2046
by Kar Wai Wong
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DVD Cover Information
Actor: Faye Wong, Li Gong, Takuya Kimura, Tony Leung Chiu Wai, Ziyi ZhangDirector: Kar Wai Wong
Brand: Sony
DVD: Region Code 99
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Subtitled); Spanish (Subtitled); Cantonese (Original Language)
Format: Color, Digital Sound, Full Screen, Import, NTSC, Subtitled
Picture Format: Anamorphic Widescreen, 2.35:1
Running Time: 129 minutes
DVD Release Date: 2005-12-26
Audience Rating: R (Restricted)
Studio: Sony Pictures Home Entertainment
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Movie Reviews of 2046
Movie Review: The Mood That Passes Through You
Summary: 5 Stars
I first saw this film three years ago when it came out in the autumn of 2004. The impression was so great that the feelings are still trying to fully sink in, after three years, each time amplified and elaborated when I see the film again. It's the exact same thing with Lynch's Inland Empire. There is so much at work there, it's really hard to decipher: the visual groove is even more frantic than it ever was in either Chungking Express or Fallen Angels, the result being more emulated, more like an elaborate extension, a footnote. The camera, our eye, moves in the space with comfort, it goes to places we couldn't have thought of, and the editing sends the images straight to our mind, overflowing with experience we are desperately trying to make into something coherent, because we know that when it settles, it will change us forever; thus we would like to be fully awake in that moment when it pours down on us, to remember, to cherish.
There is also one of the most amazing opening shots in this film: if you are familiar with In the Mood for Love, you instantly get the mood Wong sets for this film from the start, as that opening shot can't escape you: as the camera moves to distance, we enter the film. But now we are inside that secret, which has been whispered to the carved hole in the wood in a film four years earlier.
Longing, a romantic idea, nostalgic at that, is something that's rather hard to accomplish in cinematic terms. Either this cinematic longing becomes overtly sentimental, by which I mean a narrative device that is so interested in evoking an emotional response even in the lowest denominator that it's insultingly aggressive: it's a form of rhetoric where you are actively propagating your own ideas on someone else. It's like being forced to love a person you don't. The feeling does not grow from the inside, but is being brought to you on a plate, sterile and cold. There's no nuance, no matter how cinematic it would be otherwise. Or then this is accomplished by the non-cinematic device, the device of the novel: stuffing things into an historical context. Whereas in the aforementioned example the grand sweeps of destiny wash over individual lives, affecting their own selves and thus affecting the reality around them, this time it is the times that are a-changing and the political environment is where the great sweep takes place, amplifying the smallness of a human being in the midst of the great wheels of history slowly turning. We are often given the contrast of political change reflected in the life in the small.
I avoid both extremes, but lean toward the first option: it becomes easily sentimental when trying to be poetic and reach out, but with the latter option the outcome is often too preachy to care about. The love gets lost. But Wong transcends all this, as does the best of romantic cinema. He starts with individual lives, weaves out a poem from this intimacy, and yet shows us another world, a far greater world, from outside. He shows us that what happens might feel like the world to those involved, but that they're merely a single drop of tears in an ocean. And it makes the film deeper, because we know that when this kind of love walks by, it may never do so again. In his world it is the love that is the cosmological force that creates not only the characters or environment, but the images, too. Terrence Malick does something like this, as did Tarkovsky, boldly approaching the intimate, the soulful, from a grand perspective. For them the world revolves around as a natural consequence, and they find their images through intuition: think of Malick's The New World, where the great historical context of the settlers arriving to the shores of America is focused to that one thing, love in between. And isn't Wong intuitive if anything?
And think of the way Wong bends the political context of the fate of Hong Kong under the tone of the film: the "history" behind the year 2046 is never explained, instead it is the room where our writer used to go hiding in the previous film; and this time it is not the room he inhabits, but a place where he lays his own past upon the life of the young woman living there.
These are the best films about love because they work so intuitively; we all know Wong's working methods. And that's how love triumphs, how poetry triumphs: it comes into our lives not according to a plan, but perhaps to a single glance or moment where we instantly see the possibility, a yet-to-be determined future - and it's our decision if we jump in or not.
Cherish this.
With best regards,
AK
Summary of 2046
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