An enigmatic tease of a trip for the head and the heart, Wong Kar-wai's 2046 is a movie you could get drunk on, an audacious blast of pure cinema brimming over with elaborately sensual sights and sounds. The film is sort of a loose (very loose) sequel to Wong's masterful In the Mood for Love, with Tony Leung returning as Chow, whose unspoken and unconsummated, but no less grand, romance with a married woman was the bittersweet focus of that movie. 2046 is also about frustrated passions and romantic near-misses, but while the new movie's surface is as gorgeous as anything Wong's created, the interior is even more fatalistic and the metaphysical concerns even more slippery this time out.
The film takes place in the years following In the Mood for Love, with our once-wounded-in-love hero now an emotionally distant womanizer who we see crossing paths with a series of beautiful and mysterious women moving in and out of the hotel room across from his. Connections are made, unmade and messed with, relationships play out, events repeat themselves and time slips away only to be regained once more, and even those paying strict attention may be hard pressed to say what some of it means. We eventually come to see that the film's title refers not just to the room inhabited by Chow's various girlfriends, but also to the very curious sci-fi novel he's writing (and that we see visualized and paralleled throughout the film), which posits a place populated by androids with "delayed emotional reactions" and where all memories come to roost. As in In the Mood for Love (and, for that matter, all of Wong's films), life is both sad and unbearably sweet, love boils down to either good or bad timing, and 2046 reveals itself as another of this brilliant filmmaker's magnificent but maddening meditations on memory and desire. Also stars Zhang Ziyi, Faye Wong, Gong Li and Maggie Cheung.
2046 (R) opens Sept. 16 at Sunrise Cinemas in Tampa. Call to confirm. HHHH
This article appears in Sep 14-20, 2005.