2046 - The Atlanta Journal-Constitution movie review

'2046' is a melancholy, romantic wonder

By STEVE MURRAY
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

At the end of 2000's swooningly romantic "In the Mood for Love," Mr. Chow (Tony Leung Chiu-wai) whispered a heartsick secret into the chinked wall of a Cambodian temple. When we make his acquaintance again in Wong Kar Wai's follow-up, "2046," he's become an example of the transformative power of love — at its worst.

The year is 1996 and Chow is so wounded by the end of a relationship with his neighbor, Mrs. Chan (Maggie Cheung), he vents that pain on all women he meets, refusing to let himself feel so deeply again.

Sony Pictures Classics

'2046'

B+

The verdict: It's a year, it's a room number, it's a melancholy, romantic wonder.

Director: Wong Kar-Wai
Starring: Tony Leung Chiu-Wai, Gong Li, Tony Leung Ka Fai, Ziyi Zhang, Takuya Kimura
Run time: 129 minutes
Release date: August 5, 2005
Rating: R for sexual content.
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That's the emotional thread "2046" hangs on — though, like all of Wong's movies, it doesn't lend itself to easy explanations. Think of it as a visual tone poem about longing and loss, a journey through a vale of luminously beautiful tears.

While "Mood" was an immersion in a single, ambivalent relationship, "2046" shows us Chow interacting — usually arrogantly — with a series of women: sweet-faced prostitute Ling (Ziyi Zhang, breathtaking and heartbreaking), whose vulnerability Chow abuses; an ill-fated party girl who goes by both Mimi and Lulu (Carina Lau); a professional gambler distinguished by a single black glove and the codename Black Spider (Gong Li); and Jing (Faye Wong), the hotel owner's daughter, whose romance with a Japanese boy brings out Chow's only hint of altruism.

Why is the movie called "2046"? That was the number of a hotel room in the previous film, and the number of the room next to the one Chow rents in this one. Also, Chow, a journalist-turned-pulp-fiction-writer, is penning a sci-fi story. In it, 2046 is both a year and a destination people visit by train, a place to recapture past memories ... though no one has ever returned from taking the trip. In the world on this side of the movie screen, 2046 is the last year before Hong Kong's reintegration into China.

Like the title itself, the movie invites interpretation. Director Wong infamously works without a finished script, having the actors — often left in the dark about the plot or even the characters they're playing — improvise. It doesn't make for the best working environment. (Wong's longtime cinematographer, Christopher Doyle, reportedly threw in the towel over this film's protracted shooting schedule; the film credits two additional directors of photography.)

The film premiered at the 2004 Cannes Film Festival, barely in time to make its scheduled screening, and that original version was tepidly received. Wong continued to edit and reshape it as it played around the world, winning multiple awards, on its journey toward a springtime opening in the United States (and now, finally, Atlanta).

Such unconventional tactics lead to unconventional, often stunning, results. If Mr. Chow is working through some personal obsessions, Wong seems to be doing the same himself.

You can view "2046" as less a straightforward sequel to "In the Mood for Love" than a reworking of its themes — similar to the way Chow transforms the women in his life into futuristic but recognizable fictional counterparts in his sci-fi story. It's a case of mirrors-on-mirrors.

The movie repeats an image: these women, standing against the sky beside the rooftop sign for the Oriental Hotel. It's as if each is a possibility for Chow, a door he can choose to open onto a new life, if he only would. (Most of his voiced-over memories of these women end with a variation of, "That's the last time I saw her.")

Saying goodbye to the mysterious, haunted Black Spider, Chow says, "Maybe one day you'll escape your past." The irony, of course, is that he can't escape his own, the oasis of almost-love he found with Mrs. Chan. He's stuck on a metaphorical train toward old memories, and it looks unlikely that he'll ever come back.

Wong doesn't only mine his earlier movie for material. He also recycles the sight of two people — one awake, one asleep — in the back of a cab. That's the key image from his 1997 film "Happy Together," another melancholy meditation on love.

As in his other work, he picks musical pieces for maximum effect, this time "Casta Diva" from Bellini's opera "Norma," and Nat King Cole's "The Christmas Song."

While watching the often mesmerizing, sometimes maddening "2046," you realize, and marvel, that certain scenes tiptoe right to the edge of camp or pretentiousness. But Wong somehow, inexplicably, makes it work.

When I reviewed "In the Mood for Love" in 2001, I gave it a B+. Four years — and several re-watchings — later, it feels more to me like a solid A. I'm hoping "2046" likewise will continue to resonate with me as we move closer to the year of its title.

In her last, sad exchange with Chow, the prostitute Ling says, "I wish it could have gone on longer." The movie is long enough, but you may want its melancholy-romantic mood to linger with you. While it's hard to explain exactly where "2046" — the movie or the train featured in it — takes you, it's one of the most mesmerizing rides you can take in 2005.