Anyone seen this? It’s a remarkable film: a loose sequel to ‘In The Mood for Love’ with many familiar Wong Kar Wai elements, but all of them taken to another level. To the extent that it has a narrative structure, it is all over the place. It skips back and fore in time, from the “real†story to the fictional one that the protagonist (Chow) is writing, and it replays certain scenes as new information makes them more poignant, or marginally intelligible. I kept thinking of ‘Beau Travail’ as I watched it because that’s another film that I can watch over and over for its imagery without ever really understanding what is going on. So I won’t even try to explain the plot, and it is in any case irrelevant to the pleasures of the film.
Tong Leung is fabulous both because of the half smile that always plays on his lips, and because his sentences always end with a rising inflection that makes him sound questioning even when he is making a statement (this is a film that has to be watched with subtitles rather than dubbing). His three loves, Li Gong, Faye Wong and Ziyi Zhang, are all superb, especially Zhang as the prostitute that falls hard for Chow. I’m not sure anyone can demonstrate the bittersweet quality of love as well as Wong Kar Wai.
And the cinematography is, as you would expect, nothing less than stunning. Almost every image is beautifully composed; you would expect to see them hanging in an art gallery rather than strung together in a movie. Oh, and check out the first deleted scene in which Black Spider visits Chow. It should not have been cut, and would have made a wonderful ending to the film.
Was going to post something about this later tonight, but I’ll have to settle for a musing on Thai oddity Tropical Malady. I admired 2046 a great deal . . . it is certainly not as difficult of a film (narratively speaking) as I was expecting it to be. The cinematography, art direction, costumes and sound design are impeccable–the best work I’ve seen all year. Still, I found the dramatic action to be a bit too cool (chilly, postmodern, self-reflexive, ponderous, illusive, opaque) for my tastes. And I think the film requires much knowledge of In the Mood for Love, which is one of my favorite films of the last five years (a completely satisfying film full of palpable heat and emotion and beautiful pictures). Ziyi Zhang is the best thing going on in this film as she provides the only character who let’s her guard down for a second. By the way, why doesn’t Christopher Doyle work more often in the States?
just finished watching it. we both thought it was excellent–in fact, sunhee says she thinks she might like it more than in the mood for love. i’m not so sure, though this is easily one of the best films i’ve seen in a very long time. i don’t actually think it requires much knowledge of the first movie, though having seen it i can’t speak to the experience of someone who might see this one first. but it seems to me that the two movies are really different versions of each other, almost like two takes, in some ways eerily similar but with crucial differences in tone, character (even the character who is theoretically the same one as in the first film) and rhythm.
i saw this last night without having seen in the mood for love and i found it captivating, gorgeous, and surprisingly easy to follow. the sequences on the train with the android are incredibly beautiful and moving — so full of longing and despair. i like the way in which chow, the writer, is depicted as, first, a man who cannot love, and, later, a desperately unrequited lover: love is as impossible to give as it is to get. also, i liked to layering of the text: chow-the-writer writes a book that is represented on the screen by a kind of “film” the real film is named after. 2046 is set up as if the images that render chow’s novel were the true film (at first one thinks of 2046 as a sci-fi movie), while chow’s 1960s life, which after all takes up most of the 2046‘s time, a foil to them. the character of chow’s book is not played by the same character who plays chow, though his book is clearly autobiographical. the android, though, is played by the same actress who plays the object of chow’s unrequited desire/love.
ultimately, this is a film about (i love saying this; i’m always looking for what a film is “about”) the elusiveness of desire/love, the impossibility of nailing people down, of “having” them for sure, for real, for ever. it is also, obviously, about time, and faust’s dream to stop the beautiful moment.
the message of this film is: chi ama senza amare finisce per farsi male.