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2046 Send This Review to a Friend
The mood and the women in writer-director Wong Kar Wai’s heady film “2046” are terrific. Much is vested in the atmosphere of the film, which ranges from ethereal to earthiness, and in the beauty of the six women in the life of the leading character, Chow Mo Wan, played by Tony Leung Chin-wai as a sharpie womanizer, who is also busy dreaming up a piece of futuristic pulp fiction. The film fuses his memories of his amorous encounters with his present entanglements and his musings about the past, present and whether one can ever go home again, so to speak.
The title itself has its multi-layered significance. Practically, it is the number of the room in the hotel where much of the action occurs. It is also the year in which the final integration of Hong Kong is to be completed, which sets up a measurement for the environment in which the events unfold, against the fading past and the uncertain future. The number also sets a symbolic tone for the writer’s fictional concepts.
Wong Kar Wai, you may recall, was also the director of the beautifully filmed but fragile “In the Mood For Love.” Now the writer from that film has moved on. His most provocative relationships in the new venue include Bai Ling, a prostitute, played by the beautiful Ziyi Zhang. But there is also the fabulous Gong Li as a mysterious woman from the past, as well as the other actresses fleshing out the contingent of provocative women in the male protagonist’s life.
“2046” is a stimulating meditation on relationships in the shadow of a changing world, made vivid by shimmering cinematography and art direction and the writer-director’s penchant for the exotic and the sensual. A Sony Pictures Classics release.
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