The moment the end credits roll in a Wong Kar Wai film, audience members are momentarily silent. Many might react with confused distaste or flabbergasted disappointment. But at the end of 2046, one is left with a sense of aesthetically inspired awe and a consciousness of loss.
A booming classical score accompanies the opening montage of futuristic urban radiance. In a progression of abstract shots of a blurred, pulsating skyline and a woman whispering into a monolithic boulder, the audience learns that this is 2046, the place where people go to find love. It is a place where nothing ever changes, and no one ever leaves.
The love-paralyzed, reserved protagonist of the first film, who by a twist of fate and bad timing ends up alone, here becomes Chow (Tony Leung), an unexpectedly ruthless, hedonistic womanizer disenchanted with the very idea of love. Chow works his way through the women in rooms 2046 and 2047 in his dilapidated, color saturated hotel. Cinematographer Christopher Doyle arranges succulently tangible shots, often artfully obstructing part of the camera frame. Nothing is accidental in Wong’s films, although they typically lack full scripts and planning.
Wong breaks the mold of the three-act story told in a linear narrative, which is sometimes disconcerting, yet ultimately refreshing. A sage is pieced together through flashbacks as Chow builds and breaks relationships with many women, including lounge hostess Bai Ling, in a heavy performance by Zhang Ziyi (Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon). Chow is haunted by the women around him, as they appear in his fantasy 2046 and in settings laden with metaphors of his own lost lady. The object of his affection from In the Mood For Love (Maggie Cheung) even flits in and out of effervescent memories in the film.
The cyclical narrative reinforces a sinking sensation in the viewer as the film quietly moves on. In a breath of consciousness, the narrator quips, “It’s no good meeting the right person too soon or too late.” Chow is a character lost in the emptiness of his life, whose only refuge is in his past and his fantasy future.
Wong conceived the setting as a futuristic Hong Kong for a science fiction film. Over five years it transformed into a fictional world that leading man Chow pens as an escape from the triviality of lounge life in 1960s Hong Kong. After numerous re-workings and other unforeseen obstacles, it became a sequel to Wong’s In the Mood For Love (2000).
There are no happy endings in Wong’s films, a characteristic difference from his Hollywood counterparts. There is, however, the feeling, when silence falls and the credits appear on screen, that you have experienced something more profound and substantial than ebullient love. It is the numbing of heartbreak, persistence of memory and eventual complacency that fill the soul in a way no happy ending can.
2046 is playing at the Regal Gallery Place Stadium 14 at 701 Seventh Street, NW.
