Wong Kar-Wai’s 2046 (Transcript) Originally broadcast September 2, 2005
Milos Stehlik
Listen to Milos Stehlik's Commentary
Wong Kar-Wai is one of the most imaginative, talented filmmakers working anywhere today. His films Ashes of Time,Days of Being Wild, Chunking Express, Happy Days, and In the Mood for Love were made in the shadows of the Hong Kong action film industry.
In contrast, Wong Kar-Wai’s recent films are beautiful, moody, expressionistic, at times erotic studies of time, memory, desire, loss, fantasy, fulfillment. They are films of opaque surfaces, reflections, and cool, saturated colors or moody shadows.
Although he has always had a core group of admirers, this cadre expanded after In the Mood for Love, his first internationally-distributed success. Today, these Wong Kar-Wai groupies are a rabid bunch of evangelists, as devoted to the master as the acolytes of Andrei Tarkovsky.
Wong Kar-Wai is not necessarily dealing with the fame well. The time between his films grows longer and longer. Four years elapsed between In the Mood for Love and his new film, 2046.
The difficulties with shooting and editing continued until the premiere. 2046 was slated for its world premiere in the competition at the 2004 Cannes Film Festival. There were persistent rumors that Wong Kar-Wai might not make it in time. The print was still being subtitled the night before its scheduled screening. That screening had to be cancelled, then finally rescheduled. It was almost as bad as when a few years ago, Lars von Trier, who is afraid to fly, turned around his camper trailer on the way to Cannes from Denmark because he was too “distressed” to continue.
From stuff like this, legends are born.
You will undoubtedly read a lot about 2046. It is extraordinarily beautiful. It also doesn’t make a whole lot of sense, and if you can’t figure it out, take comfort in the fact that you will be in the majority.
There is a stellar cast. Maggie Cheung, Zhang Ziyi, Gong Li. Tony Leung, who starred in In the Mood for Love plays Chow Mo Wan, the writer of pulp fiction. His new book takes place in the year 2046. That year has nothing to do with the fiftieth anniversary of the British handover of Hong Kong to China. He is kind of a cad. He lives in Suite 2047 of a rundown, seedy hotel. That is, naturally, across the hall from Suite 2046, inhabited by a rotating procession of beautiful women.
We meet these ladies on four consecutive Christmas eves, beginning in 1966. Bai Ling, played by the fantastic Zhang Ziyi (of Crouching Tiger and House of Flying Daggers) is a prostitute who first has a drink with Chow, then sleeps with him, but he treats her badly and rejects her. Gong Li appears as a Singapore gambler. Faye Wong is the daughter of the hotel owner who is in love with a Japanese man; but Chow is attracted to her, perhaps because she is in love with another man.
These moody comings-and-goings are beautifully shot by Wong Kar-Wai’s long-time collaborator, the Australian cameraman Christopher Doyle. These love scenes are interspersed with flash forwards from a science fiction novel Chow is writing, called 2046. It’s a fantasy about a high-tech train network with a service called 2046. This cyberpunk world of bullet trains and neon lets the lovelorn recapture their lost memories.
Though all of this doesn’t add up to much of a linear plot, if you are a Kar-Wai groupie, you can search for references to his other films—Fallen Angels, In the Mood for Love or Ashes of Time. The references to “2046” get kind of overwhelming and clarity is not helped by the fact that both the Gong Li and Maggie Cheung characters are named Su Li-zhen.
In a perceptive comment, Anthony Lane in The New Yorker compared Wong Kar-Wai’s love-saturated films with those of Max Ophuls. “When I think of a true purveyor of romance, like Max Ophuls, I think of lovers whose mood for love is not imposed from on high, but caught as it flashes or flows between them. Ophuls’ films are unfailingly alert, whereas 2046 mugs the senses like a blend of perfume and chloroform.”
Another, more desperate critic, on his website filmcritic.com, mused that “at some point, that thing which Wong Kar-Wai does—whatever the hell it is—will become tiresome and rote, but fortunately for all those craving such overwhelmingly romantic filmmaking, that point seems still a long time away.”
This is Milos Stehlik for Chicago Public Radio’s Worldview.
Worldview film contributor Milos Stehlik is the director of Facets Multimedia.
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