2046

May 21, 2004

Wong Kar Wai’s sci-fi sequel to In the Mood For Love is finally done and apparently the favorite for the Palm D’Or at Cannes. It sounds absolutely stunning.

The story is a sequel to In the Mood for Love, Wong’s art-house hit of 2000. In the Mood told the tale of a journalist, Mr. Chow (Tony Leung Chiu-wai), and a beautiful neighbour woman, Mrs. Su (Maggie Cheung), who live in Shanghai in 1960. When they discover their spouses are having an affair, they begin meeting clandestinely. In spite of their attraction, however, they decline to take the easy path. Actor Tony Leung Chiu-wai took a best-actor award at Cannes in 2000 for his performance as a man struggling to retain his composure.

The first couple of reels of 2046 seem maddeningly complicated, moving from animation to a film within a film and introducing several story strands. Then we get to Chow himself, who has moved back to Hong Kong after his divorce and his break-up with Mrs. Su. The refined noble man of In the Mood for Love has changed: He begins a freelance writing career, turning out pornography among other things. He drinks heavily, picking up women for one-night stands or paying prostitutes. He moves into a hotel, vacated by a nightclub performer he once knew.

Gradually, he crafts a science-fiction novel about the future named after his room number, 2046, with characters that are thinly disguised versions of the hotel manager and his daughter (Faye Wong), who has been suffering from severe depression since her father broke up her engagement to a Japanese man.

The plot moves forward in one-year increments, from one Christmas Eve to the next, moving through the 1960s. One narrative strand follows Chow’s tempestuous affair with a beautiful, bad-tempered call girl named Miss Bai (Zhang Ziyi). Another concentrates on the hotel-keeper and his daughter. A third goes back in time to when he lived in Singapore and met a tragic, mysterious woman in a casino (Gong Li). A fourth explores the world of his novel in a film within a film.

Posted in Moving Pictures