Film
2046
- Director
- Wong Kar-Wai
- Certificate
- 12A
- Running Time
- 139 mins
For those obsessed with ‘cool’, Wong Kar-Wai has long been the name to drop. But for anyone with a penchant for substance, sitting through the likes of Chungking Express or Fallen Angels is rather like enduring the world’s longest perfume advertisements. Unfashionable though it may be to point this out, animated glossy style-mag tableaux of chainsmoking beautiful people looking vaguely angst-ridden do not a motion picture make, and the new arthouse emperor often appeared distinctly under-dressed. Mercifully, that changed with 2000’s In the Mood For Love: the subtly nuanced story of an affair in 60s Hong Kong, told entirely from the viewpoint of cuckolded husband and abandoned wife. Never one to resist an opportunity for self-referentialism, Wong Kar-Wai returned to these characters for this sequel-of-sorts.
Whereas In the Mood . . . was a taut chamber piece, the overblown 2046 attempts to meld erotic drama and Kubrickian sci-fi, but only succeeds in pulling off the former with any success. Insofar as one can follow the plot, it’s now 1966 and newspaper hack Chow (Tony Leung) has fled to Singapore, where he affects a louche playboy image with slicked-back hair and a pencil moustache while enjoying an affair with a gambler (Gong Li) whose name, Su Li-zhen, is the same as that of the Maggie Cheung character in the previous film. After her death, he returns to Hong Kong, where he’s drawn to room 2046 of the shabby Hotel Oriental. Here he conducts affairs with a succession of beautiful women, including Faye Wong and prostitute Zhang Ziyi, while working on his science fiction novel in which a train takes time travellers to the year 2046, where nothing ever changes and lost memories can be recaptured.
As a putative meditation on loss, memory and regret, this is all rather too oblique to be effective. Those who have the patience would do best to treat it as a mood piece and allow cinematographer Christopher Doyle’s typically sumptuous images to simply wash over them.
It’s back on screen in the Watershed’s The World of Wong Kar-Wai season.
Our newsletters emailed directly to you
