2046

After the red raw experience of Irréversible I decided to take myself out to see something a bit more, shall we say...elegaic. Trouble is, when you have grown aclimatised to more visceral cinematic experiences, movies like 2046 can have you fidgeting in your seat from quite early on.

Joel went to see it at the Curzon last Friday and afterwards texted me a short review, giving it a 6.75, and adding that it was "a bit long and dragging, but very sad". I discovered last night that you become aware of this impedance effect pretty much from the outset, but fortunately the ratio of motion to drag varies a bit as the film progresses.

Zhang Ziyi certainly livens up proceedings whenever she's on screen. At first she appears to be back in her type-cast role of coiled spring. She plays hard to get, foxy yet oddly disengaged, before suddenly exploding with wild man-eating passion. With her ventriloquist's diction and lively eyes she's utterly fascinating to watch. Whenever she whispers in a man's ear it's practically a sexual act.

She even gets to slap Mr Chow - a brief reminder of her butt-kicking prowess from recent Asian films of more martial artiness. (Though bizarrely the trivia page on the IMDB reveals that 2046 was originally conceived of as the story of a hitman in Bangkok!) However, Chow is determined not to enjoy himself too deeply and soon she's just another melancholic wreck in his tawdry biography.

It seems to me that both Tony Leung and his co-star from Infernal Affairs Andy Lau sport a naturally wounded look on screen, but while Lau's default expression is one of bug-eyed tension, as if permanently on the brink of the direst anguish, Leung's is more rueful, as if he has learned to simply absorb the punches.

Actually I was again reminded that Leung could quite easily pass himself off as a Mexican. Won Kar Wai's films undoubtedly feature the immoderate romantic sensibility of boleros, and like many works of Latin American cinema the background music often pushes to the front, blatantly captivating our attention and conducting our emotions with its dance. Bellini and Nat King Cole are laid on thick and repetitively. The 2046 Main Theme sounds a lot like the theme from Leon and there's a tune by Zbignieuw Preisner, who composed so much of the music for that other ponderous poet of the modern cinema, Krzysztof Kieslowski.

In the Sunday Times this week Cosmo Landessman observed that Wong Kar Wai's films are "a passionate postmodern mix of Gustav Klimt, Edward Hopper, Frank Sinatra and God knows what." Now Hopper's work is often cited as having been very influential on the cinema of his day, but his canvasses are frozen moments, studies of the transcendent gaps in human existence, and hence possibly not the best ingredients for full-length feature presentations. In the film-maker's art, when your underlying subjects are things unsaid and actions misplaced you can all too easily end up with over-nuanced interactions; and indeed by the end of 2046 you're hoping that someone, somewhere will get something off their chest just a tad more directly.

This torrent of repressed happenings ultimately feeds the aforementioned fidgeting , especially when you start to factor in your recollections of the earlier Chow Mo Wan film In the Mood for Love. (In fact, appropriately enough, I remember is that is was a beautiful, and indeed very moody film, but not much else.)

"When in doubt, gross'em out", proclaims a character in a Manga comic I read recently- an approach that Gaspar Noé for one might agree with. Wong Kar Wai on the other hand opts for the opposite aesthetic strategem; I guess you could call it "When in doubt, grace'em out". In 2046, even the doorknobs are achingly evocative.

The futuristic scenes from Chow's science fiction stories meanwhile are somewhat incongruously styled like a bad 80s pop video. (Does anyone else remember Drowning in Berlin? A classic of the genre!)

Anyway, if it finds you in the right mood 2046, like its predecessor, will most likely be an indulgent pleasure, poignant and never quite pretentious. However, unlike that other recent romantic sequel, Before Sunset, personally I have no immediate desire for a repeat viewing.

Incidentally, Jason commented to me yesterday that my review of Irréversible contained a few choice keywords likely to assist my Google ranking. Here's to that!