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2046 review: Bleeding Men & The Women Who Love Them

 
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lemonberry



Joined: 28 Jul 2003
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PostPosted: Sat Aug 06, 2005 7:40 pm    Post subject: 2046 review: Bleeding Men & The Women Who Love Them

Bleeding Men & The Women Who Love Them
Wong Kar Wai's latest proves he's among the finest artists - in any medium - of our age

BY NATHAN LEE
August 5, 2005

Jorge Luis Borges, in his pseudoscience classic "The Analytical Language of John Wilkins," describes a Chinese encyclopedia that organized the entire animal kingdom into 14 categories, including "belonging to the emperor," "embalmed," "sucking pigs," and - my personal favorite - "having just broken the water pitcher." "The impossibility of penetrating the divine pattern of the universe," Borges wryly concludes, "cannot stop us from planning human patterns."

Numbers impose logical patterns on the universe but, as products of man's imagination, also lend themselves to all manner of poetic use. When the Chinese wish to talk about the sum total of stuff in existence, they refer to "the 10,000 things." For Marcel Duchamp, the number three came to represent any large number at all. Between these two calibrations of infinity, you will find 2001, Stanley Kubrick's magic number. Just a little further on you will arrive at "2046," the multifarious, multivalent symbol for a 10,000-thing odyssey through time, space, and the endless spirals of memory.

In other words, a new movie by Wong Kar Wai.

This film begins with an ambiguous animated spectacle: A supersonic train twists through a complex futuristic cityscape. "Every passenger who goes to 2046 has the same intention," says an unidentified voice-over. "They want to recapture lost memories, because nothing ever changes in 2046. Nobody knows if that's true because nobody's ever come back." We seem to have entered a science-fiction movie having something to do with a paradox called "2046," which is both a time and a place, static and indeterminate.

Yet no sooner have we been introduced to these intangible panoramas and melancholy physics than they disappear from sight. We leap back 80 years, transported to a shadowy stairwell in Hong Kong. There stands, stunningly glamorous, a handsome man and a beautiful woman. They talk, tentatively approach, and part ways, triggering an interlude of slow-motion lyricism before the montage leaps through time and space once more.

This is the central pattern of "2046," an arabesque on the themes of love, loss, memory, and creation. On the most literal narrative level, it relates several years in the life of a dashing, dissolute journalist (Tony Leung Chiu Wai as Chow Wo Man) as he embarks on a series of bittersweet affairs. But this is like saying "The Searchers" is about a cowboy looking for a girl. "2046," a chamber-piece romance, takes place in an echo chamber of the mind.

As my fellow critic Grady Hendrix has pointed out, the characters, conceits, and dialogue of "2046" share DNA with Mr. Wong's entire body of work. The character eventually known as Chow was first glimpsed in the final scene of "Days of Being Wild," Mr. Wong's second film (and first masterpiece).That queer coda - introducing a new character with no explanation whatsoever at the very end of a story - was of a piece with the movie's oneiric evocation of 1960s Hong Kong, but its origins were less abstract. Mr. Wong first plotted "Days" as a two-part story (a structure he would later perfect in "Chungking Express"). This brief moment was all that survived of the initial conception.

Ten years later "In the Mood for Love" picked up the pieces. Mr. Wong's most perfectly controlled film told the story of a suppressed, slow-burning romance between Chow and his exquisitely reticent neighbor Su Li Zhen (Maggie Cheung). Their affair was never consummated (not on screen at least), but reached a fever pitch of tension in the privacy of a voluptuously red hotel - room 2046. By film's end, Su was gone and Chow had left for Southeast Asia, where, in another of Mr. Wong's beguiling codas, he whispered his sad secrets to the temples of Angkor Wat.

"In the Mood for Love" was a densely imagined, intuitively executed, ecstatically lyrical memory trip - an instant classic. Abetted by the matchless cinematographer Christopher Doyle, the lavishly multitalented William Chang (editor, costumer, and production designer), and his breathtakingly beautiful leads, Mr. Wong brought a lost era to life with Proustian delicacy. The film premiered in 2000, as if to set the bar for cinematic sublimity in the new millennium. No one - not even Mr. Wong - has yet moved it higher.

"2046," a self-conscious magnum opus, is an extrapolation of the "Mood" universe. It is, in fact, a direct continuation of the previous film. Chow returns from Singapore and takes to gambling, drink, and womanizing. He runs into an old flame at a nightclub and followers her home to the residential Oriental Hotel - room 2046. Sometime later, he returns to check on Lulu (Carina Lau Ka Ling) but is told by Mr. Wang (Wang Sum), the manager, that she has moved out. (In truth, she was stabbed by a lover.) Chow moves into room 2047.

Another flash of moody science fiction fills the screen: fragments of action sequences, sexbot lovemaking, abstract light phenomena. We discover these are the visualizations of a pulp novel Chow is writing, translations of his quotidian inner life into extravagant fantasies. Multiplying its meanings to dizzying effects, "2046" has now become time, a place, the number of two significant hotel rooms, the name of a novel, and - as becomes increasingly clear - the story of "2046" itself.

Which is to say, this is a movie that everywhere reflects the joy, pain, eroticism, and frustration of its own making. "If someone wants to leave 2046," asks the voiceover, "how long will it take?" It's a question Mr. Wong must have posed himself many times during the famously difficult, endlessly delayed, constantly changing production of the film. "Some people get away very easily. Others find that it takes them much longer."

A super-sexy courtesan enters the picture: Miss Bai Ling (Ziyi Zhang). Wowza! There may be a more beautiful woman on earth than Ms. Ziyi, but not as she appears through Mr. Doyle's lens, wrapped in Mr. Chang's couture, skipping through Mr. Wong's widescreen, neoclassical compositions. Whether talking sass, turning a trick, or bitch-slapping Chow, she's a fabulous, ferocious creature. Talk about hustle and flow!

The problem is, Miss Bai gives herself fully - a total letdown post-Su Li Zhen. Chow's tempestuous, ultimately tiresome affair with her gives way to flirtation with Mr. Wang's daughter, Wang Jing Wen (Faye Wong). Wang is in love with a Japanese youth (Kimura Takuya), but her father disapproves. Chow intercepts his love letters and passes them along to Wang, who starts collaborating on his potboilers.

Chow's final woman is called Black Spider (Gong Li): the woman from the stairwell. She has a secret; its disclosure will cast a final, resonant echo through the corridors of space, time, and memory in "2046."

The origin of this film's title was China's promise in 1997 that nothing would change in Hong Kong for 50 years. "2046" was to be a science-fiction film, perhaps with political overtones. Many things have changed since then, not least of which is the form "2046" would ultimately take.

What we now have could be classified as romance, melodrama, period piece, sequel, act of self-interrogation, political allegory, crypto science-fiction, belonging to the emperor, having just broke the water pitcher. "2046" is a patterning of the divine universe - a fancy way to say it's a work of art. But there are patterns and there are patterns: Mr. Wong's are among the boldest, brightest, and brilliantly wrought in contemporary art.
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