2046 "Tony! Tony! Tony!" interviewed by City Pages

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City Pages

Tony! Tony! Tony!

The seductive star of '2046' reveals the method of his mood
by Terri Sutton

http://www.citypages.com/databank/26/1290/article13621.asp

Whether Tony Leung represents director Wong Kar-wai's muse or his avatar, the fact is: As Tony goes, so goes the film. For In the Mood for Love, Leung was wide open--too much so, according to some critics. In 2046, he is, for long stretches, a wind tunnel. This viewer feels the difference in her chest (and feels precisely the moment in the latter film when Leung's Mr. Chow begins to shut out the wind in order to hear his own keening). Leung's performance in 2046 may be the most subtle of a subtle actor's career, and yet it is a work of cumulative beauty: shifting believably from the first scenes' greasy carapace of a playboy to the stinging point near the end where Chow confesses to Ziyi Zhang's Bai Ling that he can no longer rent out his body to strangers.

I met Leung in a private dining room of Cosmos. Mine was his last interview of a long press day in Minneapolis, with a plane trip to follow, but Leung was unfailingly attentive, even moving quickly to open the honey jar for my tea. When I asked him if the presence of Japanese pop star Takuya Kimura in 2046 was an acknowledgment of the 43-year-old Leung's diminishing draw with younger audiences, he looked quizzically at me with those deep brown eyes, as if wondering where I had disappeared. Otherwise he was soft-spoken and considered, with a rising laugh that hinted at getting giddy somewhere far from an interview.

City Pages: I read that for you and Maggie Cheung, watching In the Mood for Love was a painful experience: You had filmed so much, and so little of it was on the screen. Was that true for 2046?

Tony Leung: It was the same. And much more...scary. A few days before [the world premiere in] Cannes, we were still doing the dubbing.

CP: One criticism of 2046 has been that the characters are not as sympathetic as in In the Mood for Love, and the story is not as engaging.

Leung: I don't know how you can compare [the two films]. In the Mood for Love is a very straightforward love story, so it's easy for the audience to follow it. 2046 is a story about love. So it doesn't have a specific direction. It's just a kind of feeling. At the same time, it can also relate to Kar-wai's previous movies. Like the cab scene: I related that to me and Maggie in In the Mood for Love--and me and Leslie [Cheung] in Happy Together. You can call [2046] a summary of all [Wong's] movies.

CP: Much has been written about the painful, drawn-out process of working with Wong Kar-wai--the lack of a script, the sudden changes in characterization, the endless shooting. Would you say that process is getting more messy?

Leung: You can say more messy because there are more actors [in 2046]. Every one of them is a big star in Asia, and the scheduling conflicts caused big problems. [Wong] still works very much like before. I've gotten used to it. Newcomers [to his sets] find it very frustrating [laughs]. The more [actors], the more counseling I have to do.

CP: You've said that you've come to trust him more. Do you feel he trusts you more?

Leung: No. I've found that he loves all his actors. That's why they appear so special in his movies. He's a very good observer. He can always explore some qualities [in actors] that sometimes even they are not aware [that they have]. I don't know if it's his method of making movies or his [method of] observation. He's a very sensitive person. After a period of time, an actor will fall very easily into a stereotype. You need to work with somebody else who can give you a different chemistry--to make you change. Sometimes actors have too much power. When a director says, "Follow my direction," some actors have the power to say, "No, I don't want to do that." But if you don't take that challenge, you might miss some surprises. When I work with Kar-wai, he always surprises me.

CP: How did he surprise you in 2046?

Leung: At the very beginning, I think we were trying to do something new. But from the first day he asked me to revisit the character [from In the Mood for Love], the scenes, the colors, everything kept reminding me of the loss. I didn't find anything new. I don't know whether he intends to do that. I think he might intend to do that.

CP: You argued for a moustache to distinguish this version of the character from the other one--because you had such a strong emotional "hangover" [from In the Mood for Love]. Did this [character] hang around a long time, too?

Leung: Yeah. It took me quite a long time to get out of Mr. Chow from 2046. Even when I was doing Tokyo Raiders II last year, [Mr. Chow] still lingered. I still think I'm that man. The director [of Tokyo Raiders II] said, "You are not that guy [in 2046]!"

CP: I've heard it took more than 30 takes to get that amazing kiss with Gong Li.

Leung: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And each take is a thousand feet [of film]. And [Gong] cried more than 30 times.

CP: That's some technique. Or frustration.

Leung: Frustration, probably [laughs].

Also in this issue: Endless Love In '2046,' the world's greatest living filmmaker fails to forget the past by Rob Nelson

· · Vol 26 · Issue 1290 · PUBLISHED 8/24/2005
www.citypages.com

City Pages is the Online News and Arts Weekly of the Twin Cities

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Moview Review
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City Pages
· · Vol 26 · Issue 1290 · PUBLISHED 8/24/2005

Endless Love

In '2046,' the world's greatest living filmmaker fails to forget the past

by Rob Nelson

www.citypages.com/databank/26/1290/article13622.asp

You will fall in love only once. Obstacles will prevail. The rest of your life is spent recovering. --Alice Dallow, "Things Wong Kar-wai Taught Me About Love," Senses of Cinema

Like a lot of us who've encountered the uniquely heartbreaking In the Mood for Love, Wong Kar-wai has spent a long time trying to recover from it. The filmmaker conceived his follow-up feature, 2046, as a Philip K. Dick-style sci-fi epic set in the year of the title--an apparent means of escape from Love and its early '60s period melodrama. But the name of the new film carried other, hauntingly familiar connotations: It's the number of the hotel room where Love's Su Li Zhen and Mr. Chow nearly consummated their secret affair (an editor's blade intervened at the climactic moment); and it's the last year, as per Deng Xiaoping's pledge, in which the director's native Hong Kong will remain systemically unchanged by the Chinese takeover of 1997.

For better or worse--inevitably, in any case--only a few minutes of Wong's futuristic vision made the belated final cut of 2046. In the end, which he managed to delay until past the deadline for the Cannes Film Festival, the recovering romanticist auteur simply couldn't let go of the Love story--continued here via Chow's ongoing struggle to put his ill-timed infatuation behind him. Like the whole of 2046, those few minutes of spaced-out sci-fi are enough to suggest that change is a relative prospect at best. We may be blessed in 40 years with transit at lightning speed, but the human heart will still take a lifetime or more to heal. In Wong's future, you can revisit your memories, but you can't come back; even androids dream of forgetting.

Distance, however unattainable, is a desired state in 2046, a film whose intellectual provocations don't always enable the viewer (I'm tempted to say patient) to procrastinate the processing of its too-intense sights and sounds. This may be a film about loss, but Wong is in full possession of his near-supernatural ability to direct our feelings through the purest properties of cinema. There are colors, shades of red in particular, that suggest the world of romance as an open wound; there's music, including Nat King Cole's mournful "Christmas Song," strategically repeated to leave marks on your brain, not all of them welcome; and there's a kiss (also not entirely welcome) that's at once the hottest and most disturbing of any to hit a movie screen since the one in Notorious from 1946.

But back to distance. The future of 2046 doesn't belong to the filmmaker, technically speaking, but to his protagonist (Tony Leung), a man whose failure to hook up with the love of his life has turned him into a hack writer of would-be escapism as well as a serial ladykiller, an emotional sadist, a mean bastard with a black heart and a brazenly chintzy mustache. When he's not at the typewriter fantasizing his pulpy cross between Barbarella and 2001 (both released in 1968, the year before 2046 leaves its characters to drown in their own tears), Leung's Chow practices his equally tacky art of seduction--which, like the prose, is hardly ineffective.

No fewer than four women (I'm tempted to say victims) variously surrender themselves to Chow's undeniable charms. There's Jing (Faye Wong), the relatively resilient daughter of the man who owns the hotel where Chow plies his cruelly flirtatious trade; Bai Ling (Ziyi Zhang), a prostitute who's far less adept than Chow at concealing emotion; Mimi, a.k.a. Lulu (Carina Lau), whose bleeding heart gives way to a crimson stain on her bed; and the so-called Black Spider (Gong Li), whose alleged other moniker, revealed to Chow late in the game, might be one of this professional gambler's most successful hustles.

Oh, yeah: A fifth woman--Maggie Cheung's Su Li Zhen--appears intermittently as well, but only long enough to disappear. Teasing us with her presence, she seems to register almost subliminally, befitting her status as Chow's nagging apparition, the ghost of Love lost.

As much as any movie with the possible exception of Vertigo, 2046 is the cinematic epitome of what a shrink calls repetition compulsion--the desire to do what's dangerous again and again in a futile attempt to get it right, the inevitable failure of the effort allowing yet another try, yet another failure, on and on. With 2046, Wong dares to shatter the mirror image of his most celebrated movie and let the shards fall where they may, just as Chow destructively reprises his love-'em-and-leave-'em number at least four times, with diminishing returns. Memory is a messy thing and so is 2046: Bouncing as if at random among the stories of Chow's several surrogate Su Li Zhens, the narrative is (dis)organized in the manner of a scarred lover's semi-coherent search for the source of his pain--which he'll never find unless he looks at himself. "I made it up," Chow says of his fiction. "But some of my own experiences found their way into it."

Can obsessive narcissism make for great cinema, if nothing else? Hopelessly in love with Love, 2046 moves beyond mere melancholy to become self-pitying and at times even pathetic--as the private continuance of a dead relationship often is. Wong not only loads the movie with sentimental homages to his own images of the past (my favorite has Faye Wong appearing to trace an airplane's flight as she did in Chungking Express); he also deliberately flirts with self-parody in sensual close-ups of rain battering a street lamp, a key sliding into a lock, a drop of water dripping slowly...slowly...from a faucet. Many of the shots in this, Wong's first film in Cinemascope, devote half their width to the likes of dark curtains and crack-filled walls, as if to say that the potential to expand one's horizons will always remain unrealized under pressures as confining as these. The movie is ravishingly beautiful, of course, but the celluloid seems to have been processed to emphasize the graininess of the image--to suggest that these vivid memories are already deteriorating. (Thus Wong, staring down the dawn of digital exhibition, also weeps for celluloid and all its gorgeous imperfections.)

If Love's mood approximates the exquisite ache of an eternal maybe, of love without sex, 2046 works somewhat in the opposite direction, deepening its big-bang theory of human relations to inch itself as close as pop can come to philosophy. What the movie ultimately addresses, through its repeated scenes of lovers in the throes of separation, is the unanswerable question of how we take leave--of our memories, of ourselves, our relationships. In 1966 or 2046 (or 2005), it takes a lot less than death to part us from one another. But how much less? Is there a good way to let someone go? And what if you can't? In 2046, the callous Mr. Chow learns to share his secret--the one he whispered into a mud hole at the end of Love--with another living soul. He makes a gift of his hurt to allow someone else's love to grow. But in the end, Wong is too honest about human nature, too knowing about the fundamental violence of love, to let Chow live happily ever after. The climactic smile on the heartbreaker's face might signify his new satisfaction with self-sacrifice as a rule of the game, but I'm not so sure.

Whether or not a reviewer of a movie about separation anxiety needs to sweat his own ending, I'm giving the last word to Wong Kar-wai, whom I asked in Cannes whether he had mastered not only the fine art of filmmaking, but of forgetting.

The only comforts from reality, the only rewards you can get, actually, are memories. Even though a relationship doesn't work in reality, it stays in your memories. Sometimes it's good; sometimes it hurts. Our memories are selective... But we can't always select what we want to remember...

Also in this issue: Tony! Tony! Tony! The seductive star of '2046' reveals the method of his mood by Terri Sutton

· · Vol 26 · Issue 1290 · PUBLISHED 8/24/2005
www.citypages.com


City Pages is the Online News and Arts Weekly of the Twin Cities

[Pungyo]

Thanks, news, very interesting.

-K
_________________
Post nubila, Phoebus.

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You're welcome Pungyo.