Home
sign up| features / film feature |
 content by: editor |
 2046
 to access audio and video on collective you need real player.Wong Kar-wai’s dream sequel. It’s been years in the making, but director Wong Kar-wai’s 2046 has arrived every bit as sumptuously beautiful and romantically evocative as fans hoped for. Picking up the threads of In The Mood For Love, 2046 follows the continuing adventures of Chan (Tony Leung). Now a washed-up 60s playboy living next to room 2046 (a memory from a failed love affair), he fills his days with meaningless flings and writing pulp fiction. Doesn’t sound too bad? It is. Chan’s world is an emotional wasteland. Even beauties Ziyi Zhang, Faye Wong and Gong Li can’t get him to connect with the present. Instead he writes about a futuristic place, 2046, a place where travellers go to reclaim lost memories. As Kar-wai explained to Collective at last year’s LFF, “The film is about what makes Chan’s ideal woman, and in fact those characters together is a perfect lady for him. He thinks he can’t have what he wants, but really he wants what he can’t have.”  Similarly, in recent years Wong Kar-wai, along with his collaborators, cinematographer Christopher Doyle and set designer William Chang, have pursued a new standard of visual perfection in cinema. 2046 marks a high point for their brand of extreme beauty. Within the film, people, locations and even light seem lacquered, plumped up, glossed and glammed to the nth degree. Like the broken-hearted lovers who occupy this heady sphere, it’s enough to make you swoon. As with Chan’s mythologizing of his lost love in fiction, it’s an impulse that reflects Wong Kar-wai’s own attitude to Hong Kong: “It’s a city that change very fast. It’s almost eating its own history,” he explains. “Hong Kong in the 60s has become my memories, and in my memories it has become perfect. At a certain point the film is like another 2046 for myself.” But one we all get to share.
Skye Sherwin
2046, on selected release 14 January 05.
 conversations
Read members' comments.
|
 |
related info
 useful links
note: The BBC is not responsible for the content of external internet sites.
see also
 lff 04feature
related member reviews
also on bbc.co.uk
books  books and comics archive Author interviews and reviews from 2002 to 2008. |
send to a friend
access 1000s of articles
