2046 Release Date: August 5, 2005 Starring: Tony Leung Chiu-Wai, Gong Li, Tony Leung Ka Fai, Ziyi Zhang Directed by: Wong Kar-Wai
PREMIERE.COM'S REVIEW (posted 7/5/05)
Some people have been complaining that Wong Kar Wai’s long-awaited follow-up to his ecstatic In the Mood for Love is no In the Mood for Love, and they’re right, and I’m glad. I know—now you’re expecting me to get real bold and say 2046 is even better than In the Mood for Love, but I’m not gonna go so far. I’m glad that 2046 is different from Mood even while being strangely of a piece with it. Like Mood, it’s a movie of utter wonder and ravishment. But the key here is different. Tony Leung returns, bearing the same name as his Mood character and sporting a pencil-thin mustache; he’s an anachronistic heartbreaker, a writer of pulp fiction whose nonsensical sci-fi tales refract his own heartbreak and the heartbreak he inflicts on others. Insanely evocative ’60s-style landscapes and settings share screen space with claustrophobic futuristic CGI metropolises; everyone smokes and drinks too much; musical themes repeat as characters get stuck in their own self-defeating modes of eternal return. A puzzle, a valentine, a sacred hymn to beauty (particularly that of Ziyi Zhang, almost preternaturally gorgeous and delivering an ineffable performance), and a cynical shrug of the shoulders at the damned impermanence of it all, 2046 is a movie to live in. —Glenn Kenny
