36. 2046 (2004)

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By Roderick Heath

Wong Kar-Wai was already a major figure on the film scene of the 1990s, but his 2000 film In the Mood for Love made him something close to the cinematic poet laureate of the millennium’s pivot as far as many moviegoers were concerned. Achingly beautiful as a remembrance of things past and a portrait of stymied emotions, In the Mood for Love was both an apotheosis of Wong’s obsessive refrains as a creative force, but also suggested a deliberated about-face from the artistic persona he had built for himself and the style of his oeuvre to that point, rooted as they were in the hyperkinetic climes of his native Hong Kong. Works like Chungking Express (1994) and Fallen Angels (1995) were concerned with the neon-painted lives of young city dwellers adrift in the tides of modern detachment, the suffocating nature of lives spent in the vortex of too much choice and chance. In the Mood for Love, nominally a portrait of two people drawn together but fatefully unable to connect, was more tone-poem than narrative, celebrating evanescent emotions in the midst of such human furore, immersing the viewer in Wong’s nostalgia for the milieu of 1960s Hong Kong with its crumbling, seedy, intimate vibrancy, an attempt to grasp at an image-dream of the past, swept away in the hoopla of the late twentieth century.

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Wong’s most excitedly accepted works had a habit of dropping in between other projects he was expending more energy and time on, and the genesis of In the Mood for Love hardly suggested it would prove Wong’s most popular film, as Wong had conceived and shot the film as a respite and recourse whilst another, heftier project called 2046 languished in development hell. Wong spun one project from the material of the other, resulting in two films linked by crucial aspects but rearranged, each narrative and its human figurations haunting the other like a ghost. A third film in the mix is Wong’s debut, Days of Being Wild (1988), suggesting that 2046, when it was finally produced, had evolved into a summative assessment and closing bracket for all his films up to that time. 2046 is a partial antithesis to its immediate predecessor in spite of its shared images, themes, and characters – sexual where the earlier film was chaste, purposefully messy rather than singularly focused, a study in the onrush of history both personal and general rather than a wistfully static zone within it. It’s also the director’s most unusual narrative insofar as it takes place in two different times, or two different realities, splitting the difference between mid-1960s south-east Asia and the year of the title. 2046 isn’t a sequel in the conventional manner, nor is it a second chapter of the same story. A close literary relative would be D.H. Lawrence’s The Rainbow and Women in Love, which tell the lives of two sisters but can easily be regarded as standalone works or distorting mirrors of each-other.

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