexive, conceptual, political, abstract...a film that builds its narrative out of rhythms and repetition rather than offering a traditional romance. This is perhaps most fascinating in that 2046 is a sequel (of sorts) to In the Mood for Love, the director’s most classical film.

Mr. Chow, the lonely protagonist, now carries on a series of love affairs in an attempt to rediscover the passion he once felt for Mrs. Chan. With each lover (the gambling Black Widow, a glamorous prostitute, the young daughter of a hotel manager, and a woman engaged to a Japanese man) his search becomes increasingly futile. Nonetheless, he manipulates their characters to design a new serial novel in which, ultimately, some of these women are conceived as androids—soulless mechanisms of care and affection that are, in their design, incapable of offering the happiness he seeks. The novel concerns a train that takes its passengers to the year 2046 (the number of the hotel room where Chow and Chan meet in In the Mood for Love), where one’s memories exist in a comforting stasis. It builds a romantic if nihilistic paradox: that in order to find what we want, which is inevitably rooted in the past, we must look to the future. Emotional implications aside, the film has a distinctive socio-political weight. That intoxicating year where future and past unite is the year when Hong Kong will make its final transition into China from British sovereignty.

If Wong—consciously or not—has a fascination with complementary hemispheres (East/West, past/future, reality/fiction), 2046 is the perfect mirror to his earlier film, and the two offer some understanding of the left-brain/right-brain symmetry in his work. In addition to the fact that the highly modern story of 2046 balances the restrained classicism of In the Mood..., several smaller parallels abound: the red and orange tones of the first film are matched by their complementary colors (blue and green)in 2046; the playful chirp of a violin is now a roaring string orchestra; the hopeful spiritualism of the original conclusion is countered here by a similar “higher power” this time, a vacuous, technological future; and muted sexuality is now full-blown eroticism. While it is not necessary to see either film to enjoy the other, it is intriguing to consider them as a pair. They inform each other, and their mutual implications, like the process by which they were made, will evolve and become richer year by year.

 -- Mark Thiedeman