I'm a fan of Won Kar-wai. I bought In the Mood For Love- which I thought was an exceptional movie. I also liked Happy Together and Chungking Express, which is another of my favorite movies:
2046 (2005)
You can visit 2046. A mysterious train, stocked with beautiful androids will take you, and once there, you can reclaim lost memories. But be careful: only one person who has made the journey has ever returned. 2046 is also the year in which Hong Kong's pact with China, which allows it to remain largely autonomous of the mainland government, expires. It is a room number, the room used by the couple writing a kung fu serial and seeking refuge in each other from their philandering spouses in Wong Kar-wai's In the Mood for Love, and now a hotel room held by a succession of beautiful women who will fall under the spell of their neighbor in 2047. And 2046 is Wong's semi-sequel to In the Mood for Love, more dream than drama, a languid and sometimes frustrating evocation of love and regret, and the most purely romantic film of this or most years.
The new movie picks up where In the Mood for Love leaves off, in the Hong Kong of the late 1960s. Tony Leung Chiu Wai once more plays Mr. Chow, but as the caterpillar wisp of a mustache on his upper lip suggests, there is something different about him and it's not just that he has decided to adopt the look of an aging roué. He is no longer a journalist, but the writer of seedy pulp fiction, specifically science fiction that takes his readers to that idyllic year 2046. He himself often seems to live in his own lost memories—of the beautiful gambler Su-Li-zhen (Gong Li) whom he knew in Singapore, and of Lulu (Carina Lau), a seductive singer. But there are new lost memories to be made. And, tantalizingly, they're right next door, first in Bai Ling (Zhang ZiZi), the prostitute who falls in love with him, and then in Miss Wang (Faye Wong), the landlord's daughter. Miss Wang originally uses Mr. Chow to hide her correspondence with her Japanese boyfriend from her father, but eventually the relationship deepens, when Chow once more tries his hand at penning a martial arts serial and asks Miss Wang to collaborate.
The movie runs in parallel lines where Chow's life leaves off and his fictional alter ego's begins, riding that train where he becomes entranced with wjw1967 (Faye Wong again), an android stewardess who seems all too human. But it is not his fictional self that is stranded in 2046, but the writer himself who is kept captive by his lost memories, so much so that he cannot quite connect emotionally with the women in his present. A succession of Christmases, each one accompanied by Nat King Cole's soulful rendition of "The Christmas Song," makes plain Chow's essential loneliness, in spite of his ease at finding female companionship.
That loneliness sets the tone of the film and sadness permeates nearly every frame, and yet the film's romanticism and its subdued eroticism ensure that it is not depressing, nor is it a knee-jerk tearjerker. Instead, it takes off in flights of lyricism, a poem to the power of love, loss, and longing. It could be shorter, at just over two hours; its trancelike rhythms sometimes straddle a fine line between dream-like and the R.E.M. state of actual sleep.
But it is hard to fault Wong for apparently falling under the spell of his own images and pushing this intimate drama to near epic proportions. It is dizzyingly gorgeous, from his alluring cast to the sumptuous production design that re-creates a stylish period in Hong Kong to William Chang's elegant costumes to the absolutely miraculous cinematography, much of which is by the great Christopher Doyle. In the States, we tend to think of the late 1960s as an epoch of long hair and blue jeans and flower children rolling around in Woodstock's mud, but that world does not even exist in Wong's vision. Instead, he paints the glamour of the time, however quickly it may have been vanishing, and his film simply shimmers with it.
Ironically, within the film itself, it never seems as if Mr. Chow is any more than a hack writer. And yet that creation ascribed to him, that world of 2046, is an intensely inviting place. In a year in which so many movies seem worth scant attention, 2046 is one the demands investigation. All aboard that train.
— PAM GRADY |
