2046

I know, the poster is a little too big for the blog, but it is difficult to write anything about films like this. It is something to be seen and experienced first-hand, rather than something to theorise about in leisure. The poster captures some of the lighting, colours, background details and the "atmosphere" which is impossible to describe in casual posts like this.



2046 is the latest film by the Hong Kong director Wong Kar-Wai and the long-awaited, much delayed and much speculated follow-up to his 2001 international art-house success In the Mood for Love. It is technically not a sequel but those who have seen Mood and are familiar with wong's earlier films (specially Days of Being Wild) will find a few references which others who have not seen will miss. Not that this should stop anyone from watching and appreciating the film before those earlier ones because Wong is not much of a story teller anyway. Such old fashioned concepts like narrative coherence, closure, redmeption or plot and character development are not things that bother him much. What interests him, on the other hand, is the creation of a 'mood' and an 'atmosphere', which he achieves by a virtuoso blending of sound and images, which can only be seen to be believed, or felt.

I think even the themes and ideas that he explores are rather banal and surely in some other, less visually gifted, hands the same material could have become a third-rate sentimental nonsense. I mean, how can you not wince when an intertitle early in the film announces, "All memories are traces of tears" or when our narrator-hero offers this nugget of romantic wisdom, "Love is not just about meeting the right person, it is about meeting the right person at the right time". Needless to say, in Wong's films it is never the right time when two beautiful people meet. It is always either too early or too late. He uses this basic conceit to explore the moods of romantic fatalism and impossible desire. And he does it really well.

I won't summarise the plot and to be honest I lost bits of it midway through the film but if you have seen In the Mood for Love you will like it even more and if you have not seen that then it is a perfect introduction and a good summary of Wong Kar-Wai's career (who is surely one of the most exciting and important filmamkers working today). Also since the film is all about sound and images, seeing the film on big screen helps. And if all this was not enough there is even some sex, not explicit but the way Wong Kar-Wai makes the walls of the seedy hotel room shake was really erotic, at least I thought so!