Review

Review Date: 18-September-05
Spoiler Rating: Low
Juju Judgment: Just OK

2046 (2005)

Put simply, "2046" made me feel icky.

Wong Kar-Wai's languid, retro-futuristic movie is a downer, a series of romantic misfires which seems to conclude that love makes the world go 'round with the force of misplaced passion and unrealized potential. The story transpires mostly in 1960s Hong Kong, with the occasional excursion to the fantastic destination of 2046, where people seek lost dreams. Unspooling in film noir fashion, it depicts a world in which most men are hard-boiled and most women prostitutes with hearts of gold. The protagonist is a writer (Tony Leung Chiu Wai) who heads to Hong Kong after a failed attempt at love and establishes himself as a boarding house resident and hard-hitting ladies' man. Over the next few years he encounters and muses upon a number of women, including an ill-fated friend from Singapore (Carina Lau), his landlord's enigmatic daughter (Faye Wong), and his neighbor across the hall (Zhang Ziyi), who comes close to exposing his wounded soul but can't release him from his past.

"2046" dwells upon the notion of love falling prey to bad timing and secrets unshared; there's plenty of sex and heated argument but little real connection. This, along with Kar-Wai's atmospheric deliberation, creates an overtone of futility that caused me to shut it out. I often found myself drifting away from the narrative to focus on trivialities like whether Nat "King" Cole was really big in China, or the smashing effect of high-necked Asian dresses. Only one thing really caught and kept my interest: Zhang's performance as a sad but hopeful beauty. Whenever I have watched her before — kicking butt in "Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon," "Hero," or "House of Flying Daggers" — it never occurred to me that she is a talented actress as well as a dynamo. Here, she commands enormous power of a new kind, a desire and vulnerability which enhances the film's melancholy much more than Leung's brittle machismo. (I look forward to seeing her in this winter's "Memoirs of a Geisha.")

The writer's alter-ego tries to lose himself in 2046 but eventually decides to escape this place where men inhabit their memories and nothing ever changes. I suppose the conclusion is that one must keep on looking for love despite the odds stacked against us. But that doesn't feel like the message of "2046." The movie feels like a long, hard drink of whiskey that clouds your mind and sends you reeling into the darkness of night.

Copyright © 2005 The Jujube (M. I. Kim). All rights reserved.