As I said
in my In the Mood for Love review,
this was the first Wong Kar-wai movie I ever saw. I was in the middle of a Ziyi Zhang kick at
the time, and, having read a lot of good reviews, I was anxious to see it and
spent months waiting to get my hands
on the single, always-rented copy at my local Blockbuster (talk about the old
days.)
Of
course, the reviews I read didn’t mention that the film is a sequel of sorts to
both Days of Being Wild and In the Mood for Love. Not having seen either, watching 2046 was like listening to music sung in
Italian or reading your first Gerard Manley Hopkins poem; my chief reaction
was, “I have no idea what’s going on, but it’s gorgeous!” Now that I’ve
seen all of Wong’s work, I have a much better handle on it, but it’s still a
little slippery. Basically, it’s about
Chow Mo-wan from In the Mood for Love
losing sight of himself after the events of that film.
Tony
Leung Chiu-wai is of course back as Chow (at the start of my initial watch, he
had me saying, “Hey! It’s the guy from Hero and Infernal Affairs,” but by the end, it was, “I need to see more of
this guy!”), but the character has changed so much that he often seems like a
completely different person. The gentle,
quiet man who befriend and then, against his intentions, fell for Su Li-zhen
has been replaced by a drinking, gambling playboy chasing quick and easy
gratification. Having lost something
real and important, he now focuses on trivialities that can’t hurt him by being
taken away. At least, that’s the
plan. Along the way, he becomes
entangled – by turns platonically, professionally, sexually, and romantically –
with an ace gambler (Gong Li,) Mimi/Lulu from Days of Being Wild (Carina Lau,) an escort who tries to hide her
fragile heart (Zhang,) and an amateur writer with an inaccessible love of her
own (Faye Wong, who previous worked with Leung in Wong’s Chungking Express.)
It’s
alarming to see such a marked difference in Chow. It seems so wrong to watch him as an aimless
good-time drifter, having several girls on the line at once and not caring
about their feelings. Ahhh, what
happened, right? Well, to be frank, In the Mood for Love happened. The new Chow isn’t just a freewheeling
attempt to numb his heartbreak; he’s a conscious decision not to get hurt
again, and he wears his cavalier attitude like armor. When he tells Bai Ling, Zhang’s character,
that he doesn’t do commitment, what he means is that he can’t bear to risk
himself like that anymore. But then, the
old Chow isn’t gone, just buried, and despite his precautions, he can’t always
help getting attached.
I could
watch sumptuously-designed Wong films set in Hong Kong in the ‘60s all day. This is a stunning movie, dripping with color
and vibrating with its evocative score.
All of the acting is wonderfully on-point, and even though post-In the Mood for Love Chow can be a
grade-A dick, Leung makes you root, not for him to get some sense knocked into him,
but for him to find his way again.
Additionally, some of the most visually-arresting sequences come in a
departure for Wong – Chow is a science-fiction writer, and scenes from his
stories (which, naturally, feature avatars of just about everyone he knows) are
dramatized in a sleek, striking futuristic setting.
Warnings
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