‘2046’

Feeling is everything in this film about a writer who learns how clinging to the memory of an old love can keep you from finding a new one.

By: Elise Nakhnikian
   It’s taken Wong Kar-Wai’s latest movie almost as long to get here as it did for the notoriously meticulous writer-director to finish making it, but on Monday — two years after it wowed ’em at the Cannes film festival — 2046 will finally be shown in Princeton. It’s already out on DVD, but if you can make it Monday night, it’s well worth the effort to see this richly textured, lushly photographed meditation on the big screen.
   2046 is loosely structured as a sequel to Wong’s In the Mood for Love, and the same title would almost have worked for this one. Like its predecessor, 2046 is a melancholy mood piece whose main characters do almost nothing. Feeling is everything, and Christopher Doyle’s camera helps make even the smallest shift in expression loom large, hugging so close to the actors’ faces this time around that we can see even imperfections in Zhang Ziyi’s delicate complexion. But while the first movie was about the dance of courtship and the pain of losing love, the sequel is about how clinging to the memory of an old love can keep you from finding a new one.
   In the first, Chow Mo Wan (Tony Leung Chiu-Wai), a courtly journalist, fell for his neighbor, the ladylike beauty Su Li Zhen (Maggie Cheung), after their spouses started having an affair of their own. Chow and Su came tantalizingly close to becoming lovers, but they never quite did. Then she rejected his offer to leave the country with him and he left without her.
   2046 picks up Chow’s life several years later. Still obsessed with Su, looking for her everywhere he goes, he shows only a polite interest in everything else. An emotionally anesthetized "expert ladies’ man," debonair and rootless, he takes a room in a picturesquely dingy Hong Kong hotel because it’s next to room 2046, which was the number of the room where he and Su almost consummated their love. (2046 is also the year Hong Kong’s independent government is due to be handed over to China, but if Wong meant to weave in that thread he never got around to it.)
   In updating Chow’s story, Wong makes generous use of flashbacks — including a couple from his own earlier films. We also see scenes from a serial novel Chow’s writing, which serves as a window into his feelings. In them, a stylish, enigmatic traveler (Takuya Kimura) rides a bullet train headed for a mysterious destination. Like everyone else who takes the train, he wants to go there to "recapture lost memories," but he never arrives. Meanwhile, in the limbo of the seemingly interminable train ride, he is attended by beautiful androids who "can satisfy your every need." One of the androids looks unsettlingly like his old girlfriend. He transfers his obsession with the girlfriend to her double, wondering whether he loves the android and whether she loves him in return.
   Meanwhile, in Wong’s life the action revolves around pining for Su and spending time with gorgeous women in cheongsam dresses, all of them looking for love and most failing to find it. Played by an A-plus list of some of Asia’s most talented and gorgeous actresses, each of the women makes a vivid impression, although some are more fleshed out than others.
   First there’s Lulu (Carina Lau), a troubled party girl. There’s Bai Ling (Zhang), a feisty beauty who seems as well-defended as Chow — until she falls for him. And there’s a second Su Li Zhen (Li Gong), a professional gambler who bails Chow out when his gambling debts get him into trouble.
   Of all his female friends, Chow feels closest to Wang Jing Wen (Faye Wong), the elder daughter of his hotel’s owner. Yet in spite — or because? — of that connection, his relationship with her remains platonic. In mourning for a Japanese boyfriend her father forced her to break up with, the quietly glamorous Wang pulls Chow into her orbit without even trying, as she smokes voluptuously on the hotel terrace or talks to herself in her room, practicing the Japanese she may never have a chance to speak with her lover.
   Wong gets by with a lot of things that would come off as cliché or maudlin in the hands of a lesser director. To underscore his characters’ near-desperate loneliness, for instance, he sets many of the encounters on Christmas Eve, a time when, as his narrator notes, "many people need a bit more warmth than usual." He even plays "Chestnuts Roasting on an Open Fire" under one of those scenes — and it works.
   Wong also uses a lot of voiceover, maybe because he needed it to stitch it together all the pieces he’d created in months of shooting. But the poetic language and imagery of the narration only deepens the mood of bittersweet angst.
   True, the movie drags a bit in places. But in the end, watching 2046 is like sitting next to a charismatic stranger at a bar who charms you with fascinating anecdotes and observations about human nature. Even if he repeats himself a little at times, it still makes for a memorable night of storytelling.
Rated R. Contains sexual content.
2046 will be shown as part of Princeton Adult School’s Second Chance Cinema series at Kresge Auditorium, Princeton University, April 10, 7:30 p.m. Tickets cost $6, $4 Princeton University students. For information, call (609) 683-1101.