Movies: 2046

Wong Kar Wai sorts out the aftermath of (his perfect) In the Mood For Love in 2046, a moody set piece posing as a sexy sci-fi flick. Tony Leung has returned as Chow, now a mustachioed rake, channeling Clark Gable's Rhett Butler from his well-oiled hair to his debonair handling of the handful of women that march through his life. He seems tired.

If we have seen In the Mood For Love, we can collect enough scattered clues to order the jumbled sequence of scenes and to parse out memory from what we eventually discover to be fantasy. Emotive from the get-go, Chow has been irreparably wounded by his affair with Su Li Zhen (Maggie Chung, ItMFL) and now shuttles between Singapore and Hong Kong, gambling, boozing, whoring, and writing.

In "real time," Chow spends a good part of his time living in a hotel (room 2047) and banging (literally) his neighbor (room 2046) Bai Ling (the astonishingly perfect Zhang Ziyi, whose fragility defines youthful femininity), a call girl who falls for him hard enough to quit her profession. If he is Rhett, she's his Scarlet--delicate and feisty, attractive and proud—and he is alternately callow and callous, according to his whim. After their falling out, she moves and 2046 is empty again.

Chow has meanwhile been watching the proprietor's daughter Jing Wen (played perfectly by the lovely Faye Wong, who is still as fresh as in Chungking Express), who is in love with a Japanese man of whom her father doesn't approve. They become friends, bonding over a love for writing, reminding Chow not a little of his days writing a martial arts novel with Su Li Zhen (ItMFL). He begins writing a futuristic love story at the tender behest of his new friend, which describes a futuristic train ride from a place called 2046, where people go to find their lost loves.

Wong Kar Wai spent the greater portion of his time, money, and artistic energy on these futuristic fantasy sequences, in which trains travel up, down, in, and out of cables made from beams of neon light, and android sex-servers (Faye Wong, again, her sex processed from sugar into cocaine) keep the lone passenger—Chow—"warm." The androids are dramatically costumed and wear patent platforms whose soles flicker with electric blue light. Chow's love is unrequited.

And in memory's time, intercut with these other scenes, Chow recalls another Su Li Zhen, the "Black Spider" (the surly Gong Li) he meets in a Singapore casino. Meeting her at the lowest point in his life (immediately after the loss of Maggie Chung's Su Li Zhen), he falls for this hardened foul beauty, who mysteriously wears a black glove only on her left hand, while she helps him win enough money to buy passage to Hong Kong. She refuses to go with him, repeatedly drawing the venomous Ace of Spades, black and pointed, in their games of high/low.

It's as good-looking a film as his others—the colors, the lights, the screen split into halves and thirds in which a woman's face mulls and smoke rises against a drapery—are no different, only perhaps more slow, modulated. Wong Kar Wai has a very specific aesthetic and it is here in full force. His tone, too, so often piped-in ready-made by the melting butter of Nat King Cole, plucked up here and there by original string compositions, is ever-present, though it is clear that he gave more energy to the sci-fi visuals than the soundtrack this time around, which is a shame.

Ultimately, the film is nowhere near as tight as In the Mood For Love (which is really, in my opinion, one of the few perfect movies ever made), nor is it as charming as Chungking Express, nor is it as sexy as Fallen Angels. It's more of an art film; it broods and can be tiresome if one isn't bright and patient. I would have preferred the film without the futuristic effects (excepting the blinking platforms, which are extremely potent), though not without the futuristic scenes. It is important to remember, though, that a problematic though decent art film from Wong Kar Wai is better than the best of most anything else. Weighed against his own oeuvre, 2046 is a disappointment, but weighed against cinema as a whole, it is indeed quite brilliant.