2046
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Movie Reviews of 2046
Movie Review: 2046: Visuals Over Plot
Summary: 5 Stars
For the typical American audience, 2046 can be a puzzle. Americans tend to like their movies the way they like their novels, with a straight line progression of plot. For those who can allow themselves the luxury of going with the flow, 2046 is a stunning achievement. What this film does is to present more of a mood, spliced with wispy tendrils of thought that ebb and flow in both temporal directions. Tony Leung is Chow, a Chinese author who writes what he considers second rate soft core porn. He dreams of a mysterious land called 2046, which, in this film, is the room which, because of tragic memories, resonates with equally tragic yet frequently impish overtones. His stories are full of tormented souls, much presumably like himself, who need to escape the unhappiness of the past by seeking in the present a key to the future. He peoples his characters as passengers on a train, some of whom have sex with automatons who resemble previous lovers. Part of the joy of 2046 lies in the audience's task of distinguishing life on the train from life in Chow's daily existence. Chow is a drinker, a gambler, and an inveterate womanizer, who nonetheless possesses a spark of decency that forbids him from taking sexual advantage of teenage girls who throw themselves at him. His life is a montage of regrets, beginning with a prostitute who may or may not be the same girl from his past. He courts her but sets some basic rules: their relationship will be platonic until she wills otherwise, and if and when she wishes sex, then their relation can be neither serious nor permanent. She agrees, but when she falls in love with him, he stuns her by adhering to their original agreement. In strolls another girl (Maggie Cheung); this one is the daughter of his landlord. She loves a Japanese but her father hates all Japanese and forbids her to see him. Chow falls in love with her but refuses to even try to get physical. Chow even helps her to marry her Japanese boyfriend. Enter the third female (Gong Li), known as the Spider Woman, who helps him to regain losses suffered in a casino. Throughout these temporally floating affairs, Chow keeps himself aloof from a too deep attachment. He may fall in love with one or more women, but he refuses himself the luxury of becoming overly emotionally dependent on any. The filming style does not ever sink into a raw herky-jerky morass of illogic. By the time Chow goes through his last woman, he teaches himself the valuable lesson that regardless of how much one woman may have meant to him either in his murky realm of 2046 or in his even murkier real life, he can never go home again. All that he and presumably the ones reading his cheap stories or watching this masterpiece can do would be to press on and face the next challenge, which in his case is to chain smoke as he awaits a woman who reminds him of yet an earlier version of herself.Movie Review: Can Lives Be Redeemed, or Only Lived Out?
Summary: 5 Stars
Continuing his unparalleled examination of human relationships, Wong Kar Wai returns to the character of Chow from In the Mood for Love, who had one chance for love, lost it, and has never gotten it back. (While it is not necessary to have seen the former film to understand 2046, In the Mood for Love is such a wonderful film, that I recommend it to anyone who likes 2046). Tony Leung gives a wonderful performance, clearly showing that he knows he should treat his women better than he does, but after giving his heart once in vain, he is not prepared to ever do so again.
2046 appears at first to be a year in the future, but is ultimately revealed to be the number of a hotel room where Chow had his one chance at happiness. He finds a modicum of that innocence once again, this time in 2047, with a different woman (the daughter of the innkeeper, played by Wang Faye), the only one he treats with anything like the affection he had for the woman who had shared (platonically) 2046 with him earlier. He writes a story for her, called 2047. She says she likes it, but wishes it had a happier ending, something fans of Wong Kar Wai sometimes long for, but realize would not be true to that which goes on during his stories.
Aside from Tony Leung's masterful performance, 2046 is the perfect platform for the greatest Chinese actresses of today, demonstrating once again that no one can break your heart like Maggie Cheung, no one can make you happy like Wang Faye, no one can be a [...]like Zhang Zi Yi (albeit one that can still have her heart broken because she uses a hard exterior in a vain attempt to protect a brittle interior) and no one could ever be as beautiful as Gong Li.
Like most of Wong Kar Wai's movies, the ending can be called bittersweet at best. He has only had one semi-happy ending, in Chungking Express, which also featured Tony Leung and Wang Faye (the only other time she has appeared in one of his movies). This time, the only character who ends up happy is Wang Faye's, largely due to Tony Leung's intervention. I don't know if that is a coincidence, or perhaps a comment on the fact that it isn't really possible to have anything but a happy ending when her luminous cheeks and eyes bless the screen. For all of the other characters, however, we see much of the same unfulfilled longings and reconciliation to the alienation so many feel toward their families, friends and lovers.
Each of Wong Kar Wai's films has built up to this ultimate piece on what it means to be human and to know other humans. You should really watch all of them, but even if you just watch this one, you will be the richer for it.
Movie Review: It's a metaphor
Summary: 5 Stars
First the history: Hong Kong was given back to China by the British in 1996 but was decided that nothing would change for 50 years -- until the year 2046.
Now the movie. To me, "2046" is a metaphor for how the Chinese in Hong Kong would be feeling in the year 2046 when they will be fully under Chinese rule. Some who can't or won't accept change will ask why can't things go back to the way it was before, while others will embrace what the future holds. Something like that. Remember the owner telling Chow to stay in 2047 for a while and move to 2046 when the room was ready? Chow later says that he got used to 2047 and decided to stay.
The characters are culled from 2 previous WKW movies that loosely form this trilogy. Carina Lau is Lulu from "Days of Being Wild". Tony Leung also from that movie but only in the very last minute of the film, and of course, he was in "In the Mood for Love". He not only gets to act with his beautiful real-life girlfriend, Carina, but his other female co-stars are also legendary beauties in Asian cinema. Maggie Cheung/Su Lichen is only in a dream sequence, Faye Wong/owner's daughter (this is only her second WKW film) whom Chow has grown affection for, but willing to let her (HK) go, Zhang Ziyi/Bai Ling (a new addition to WKW's stable of muses) who loves Chow (HK) unconditionally whatever his flaws, and Gong Li/Black Spider who wants to go with him but is stuck in the past.
The film is presented in 3 viewpoints: the present "real life" in which Chow is the womanizer who can't be pinned down because of how much he still loves Su Lichen in ITMFL and she is the yardstick by which all future relationships are measured. The futuristic scenes are when he is writing his sci-fi novel and his "real life" people and experiences work their way into the novel. Also, when he can't deal with real life, he goes to his novel and integrates recent real life events into the novel to help make sense of it all. Then there is the one or two dream sequences for when he is narrating his thoughts to us, the viewer.
I'm sure this is only the surface of the many layers this wonderful movie has to explore. I look forward to "getting" more of it with each new viewing.
p.s. after reading others' reviews, I must add that the room in this movie is not the same as in ITMFL, but it does have the same room number which, when it gets his attention, Chow is transported back to the remembrance of the love of his life.
Movie Review: Better than "Mood For Love"
Summary: 5 Stars
I was pleased by In The Mood For Love's visuals and such. 2046 is obviously a much bigger production, and there is so much more of everything I liked about the first movie. This is one of the best looking movies I've ever seen. The 60s Asian places, clothes, and people look really cool, and the colors are saturated and beautiful.
In "Mood", Chow lets his own honor keep him from starting a romance with the woman he truly loves. 2046 picks up with Chow changed by the experience in the first movie. Now he's a cynical womanizing bastard with a little moustache. He's way cooler now.
Don't be fooled by the name or the opening sequence. This isn't a scifi movie. This is the continuation of Chow's life. Most of the movie takes place in Hong Kong in the 1960s. There is a segment of the movie in which Chow writes a story that takes place on that futuristic train. The futuristic part is a visualization of a story Chow writes. And it is very cool, but different from the rest of this very cool movie.
See this movie if you enjoy stunning visuals and badass characters more than you enjoy clear stories that go somewhere. This movie ends at a place not much more appropriate than any other part in the movie. Watching it was just so enjoyable that I wanted it to keep going for another hour.
Movie Review: Hotel at the end of the universe
Summary: 5 Stars
A marvelous evocation on a hotel room. Picking up where "In the Mood for Love" left off, Chow tries to track down his lost love, Su Li Zhen. He finds himself in the same hotel, if not the same room, with a new set of relationships which are much more fluid in nature. While he cannot commit himself to any one woman, he does seem to find some solace in the landlord's daughter, who helps him write a sci-fiction serial entitled 2046, where all time seems to have come to a standstill and he sublimates his love in androids. Not even the lovely Bai Ling (Ziyi Zhang) can stir Chow from his fantasies. It is only when he finds a similar namesake (Li Gong) that passions are aroused, but this Su Li Zhen is a professional gambler, who proves even more elusive than the first.
2046 is sumptuously filmed with the same inescapable claustrophobia as "In the Mood for Love." About the only breath of fresh air was from the roof top balcony of the hotel. Kar Wai Wong has a more modern sense than such Chinese contemporaries as Yimou Zhang, although they use many of the same actors. Wong also did "Chungking Express," which has a similar moody atmosphere.