2046: Os Segredos do Amor

This film is the autobiographical narrative of a writer's love life between 4 women back in 1960's, and his imaginative reality on board of the train 2046.

This film is very beautifully made. It is atmospheric, with excellent cinematography and a very beautiful classical soundtrack. The story weaves from one relationship to another without getting confusing, even though they do not occur in chronological order. The emotions portrayed are rich and varied. I am particularly impressed by Ziyi Zhang's performance in the film as a woman who makes the transition from being strong willed and independent woman to being desperately in love. The plot is complex and will require many viewings to understand what it is about. There is a lot of imagery in the film, and many of them I have not been able to spot if I had not read the other comments here. This film is really a piece of art!

The title of the film, "2046," refers both to a time in the future and to a hotel room in the past. Chow Mo Wan is a writer living in Hong Kong in the mid to late 1960's. The hotel room he rents is right next door to Room 2046, whose various residents, all beautiful but troubled women, he observes and interacts with and puts into his fiction, a sci-fi story entitled "2046," about a futuristic world in which people desperate for love and happiness journey to an unspecified place called 2046 where, we are told, love remains eternal and nothing ever changes. Chow's literary work also reflects much of what he himself feels about women, love and relationships. It's not always easy following the time shifts and parallel stories upon which this multi-level narrative is constructed, but "2046" is a mesmerizing film for anyone willing and open enough to give himself over to the experience.

At the start, the film feels episodic and disjointed, as writer/director Kar Wai Wong reveals in gradual stages the complex story he is telling. We can tell that this is a movie that will require our full and undivided attention if we hope to enter into the minds of the filmmakers and make any real sense at all out of it. But after some initial confusion, most of the early ambiguity begins to fade away as the major themes and characters come to the fore. Chow is a man who has clearly lost the love of his life and who has since been trying to come to terms with that fact in his later dealings with women. He has made a decision - whether conscious or unconscious we are never really sure - to keep women at arm's length, being willing to bed or help them but not allowing himself to enter into any permanent or meaningful relationships with them. Instead, he uses his writing to express those yearnings for true companionship that he cannot allow himself to act upon in real life.

Unlike many Chinese films, which enact their tales against expansive landscapes bathed in glorious sunlight and vibrant colors, "2046" is set in a claustrophobic world of dingy rooms and darkened hallways, with the camera almost never journeying outdoors or even pulling very far back from the actors in the frame. The effect of this is to plunge us fully into the world and minds of the characters, particularly that of Chow, whose thoughts and musings become the canvas on which the story is painted. Tony Leung Chiu Wai gives a subtle, masterful performance as do the various actresses who play the women in his life. It is his affair with Bai Ling, a beautiful prostitute who wants more out of their relationship than Chow is willing to give, that leaves the greatest mark on our heart.

There are times when the movie seems almost too fancy and showy for its own good, when the simplicity of the theme gets buried under the complexity and artiness of the filmmaker's style. But this is, for the most part, a challenging and stimulating work that moves us even when we don't fully understand it.

I love story with impact, new ideas and rich characters. I love exploring the mechanics of the thing. There are few films like 2046 proposing radical new ways of vicariously experiencing time and place. Easily misunderstood or confusing, it can be. Understanding and completing the 'story' in these kinds of films doesn't occur in the films themselves. We complete them in the realm of reflection, experience, and assumptions made in how to reflect, collect, categorize, and morph them with our own life stories. Sometimes these films are just a call to empathize with the filmmaker.

Wong Kar Kai is a filmmaker who calls for a personal empathy. He works to capture all the unique dynamics of romance, and how they bend our sense of time and space.

He turns his camera every which angle to try and find new vocabulary for telling a story. Well, he doesn't tell stories, he asks whether stories are found in relationships. We get pieces of stories on top of hidden stories, our focus shifts from "story" to emergent feelings out of the glimpses.

This is sophisticated, and scary when unprepared for the exotic nature. We want the familiar, but are given delicately meandering puzzles, opaque hints at beginnings, middles, and endings. Just like we don't always know at what point our own stories are unfolding. But we know the emotional states as they are lived.

Since 2046 lacks many standard cadences, it is a struggle to follow the statement through the movements. These are not even vignettes, these are a seamless series of leaps that push and pull like the emotions of day to day life. They have an indecisive flux we hope is asymptotically reaching a conclusion, but they just keep coalescing and spilling over into the imagined future from where no one has yet returned. Once we think we have moved beyond the past do we then realize that we create an unknown future by attempting to reconstruct the past in the present.

And so the main character is a writer of 'fiction' (this very movie) who through the process of embedding real life circumstances into his science fiction he also tries to determine if there is a destination this is all heading. 2046 is a place you visit to relive unchanging memories so that you will never change. Alternately, 2046 is also a time existent only within a science fiction novel when people will access substitute lovers without the haunts of what broke them in the past. So they think.

He has already been damaged by the loss of an impossible standard that cannot be met by another (see In the Mood for Love first!). So in his novel, lovers become characters. Feelings become fictional ornamentations in the future. In the present, he cannot connect with the women who come and go. In the fiction, the lack of connection is simply a matter of technological limitations.

Think about what happens in the aftermath of a failed relationship or a missed opportunity. We may grieve, but also sometimes we obsessively construct a future fantasy based on what should have happened if things had gone right; if only some vital detail didn't change things how it did. We inhabit that imagined future and interact with our counterpart ghost, making plans and times and places accordingly. We might use this process as a shield and a warning. Or it sabotages, taking on a life of its own as a mental blueprint, directing the actual present and perceptions of new companions.

Lush, poetic cinematography fills each second of this film to great mood inducing effects. In 1960's Hong Kong, where the bulk of the events take place, the dynamics of romantic encounters hide in unassuming corners of that society, only brought to light by looking at the normal world in very abnormal ways. One almost gets the impression that set pieces and abstract designations were literally dreamed up. The camera often cramps our frame of vision. Various off-center closeups which in a sense shut out the outside world, but paradoxically bring it all in to bear. There are many places where the camera does not seem to have a good shot of a character or an event, we the viewers were just unlucky to miss the opportunity of getting the full revelation of something.

And it frustrates; we want to know everything but get very little by way of visual exposition. We are forced to work on the clues, the voice overs, the symmetrical accidents in different centuries and different countries. This is not analogous to idly putting together a complex puzzle set, this is reconstructing a mystery while at the same time being on the verge of shedding tears at the quiet understanding that it isn't a mystery, it's life with a character who mediates between reality and fantasy to deal with it all. I know the kinds of things this film is about, but I've never looked at them from this stance before. As is often the case, the artist (here the writer/filmmaker) is just the one who experiences what the rest of us experience and talks about its secrets rather than conceals them.

See this film if you want to know how it's possible to visually show the invisible, inner turbulence and romantic visions that tend to hide from the outside world. On the whole, 2046 weaves in the present a future fiction invaded by the past, bred by the throes of confronting the human faces of opportunities that appear, disappear, reappear and fade and collapse into each other.

I read different takes on 2046 and its connection to its predecessor by writer/director Wong Kar-Wai, In the Mood for Love. Some said you had to see it before 2046, although the general consensus was that the unusual romanticism and little details in both films, and actors like Tony Leung and Maggie Chung, made the only real connection(s) (Wong himself has said ironically to see 2046 before In the Mood for Love). It seems, after seeing the film, that he was correct; I had seen half of In the Mood for Love a while back, and I did get an idea of what I might expect, but the fact is is that 2046 really does work fine as a film on its own terms. It's a story that at first seems like it will be style over substance, and at times it is, but the substance is usually very intriguing, and keeps attention. It isn't a perfect film, and towards the end it starts to lag, but such criticisms are made up for by the attributes.

We learn from the narrator and lead character, Chow (Leung), that there is a place, if not a time, called 2046, where people don't leave unless they fall in love. But, for the bulk of the film, the film is not set in any kind of futuristic setting that might be assumed on the outset of going into the film. It's set in late 60's Hong Kong, where Chow writes lurid fantasy stories. He takes room 2046 after seeing a woman, Su (Li Gong), in the room. He feels that this place is where he, like others, can go to "lose memories" ("All memories are traces of tears", a title-card reads), which spurs him on the start writing a sci-fi novel with the room's title.

During his stay, he meets two women that effect him: an abused girl, at first acting aloof, Lulu/Mimi (Carina Lau), leaves and the later comes back in the film as a kind of writing assistant for Chow. The more significant woman, however, is in the form of call-girl Bai Ling (Zhang Ziyi, a woman so gorgeous it borders on the unreal), who like the others takes room 2047, and becomes Chow's "drinking buddy". But this soon turns to playfulness, to a side affair. Although there is much else that goes on in the film, this has some of the best material, with wonderful dialog and style giving room for perhaps th best performance I've seen from Ziyi yet.

This is not all to the film, though it could've been and been as successful. The women in Wong's films, like with Hitchcock or even Antonioni or Godard (all directors he was obviously inspired by for his own original stance), are crucial to how it turns out. These women express everything Wong desires, abandons, represses, flirts, and acts cool with. They spur on almost every one of his creative pieces (he gives a short story of 2047 to one, who wonders why the ending is so sad, to which he cannot create a happy one), and all of the things he'd rather not forget. Without the strong performances from them all, in particular Ziyi, Lau and Cheung, the drama just wouldn't be there, and certainly the style giving much weight to the film would become over-cooked and pretentious.

The style, of which, was something I took various notes of while I watched, scribbling bits, elements, colors and shots that caught my eyes: the greens in the halls, the brightness of outside on the porch, the black and white scene in the cab (one of my favorites), and of course the futuristic visualization scenes of Chow's own 2046. What's curious about the real sci-fi type scenes is that they make little sense aside from the central point- finding real love and the exile following- but the atmosphere, use of different colors and shots and film speeds (Christopher Doyle, a DP on most of Wong's films, does beautiful work all around) is unique, and basically saves a dramatically empty sequence.

There is also the question of slow-motion, which is used to much more effect than in the previous Wong films I've seen, and if it is over-used. It becomes a distraction only towards the end, when one wishes things were not TOO romanticized, but many times it is affecting, and tries to past the melodrama in some of the (above average) writing. Overall, Wong Kar-Wai displays without a shadow of doubt with 2046 that he is a master of compositions, of moods, and of creating characters that are true to themselves, who feel and love but can't seem to reach for it. But this doesn't make it an 'empty' film. If a scene missteps or something gets irksome with the style, it comes back around at the next minutes.

"2046" is the number of an apartment where a journalist lives. It is also the title of his novel, which takes place in the future. And it is also the last year before the 50-year period the Chinese Government promised to let Hong Kong remain as it is...

Wong-Kar-Wai comes back 4 years after "In the mood for love" with another refined and delicate movie, although this one has not the same strength as the previous... Because the director wants to develop too many themes (love, the power of memories, the lack of communication, the importance of living now...). "In the mood for love" was maybe more focused on a love story and the impossibility of living it. "2046" is a sort of sequel, but we don't understand very well where the director wants to lead us.

Apart from that, the film deserves to be watched because it is original, it explains that we don't have to live the future in putting there the hopes which belonged to the past, otherwise life has a wasted meaning. The film is colourful and cinematography is excellent. Very slow, yes, but a film like this one follow its own poetry, images here are much more important than words.