Movies / TV
Movie Review: "2046"
By R. E. Pierson
Mar 21, 2005, 00:43

These are my thoughts, posted after seeing "2046" last night, a movie I had long anticipated seeing. They don't so much add up to a review as a long, rambling essay about the place of "2046" in Wong Kar-Wai's career. But as the movie itself is scattered and can't adequately be summed up in a unified way, I hope it will suffice.

"The past is the present, isn't it? It's the future too."
--Eugene O'Neill, "Long Day's Journey into Night": Act II, Scene 2

We get introduced to a wealth of different characters in Wong Kar-Wai's "2046." The trick is, they're not really different at all; they're all variations on each other, and all subject to the cycles of pain and longing that we as human beings seem destined for. The film jumps from year to year, from 1963 to 2046 and back, and it's always the same story: a character clinging to a past where love seemed possible with a certain someone that they'll never meet again. It's a past that invariably haunts them and keeps them from changing; it can neither be re-captured or escaped, only longed for and vaguely grasped at with futile gestures.

This paradox is at the core of all the movies Wong Kar-Wai, and although it's a pretty familiar trope of modern drama, he can capture it better than anyone else. But when we watch it this time, there's something missing and unsatisfying here. We're not moved by it, we're not challenged by it. There isn't anything human on the screen, it's just going through the motions.

Wong Kar-Wai is way too talented a filmmaker to make a true failure. Even when his material doesn't work, it's brilliant. However, he's also only had two complete, unqualified successes in his career: "Chungking Express," and "In the Mood for Love." He works erratically, writing and editing as he goes, and it shows in the work: you can often feel his movies losing steam and picking up in stops and starts. Themes, characters, entire story arcs will sometimes drop out of sight never to be referred to again. He'll often change direction mid-film. He packs his films with as many stories, characters, and ideas as he can. Even when it's all coming together beautifully, he packs so much in that it always threatens to come apart at the seams and fall into an incoherent mess. His films have an air of incompleteness, a feeling that more could have been said. (Often he will stop shooting not because he's finished with the idea, but just because the money or time has run out--"Chungking Express" and "Days of Being Wild" were supposed to have more stories to them.) Sometimes, as with "Chungking Express," he can get away with giving you something incomplete that's still dramatically satisfying.

"In the Mood for Love" was a rarity for Wong, in that he managed to stay focused on two characters for the entire length of the film, and the kind of magic he got from that material probably won't ever be duplicated. He was already known as a world class filmmaker, but "In the Mood for Love" propelled him into the stratosphere as one of the all-time great poets of the cinema, and rightly so. It's a film like Godard's "Pierrot le fou" that happens once in a lifetime, when the ideas and the photography and the acting just click together into something that feels like it was dropped from the heavens to give us a hint of what divine beauty is. Wong poured his heart into the project for eighteen months and gave it an absolute perfect rhythm and timbre that resonates more and more every time you see it. He painted an achingly beautiful picture of lost opportunities and those untouchable memories of loss that seem to get more powerful as the years go by, even as the details become blurred and indistinct.

Such were my expectations for "2046," which Wong started filming simultaneously with "In the Mood for Love" and continued filming, on and off, until the 2004 Cannes Film Festival. It isn't quite a sequel to "In the Mood for Love," but it does follow the same character, Chow (played again by Tony Leung), through a longer period of time. It also has the same cinematographer, Christopher Doyle, and possibly the most heavily stacked roster of female beauty in any movie ever. You see Faye Wong, Zhang Ziyi, the incomparable Gong Li, and a cameo by the even-more-incomparable Maggie Cheung (Leung's romantic interest in "Hero" and "In the Mood for Love"). On paper, this is the stuff dreams are made of. How could this be anything other than jaw-droppingly great, and romantic, and moving, and sumptuous, and all those other things you can expect Wong to be when he's at his best?

For starters, there's the running time. The version I saw clocked in at 129 minutes, which is bizarrely long for a Wong Kar-Wai film and a kiss of death. He routinely makes 95-minute epics with enough quirks and ideas to fill a movie twice as long, and instead of spacing his ideas out to let them settle in and build, he essentially just gives us 30 more minutes of Wong Kar-Wai movie. Which means more story arcs, more twists, more wistful monologues set to vaguely stirring music. There's too many characters, there's too many things to keep straight, and when themes start to recur and moments start to double back on themselves, it gets nauseating. It's supposed to bring everything together into perspective when you hear the same few lines near the end that the film began with, but here you can't even remember the context in which they were first said and you have no idea what kind of comment they're making on the action.

Another big problem is that, since "2046" consists of a lot of small segments that are basically cyclical and nature and serve as variations on a theme, the film as a whole doesn't really go anywhere. It's not a coincidence that Wong's two best movies are the ones where he gave his stories the most time to build and resonate. Here he goes in the opposite direction and clutters up the drama with too many of the same moments. Tony Leung's character, Mr. Chow, has encounters with four different women over about six years, and writes a science-fiction variation of one of them that takes place in the future. They all end the same way, and in the end they're all manifestations of his longing for Mrs. Chan, from "In the Mood for Love." He doesn't learn anything, and he doesn't change. There's no real MOVEMENT over the running time, and rather than a living breathing thing that's stirring our emotions, the movie becomes this faraway static object for us to observe.

Any Wong Kar-Wai fan will tell you that change isn't the point though, the point IS the longing. I would agree with this. But to make the longing possible, there has to BE some kind of change. Watching "In the Mood for Love," you could watch the change happening, which is what made the longing so powerful. The characters we really feel for in "Days of Being Wild" are the ones who we could SEE being changed in some fundamental way by those people they now long for. The encounters held the possibility for real change, and that's what breaks your heart when the encounters don't amount to anything. But these aren't really people we're watching in "2046," they're placeholders for each other. They exist to be used as objects of desire. An exchange that Chow has with Bai (Zhang Ziyi) sums it up nicely:

Bai: So people are just time-fillers for you?

Chow: I wouldn't say that. Other people can borrow my time too.

Bai: And this evening? Are you borrowing me or am I borrowing you?

Chow: No difference.

This is fascinating as a possible subject for a film, and the middle segment of "2046" with Bai does explore the dark side of a relationship that's built from using and placeholding for another unattainable person. There's no pretense of sincerity, and it becomes a disturbing exercise in futility to watch these characters try to find satisfaction by going through the motions, like the shallowness of Jean-Paul Belmondo and Jean Seberg's "romance" in Godard's "Breathless." But somewhere along the way, we're supposed to think that Bai is falling in love with him, and we just don't buy it. They continue to go through all the motions as if she's sincere, but the character and the performance don't seem developed enough to make it real. This pattern continues through all the other stories we see: there's surface indicators of love with all these encounters, but we don't feel there's anything at stake. For all the passion displayed in this movie, there's very little sincerity behind it, and we're left with the mechanics and the aesthetics of it. We're left beholding a beautifully lit shot of Tony Leung tonguing the hell out of Gong Li, just for the sake of beholding a beautifully lit shot. We know the kiss doesn't mean anything, we know she won't hold a higher place for him than any of the other brief encounters he's had, so what is there to care about?

"2046" is numbingly beautiful to look at, which ends up working against it. It's essentially shot the same way "In the Mood for Love" was shot: characters impeccably dressed and impossibly good-looking, shot at odd and voyeuristic angles (often shot around corners, or with something obscuring their heads), gorgeous and bold colors, lots of slow-motion. "In the Mood for Love" was enhanced by this kind of filming because you got the sense that these visuals were getting at something deeper; as if the characters were so afraid of expressing what they really felt that the only way really get to that feeling was by arriving there in a canted way. The camera would only catch a glimpse the side of his face off a mirror, or focus on a tiny gesture of her hand, anything that would help us get inside them and understand why they ached so much. But to justify the style, Wong had to let us in to them as characters. Here, he never lets us in, and we never really get a sense of who these people are. The feeling gets murked in the translation, and all we get is a bunch of oblique pretty pictures. The lighting is far too perfect. The black-and-white sequences legitimately look ripped from a Chanel commercial. The features are too soft, the textures are too smooth. Wong wants it to imitate the way we gloss things over in our memories and make them perfect, but it just looks like he's trying to sell us a Tony Leung fragrance.

As with "Breathless," these characters seem like only a collection of surface features. They are the sum total of their gestures, their facial expressions, their appearances. Nothing more. And with "Breathless," that was the whole point: they weren't supposed to act like real people, and you weren't supposed to feel anything for them. But there's something disturbingly misplaced about that effect here. It doesn't even come across as unified or coherent enough to be disturbing, it's just empty and redundant. When Tony Leung shares an almost-was romance with Faye Wong, you get giddy because you're seeing the same onscreen couple you fell in love with when you saw "Chungking Express" and they're still as good-looking as they were ten years ago. But that's where the pleasure ends: no real chemistry is allowed to develop between these two characters, and you have no investment in what's happening. It becomes an exercise of imitating loss and longing, there's nothing genuine about it.

The science fiction story that Chow writes is a great idea for a story about where physical desire ends and real love begins. But it comes very late in the movie, as a fictional variation of an encounter that Chow already had with Faye Wong, and when we see Faye Wong longing and crying by herself for the millionth time the redundancy really sets in, and the fact that she's an android this time around doesn't seem to make a difference. We've seen this trick of almost-love so many times before that we know exactly how it will unfold and exactly how it will end. And that's the whole idea--the film is supposed to be cyclical--but there's no feeling behind it. Instead of a privileged window to the painful world of human experience, we get an opaque piece of construction paper with something that vaguely resembles a person on it, doing something that vaguely resembles crying.

Crying is a big selling point of this movie, but the lack of proper build makes it curiously empty. There's no energy here. Maggie Cheung, in her best moments of "In the Mood for Love," could stand perfectly still, crying quietly to herself, and look like the weight of the world was about to crush her. Wong tries to get this same effect from all his actresses here. But when you get Faye Wong to do it, all she does is stand still. You want her to move around, to be wild, to be nervous. She doesn't look natural in all this caked-on beauty, and it kills her story. Gong Li does it well, but her story is over before we know it and we have no idea why she's important. Zhang Ziyi is like Jean Seberg: she is exactly as she appears, she doesn't convey anything from the inside out. She can cry for display, but she can't use the tears to convey anything.

It shouldn't be this way. There are some real human emotions and ideas under there surface here, fighting to get out, but they get muddled up in all the beautiful obliqueness of the photography, in the beautifully poreless faces of the actors, in the beautiful emptiness of the music. We look at all these characters who are variations of each other, all with dark pasts that they'll never be able to re-capture or escape. But we're not saddened or intrigued by any of it, because we know that deep down, this past was exactly the same as what they're experiencing right now. And if it was exactly the same before, there's no mystery to it and there's no sense of loss.

And so apparently, Mr. Chow is doomed to forever wander the earth, always running into impossibly gorgeous women--some he will long for, some who will long for him, but never one who brings him lasting happiness, only reminders of the same woman he lost. There is a finality to the story that seems like Wong Kar Wai coming to terms with what he's always made movies about, a housecleaning of ideas, trying to make the ultimate larger point that his work has always hinted at in smaller ways. This approach would have made a beautiful movie--the definitive Wong Kar Wai movie, possibly. But beautiful visuals and beautiful ideas do not make a beautiful movie if they're not brought together, and this is where he fails.

NOTE: This film has never gotten an official release in the States. You can only see it via bootleg copies, or by ordering it from Netflix starting next week.

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