A Noble review of 2046

A close cousin to Wong Kar Wai's earlier film, In the Mood for Love, 2046 is a lot less accessible to newcomers to the director's work. That's not to say this isn't a stunning effort, possessing a lush visual style, a multi-layered narrative and a bevy of excellent performances.

Yet, inaccessible it somewhat remains even to those who are familiar with Wong Kar Wai. It's been reported for the past two years that this is a heavily edited work and it shows. With sequences and scenes that blossom for no apparent reason, heavy-handed visual motif and byzantine storyline choices, there's no end to the filmic alternatives Wong suffered through. Whether he succeeded or not is in the eye of the beholder but, to be sure, this film is an auteur's experiment, a piece of cinema loaded with enough ideas to drown a Hollywood studio. For that alone it needs to be celebrated and even if you don't like its choices, give it credit for trying.

Tony Leung does a decent but not terrific job. His character is the same from In the Mood for Love but he's a callous man here, disenchanted with romance and looking only for conquest. That his character is less likable here is only partially responsible for the fact that Leung invests lots of irony in his performance with only some of it paying off. It seemed like half the time we weren't quite on the same page as him even if we wanted to be -- what does he know that we don't? Probably a lot and inscrutably debonair will only get you so far.

Zhang Ziyi here in the newly Anglicized credit of Ziyi Zhang (she crosses the English barrier for Memoirs of a Geisha this winter and its promised Oscar nom) gives an extremely honest, powerful performance. If Zhang has been somewhat wooden in her earlier films, she disptaches of any awkardness here and comes across as a beautiful actress in charge of her craft. In one word: wow.

Gong Li aims for sincerity and poise -- achieving both -- but her scenes feel wearying; it's the case, though, that they're incredibly important to the themes of the movie. Leung's character says to her "maybe one day you’ll escape your past..if you do, look for me" and it's clear he's talking about himself as much as anyone else. Faye Wong's "older daughter in love with the Japanese" character is light-hearted, witty and very engaging. She seems to come out of this the most intact and we're glad for that.

The ever-cool Maggie Cheung is relegated to an ultra-brief cameo and it's frustrating to know that her character, the female lead of In the Mood for Love, was almost completely removed from the final edit of this movie. She gets above-title billing but she's on screen for mere moments.

Story and image combine to form a mesmerizing experience. 2046 isn't a science fiction film, it's a character study about regret and the 2046-subplot is woven into the narrative as a story-within-a-story a la Margaret Atwood's The Blind Assassin. We can tell that Wong Kar Wair must have gone back and forth as to how much of the futurustic storyline to invest in the film. It's not difficult to note that there probably are a slew of deleted scenes lying somewhere on a cutting room floor soon to be parceled out on a DVD extras disc. As a note, the image below never appears in the movie but I chose it because it's representative of the visual style.

My advice is to see In the Mood for Love first, then see this movie, then go back and see the deleted scenes from the earlier film. It'll be a more satisfying experience in the long run if you look at the material in that order; just don't listen to the director's commentary on the deleted scenes -- you'll only get frustrated.

Whether or not the film succeeds -- and I don't think it completely does -- see the movie for what it attempts. I walked out of this film wanting to screw, drink and be introspective about both.

Wong would be proud.