By Chi Tung

All the haters relax: 2046 is still a wong-derful world of sweltering glances, moods and palettes. Prepare to be swept off your feet.

In the eyes of the cineaste, Wong Kar-Wai must've become the world's worst kept secret: a filmmaker who trots out long takes and impeccable mise-en-scene is hardly cause celebre these days, but one who does so to the tunes of Nat King Cole and Asia's most photogenic faces while dilly-dallying, Gangs-of-New-York-style for no ostensible reason other than knowing that he's become a cause celebre -- well, to paraphrase a U2 song, let's just say that it's Wong love and we get to share it.

Problem is, everyone's got their own idea of what a perfect Wong movie should be: for some, it's In the Mood for Love's gloom-and-doomed lovers played by Maggie Cheung and Tony Leung; others consider the flitty Faye Wong of Chungking Express the muse of his unchained melody. But if early indication means anything (usually, it doesn't; film festival-goers are notoriously prone to snap judgment), 2046 is where Wong lost that lovin' feeling -- the detractors say it's too star-studded, too big-budget, too cluttered by narrative hokum and grandiloquent symbolism to really speak on the idea of love as a conquering force without reusing and abusing hoary clichés. What's wong with Wong is simple enough: what wasn't broke before is now showing signs of wear and tear, and he's either too arrogant or deep-pocketed to fix it.

Here's the thing: I couldn't agree more. It's true that 2046 might've benefited from a little more character consistency and a little less Golden Horse (the Asian Oscar equivalent) mugging. As boootiful as Gong Li, Ziyi Zhang, Faye Wong, and to a lesser degree Carina Lau and Maggie Cheung -- I say lesser because of their screen-time, not their bombshell status -- all are, the back-and-forth shuttling between their stories is not only disorienting, it short-shrifts their considerable talents -- only the clingy, forlorn Bai Ling (the name of Ziyi's character, not the actress) is given a fair shake with the particulars of her torment. The others are gamely watchable -- especially ageless wonder Gong Li as the gambler who gloves her feelings nearly as unceremoniously as she does her hands (she wears all-black gloves and cleans house playing cards -- pat yourself on the back if you get the metaphor) -- but they're also missing ... well, mostly, they're just missing.

Of course, this being the story of Chow Mo Wan (yes, that Chow Mo Wan), struggling writer by day, ruthless lothario by night, we shouldn't let the women do all the vamping. Leung remains one of modern cinema's most unheralded leading men, and those who've been a mite weary of his recent predilection toward morose, renegade-hero types should revel in his playa-please mack-downs. But even he can't escape the clutches of an ill-conceived narration device, one that serves almost as an unspoken-love-for-dummies handbook, rather than allowing the empty spaces and structural fakeouts to fuel our imagination. Think of James Joyce's Ulysses turning out to be a scientologist allegory instead of a series of abstract revelations and non-sequiturs and you should get the idea.

If it sounds like I'm suggesting that Wong Kar-Wai has turned his back on delicately rendered minutiae and show-not-tell subtlety, you'd be half right. (He seems also to have relaxed his obsessive-compulsiveness toward musical motifs -- to my count, Nat King Cole's “The Christmas Song” plays only twice; no other song plays more than once.) 2046 is indeed Wong fully loaded: the sets are more sumptuous, the images splashier, the story more long-winded and abstruse. But that feeling -- and oh what a feeling it is -- of love lost, then found, then denounced, then exalted remains as fresh, elusive and rapturous as ever. The best auteurs are the ones who remain icy cool under intensified scrutiny: they know what you want, but they'll make you work for it until you want it even more. In one of 2046's more tender vignettes, Chow Mo Wan is bed-ridden due to a case of the flu, so he decides to recite the remainder of his kung-fu novel for Faye Wong's character, the peppy writer-in-training Wang Jing Wen. Little does Chow know that in this particular case, the student has surpassed the teacher; Wang understands the psyche of the martial-arts master much better than Chow, whose bread and butter is still pap, even if he tries to dress it up with hoity-toity plot contraptions and sucker-punch metaphors.

The sequence is Wong's not-so-subtle poke at himself -- like all new-new-wave Asian filmmakers, he once tried his hand at boho-chopsocky with disastrous results. ('94's Ashes of Time, so bad it's good. Almost.) Some might say the same of 2046; that it stretches the realm of believability, that it's Wong more or less traveling the same thematic terrain, but a much more gnarled and withering aesthetic one. To which I say: Wong, foo. Because 2046 isn't about love paying off. It's love refracted so many different ways you can't tell what you liked about it in the first place. What you do know is this: you can't wait to go back.

Published: Thursday, July 21, 2005