2046 Review: SF Chronical

[doriyaki]

Frustrated romantic trapped in the past, with hope for the future

- G. Allen Johnson, Chronical Staff Writer


"Love is a matter of timing," the dashingly handsome but moody writer- hero of Wong Kar-wai's "2046" intones. "It's no good to meet the right person too soon or too late."

In his nine-film career, Wong has perfected the romance noir genre, and these days, he has it all to himself. Nominally a sequel to his masterpiece "In the Mood for Love" (2000), "2046" stakes out its own territory as a complex, visually rich, pull-out-all-the-stops rumination on memory, regret, relationships and the creative process.

While it falls just shy of a masterpiece, Wong's idiosyncratic command of the medium, along with Christopher Doyle's cinematography, William Chang's set and costume design and a veritable Murderers Row of Chinese and Hong Kong actresses -- Ziyi Zhang, Gong Li, Faye Wong, Carina Lau and, in a cameo appearance, Maggie Cheung -- make this a rare, sumptuous movie treat.

It already feels like a classic.

"2046" finds the frustrated and hopelessly romantic science-fiction writer and newspaper reporter Chow (Tony Leung) trying to get over his failure in the previous film to hook up with Su Lizhen (Cheung), his neighbor whose husband was having an affair with his wife. It is set in both 1960s Hong Kong and the year 2046 as imagined by Chow, who now seems divorced, in a story he is writing -- a story that is supposed to help him through a time in which he has lost all hope of having a happy life.

"Memories are traces of tears," he writes, and for the time being, he has decided to live in those memories. He dallies with Lulu (Lau), a dancer he met in Singapore years before. He occupies a hotel room next to No. 2046, where he and Lizhen used to meet. The room is occupied first by the owner's daughter, Jing-wen (Wong, reuniting with Wong Kar-wai and Leung from 1994's "Chungking Express"), who is trying to gain her father's approval of her Japanese boyfriend.

Soon the room is taken over by Bai Ling (Zhang, in her most mature performance to date), a prostitute who falls for Chow. They begin an affair that is one-sided, as Chow is emotionally unavailable. He thinks back to Singapore, where he met a gambler who has the same name as his missed opportunity, Su Lizhen (Gong).

And laced through all this serial dating is his story, "2046," set in the year of Hong Kong's final integration into China. It is a futuristic city, a cool "Metropolis"-like cityscape that seems like a cross between Japanese anime and CGI, where Chow's surrogate voice is Japanese (perhaps a nod to our increasingly globalized interconnectivity), and the women in his life, particularly Wong and Lau, are robots -- a device that has its own psychological clues. It is a place, Chow writes, where people go to reclaim lost memories.

"More and more, I find people that I know appearing in my stories," Chow says, but "2046" is about how one forlorn writer will reconcile himself to his own story.

For some, "2046" will seem too scattered. It's ambitious, but lacks the clarity of the emotionally simple love stories that were featured in "Chungking Express" and "In the Mood for Love," which remain Wong Kar-wai's two best films (add to that "The Hand," his brilliant 45-minute short starring Gong that was part of the "Eros" trilogy earlier this year).

Yet the go-for-broke approach is perfect for this fractured fairy tale, and its success, despite all the beauties in this dream cast, is spearheaded by Leung, one of the most charismatic and handsome movie stars in the world.

Very few films look this dreamy. Very few sound this romantic (the eclectic soundtrack features Francois Truffaut's main composer, Georges Delerue, as well as Nat King Cole, Dean Martin and a haunting theme by Shigeru Umebayashi). Fewer still move this way. In short, very few films are Wong Kar- wai films, a phrase that in the future will carry the same weight as an Antonioni film or a Godard film.

In "2046," lovelorn loneliness has never been this mouth-watering.

[Pungyo]

Oooooh, love the closing line.... "mouthwatering!" I can't wait to see this film!!!

-K
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