Boston Phoenix - In the mood for loss (plus tony interview)

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In the mood for loss
Wong Kar-wai goes back to the future
BY PETER KEOUGH
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When last we saw Chow Mo-wan (Tony Leung Chiu-wai), the somber scribbler in the ’60s Hong Kong of Wong Kar-wai’s In the Mood for Love, he was whispering his secret into a hole in the stonework of Angkor Wat. What was it? I presume the name of his beloved, the married woman whose husband was having an affair with Mo-wan’s wife, and with whom he was playing out a chaste charade of their mutual betrayal.

In this sequel of sorts, Mo-wan is back, much transformed, having given up the Don Quixote of illusory ideals for the Don Juan of immediate gratification. Losing the love of one’s life will do that. His is a hellish promiscuity, desperate not so much for love as for loss. The director, however, has not changed much: like Mood, like his 1991 film Days of Being Wild, which was set in the same time and place and involved the same intractable questions, this is a film of surfaces, atmosphere, and fluid but delimiting time.

2046 brings Wong full circle: having taken up the hedonism of the self-destructive antihero of Days, the aging Mo-wan discovers that neither self-denial nor self-indulgence makes a dent in the prison of time, space, and desire. The best one can hope for is to sublimate loss into a ravishing work of art, like Mood, or to a lesser extent, Wong’s denser, more ambitious, but less poignantly focused 2046.

Or into a pulp science-fiction novel. Even a broken-hearted lothario needs to make ends meet, so Mo-wan serializes a story set in 2046, the year of Hong Kong’s final reintegration into the mainland. It’s more a place than a time, attainable by the futuristic bullet trains Wong renders in Matrix-like CGI. People go there, as Mo-wan intones, "to capture lost memories. Because in 2046, nothing ever changes. But nobody knows if that’s true or not. Because no one has ever come back."

Maybe that’s because 2046 is also a hotel room, the place where Mo-wan and his lost love enacted their non-affair in Mood. Mo-wan moves into the room next door and keeps tabs on the changing tenants. There’s Wang Jing Wen (Faye Wong), daughter of the hotel owner, whom he falls for, probably because she’s in love with a Japanese man her father refuses to let her marry. There’s the prostitute Bai Ling (Ziyi Zhang), with whom Chow engages in the tradition of eating at a restaurant at Yuletide while listening to Nat King Cole’s "The Christmas Song." Their rendezvous are jokingly but strictly monetary, until they’re not.

The room, though, is subject to memories as well, and so the film wanders off to other encounters that are variations on the same futility. Su Li-zhen (Gong Li), the "Black Spider" with the same name as Mo-wan’s unrequited love in Mood, is a gambler who bails out Mo-wan when his luck runs out in Singapore. Love kindles . . . and is lost again.

But not really. Mo-wan writes these characters into his novel, making them android attendants on the bullet train to the future. He reproduces his doomed loves in a Kubrickian setting with ersatz women who are a cross between sex dolls and noh actors. Meanwhile, Wong interweaves episodes from past and future, using titles varying from the specific ("24 December 1967") to the absurd ("1 hour later"; "10 hours later"; "1000 hours later"). More cogent are the musical links, from pop songs alluding to previous films (Nat King Cole’s "Quizas, Quizas, Quizas," from Mood) to plaintive strains from Bellini and Wagner operas. Throughout, Mo-wan repeats the act of whispering a secret into a hole and sealing it up, a mantra useful in picking up women. What’s the secret of 2046? Perhaps that it’s not the love that’s lost but the moment, and that the loser is condemned to relive it forever.



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No worries

It’s a shock to see that Tony Leung’s forehead isn’t permanently etched with worry lines. The prolific star, who at age 43 has been in more than 70 films, is Hong Kong cinema’s standout brooder. A parade of Asian filmmakers have cast him as introspective characters: John Woo (Bullet in the Head, Hard-Boiled), Hou Hsiao-hsien (City of Sadness, Flowers of Shanghai), Zhang Yimou (Hero), and, most significantly, Wong Kar-wai (Chungking Express, Happy Together).

Seldom have Leung’s brown eyes been so blue as they were in Wong’s 2000 In the Mood for Love, a story of repressed passion set in 1960s Hong Kong. Leung and Maggie Cheung play neighbors whose spouses are having an affair. The wronged mates bond but keep their emotions in check. For his performance, Leung was named Best Actor at Cannes.

Now he’s in Boston to discuss 2046. Five years in the making, Wong’s film continues the story of Mood’s Chow Mo-wan, a journalist who dabbles in pulp fiction. But Wong threw his star a curveball: Mo-wan, traumatized by his almost-affair with Su Li-zhen, has turned into a smirking womanizer.

Wong suggested Charles Bukowski as a role model. "I didn’t ask him why," says Leung. "But I knew it would not be easy, because the original Mr. Chow was still inside me. I got used to his body language, his tempo, his gestures, his voice. Now, with the same costume, the same sets, even the same hair cream, I would have to play the part differently."

A veteran of five Wong films, Leung is used to rolling with the punches. The writer/director is notorious for beginning projects without a script or firm story line. But that doesn’t mean his films are improvised. "Kar-wai changes his ideas every day. His work goes from zero to everything, very quickly. But I never doubt his ability. Kar-wai is like a teacher to me, in that I dare not argue with him."

Leung did win one argument: he asked to play Mo-wan with a moustache, a smarmy touch that telegraphs the change in behavior. It’s a part of a façade he has constructed, and Leung sympathizes with the man beneath. "He is cynical because he doesn’t want to get hurt. You can find the original Chow when he’s alone. You feel his sadness and his loneliness. When he’s with other people, he seems to be happy. But deep down, he’s still living with his past."

Leung fell into acting by chance. After graduating from school, he befriended a man with dreams of movie stardom: Stephen Chow, now Hong Kong’s top comic actor/director (Kung Fu Hustle). Chow persuaded Leung to enroll in the training program run by the Hong Kong television network TVB. Two stars were born.

"From day one, I was never trying to achieve anything," says Leung. "The reason I love acting is, when I was a kid, I hid my emotions. In the training class, I found out I could express my feelings in front of others because I was hiding behind someone. A character. So no one knows that it’s me." Like other players from the Hong Kong film renaissance, Leung has acted in almost every genre, from intelligent thrillers like Infernal Affairs (now being remade by Martin Scorsese) to silly farces. In Wong’s angst-filled period piece Ashes of Time, he played a blind swordsman. In Hero, he emoted while co-stars Jet Li, Donnie Yen, and Maggie Cheung crossed swords.

But Leung did participate in that film’s most breathtaking set piece, a swordfight between him and Li that took place in the air above a lake. The scene took two and a half weeks to shoot because the water was ripple-free only between 10 am and noon. The actors were suspended from wires to harnesses early each morning. "When the wind stopped, we would shoot right away." And he adds that doing a fight scene with the agile and precise Li meant that "you’re under a lot of pressure! If there was a mistake, it would be because of me."
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"Soon we must all face the choice between what is right...and what is easy"