Wong Kar Wai's 2046

[Suzanne]

2046



I don't think any movie director has ever affected me as deeply as Wong Kar Wai with "In The Mood For Love". He's back now with his futuristic cyberpunkish new movie entitled "2046" which will be in cinemas across Europe by the end of this month - and once again, the music concept sounds truly enchanting... *sighs*

  Watch trailer (Chinese and French only!)

[Mr Peach]

i want to see in the mood for love.. is it worth getting on dvd?

[Suzanne]

Yes, it's definitely worth getting. Just make sure you get the subtitled original version in Chinese - it loses its magic when dubbed.

[sizemore]

I get to see 2046 at the London Film Festival. Here is their blurb:

After the events in In the Mood for Love, Chow Mo-Wan (Tony Leung) returns to Hong Kong and again writes columns and serials for the newspapers. He lodges in a cheap hotel in Wanchai and reinvents himself as a heartless playboy. His next-door neighbour in Room 2046 is a gold-digger from China, Miss Bai (Zhang Ziyi); when their flirtatious - and soon torridly physical - relationship threatens to become serious, Chow cruelly pushes her away. Meanwhile, haunted by memories from his years in Singapore, he writes his most popular serial: a story called '2046' in which travellers take endless train journeys to a mysterious destination where they can recapture their lost memories. Wong Kar-Wai's many fans have grown used to the way his films tend to revise or 'comment on' each other, but 2046 is more than the darker flip-side of In the Mood for Love. Laced with musical, visual and verbal references to Days of Being Wild, it feels more like a grand summation: an anthology of Wong's obsessions in their purest and most piercing form. Needless to add, it provides a cinematic experience like no other this year.

If you are a big Wong Kar-Wai fan try and track down Chinese Odyssey 2002:

An extravagant and delirious send-up of Shaw Bros.-style period martial-arts films and the familiar tropes of Wong Kar-wai, who obviously enjoyed the joke so much that he produced the film himself (and, if rumour is to be believed, shoot some of it too).

Chungking Express's California dreamers Tony Leung and Faye Wong are reunited on-screen for the first time since that popular hit, with Leung playing a feared but really rather ridiculous bandit confused by his feelings for mysterious and apparently male stranger Wong (who's really an escaped princess in drag disguise). Meanwhile, his lovelorn sister (Shaolin Soccer's Vicky Zhao) is falling for the princess's brother, an Emperor who'd rather be a fashion designer (Crouching Tiger's Chang Chen). With in-jokes littering every scene, Jeffrey Lau's film may play as a spoof but it's also sincere in its intent to provide straightforward entertainment and emotion; along with the abundant humour, there's action, romance, musical set-pieces, beautiful stars, a nicely complicated plot and visual inventiveness to spare.

[Suzanne]

My beloved British PROSPECT Magazine  will be featuring a rather comprehensive look on "The Asian Aesthetic" in their November issue.

If anything, Hong Kong director Wong Kar Wai's 2046 goes even further. It, too, is a widescreen film of seductively shallow focus, surface patterning and feminine beauty. Zhang Ziyi stars again, this time joined by two other great Chinese actresses, Gong Li and Maggie Cheung. Like Wong's previous film, In the Mood for Love, it is an evocative exercise in atmosphere and music, set in Hong Kong in the 1960s. Tony Leung plays a brilliantined writer caught in a destructive web of relationships. Wong and his cinematographers take the colours and lighting of Edward Hopper but reconfigure them into wide, flat, scroll-like images where everything has a melancholic sheen, where women move in slow motion, their stilettos clicking in night-time alleyways. To this Wong adds a futuristic element. A dazzling bullet train rockets forward through time to the world of 2046, a place where robotic people symbolise the empty state of love.

  Read more

[sizemore]

I'm seeing 2046 at a press screening tomorrow morning

I'll come and spill the beans here as soon as I get back.

[sizemore]

I saw 2046 this morning. Beautiful film and much better than In The Mood For Love. Tony Leung's Chow is now a womanising playboy but he can't escape the loss he still feels after the events in the earlier film. He moves into a hotel in HK and becomes obsessed with room 2046. As a writer the events he witnesses there make their way into his fiction, especially a scifi story set in a future HK populated by overlapping bullet trains. His friend's inability to commit to her Japanese lover becomes the heart of an android whose failing mechanism only allows her to answer his question long after he has gone.

The whole thing is bittersweet and is similar to Days of Being Wild but it doesn't reach the heady heights of Chunking Express. The music is fantastic, expecially the repeated use of 'The Christmas Song' as Chow's years in the hotel tick by.

By far the best movie of the festival so far but tomorrow I'm seeing House of Flying Daggers which may just have the edge on it.

[Suzanne]

NYT article on Maggie Cheung with some beautiful images

[Suzanne]

NYT article on how Chinese actresses helped restore a sense of glamour to Chinese film production.

[Suzanne]

PIXELSURGEON reviews 2046

[Suzanne]

Telepolis posted a brilliant article on 2046 for our German-speaking readers.