As promised, here’s another Tony Leung Chiu-wai write-up for his reprised role as
Chow Mo-wan, carried over from In the
Mood for Love to 2046. My A Little TLC(w) addition to my 2046 review is as follows: “Recommend? In General – Definitely. It’s gorgeous and evocative under any
circumstances, but it’s best seen after
having watched Days of Being Wild and
In the Mood for Love, so I’d
recommend looking at those first. Tony
Leung Chiu-wai – Again, yes, especially after the other two. This is a performance that really opens up as
you think about the differences between Chow Mo-wan here and in In the Mood for Love, and there’s a lot
to unearth.” (A few spoilers for In the Mood for Love and 2046.)
On that
note, let’s dive right in, shall we?
After the events of In the Mood
for Love, Chow Mo-wan went to Singapore, working there for about four years
as he tended to his dinged-up heart. 2046 starts with his return to Hong Kong
in 1966 and follows several years of his life there, showing us, seemingly,
“the new Chow Mo-wan.” And that guy is
a piece of work, an aimless playboy drinking, gambling, and drifting through
life while keeping his collection of girlfriends at arms length. It’s enough to make you shout, “What happened
to my beautiful, sweet Mr. Chow?”
But like
I said, this role would be interesting if done-before under normal
circumstances, but as a reflection of the changes in Chow Mo-wan between In the Mood for Love and 2046, it’s pretty fascinating. In my write-up of Mr. Chow, I talked about
how self-denying he is, how he’s a decent way into In the Mood for Love before he realizes he hasn’t been living for
himself in the slightest. That movie
shows him tentatively beginning to pursue his joys in an empowering way, but in
2046, he’s clearly gone all the way down the rabbit hole. Chow Mo-wan is all about instant
gratification, chasing whatever feels good with no thought as to how it might
poorly reflect on him (a huge departure from Mr. Chow) or how it might hurt
others.
This is
shown most clearly in his cavalier treatment of women, especially Bai Ling, and
it’s also an answer to what happened to him in In the Mood for Love. There,
Mr. Chow let himself be very, very exposed in the name of love, and he got
burned badly for it. Here, Chow Mo-wan
has clearly and resolutely decided that that’s never going to happen to him,
and so he makes a point to pursue pleasure instead of love. Even as he falls into a nice, caring routine
with Bai Ling, he pulls himself back when he feels her getting close. Not because he doesn’t care about her and
doesn’t want her to “cling,” although that’s basically the line he gives
her. Rather, it’s because he does care about her and desperately
wants to stay out of the danger zone, holding back for fear of catching
feelings. Even as he’s dismissive and
jerkish to Bai Ling and you feel bad for her, you find yourself feeling bad for
him as well, because it’s obvious how
much damage he’s been through to guard against love even at the expense of his
own desires.
But no
matter what he’s been through and how he’s changed, there’s still some of Mr.
Chow in Chow Mo-wan, and we see that more and more as the film progresses. He gets these small moments of gentleness and
compassion, hints of something real shining through the shallowness and easy
thrills. It helps that the movie covers
a span of several years because, in a way, it’s showing Mr. Chow finding his
way back to himself. By the time he
befriends Wang Jing-wen, they hit some of the same beats that he hit with Su
Li-zhen in In the Mood for Love, and
you applaud him for not bailing when he realizes he’s getting in deep. He’s never going to quite be who he was then,
and his heart will always be in some level of danger, but you have faith that
he’ll at least be all right.
Since I
saw 2046 completely backwards, before
In the Mood for Love, my first
reaction to Leung’s performance here (one of my earlier exposures to his work)
was that it was very well-done and showed enough talent that I wanted to see
more of him, but it wasn’t revelatory.
“Shallow playboy who hides his broken heart” isn’t exactly a
road-less-traveled archetype, and I’d seen plenty of this type of character
before, though it was certainly a capably-performed example. But if you see it in the right order, it
becomes so much more. Rewatching the
film now after a fairly recent rewatch of In
the Mood for Love, I’m struck anew by just how well Leung finds the tiny
threads of connection between the wildly-different characterizations of the two
films. Chow Mo-wan seems at first worlds away from Mr. Chow, but then I
start seeing those little hints, those brief moments that remind me that he’s
still the same man, and that’s incredible.
Especially given how much more likable Mr. Chow is, it would be easy to
want to hate Chow Mo-wan for “ruining” the wonderful character I had in Mr.
Chow, but I can’t do that. I see those
glimpses of the one inside the other, and it makes Chow Mo-wan so sympathetic when I realized how hurt
he had to be to do this to himself.
Really powerful, effective work by Leung – all the props to that man.
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