Time, memory and loss converge in 2046: Wong Kar-wai's long-awaited, long-obsessed over "sequel" to In The Mood For Love. SHAHIR DAUD rediscovers his own infatuation with one of modern cinema's great auteurs.


TO KNOW Wong Kar-wai's film is to love them. Many were fortunate to be introduced to the Hong Kong auteur through his breakout Pulp Fiction-esque Chungking Express which brought the director's frenetic vision of unrequited love and raw sexuality in a bubbling brew of art house sensibility mixed with an unmistakable MTV style. But underneath the veneer of pop culture stylings and effortless cool was the serious auteur that would eventually deliver the 2000 art house favourite In The Mood For Love. Since rising in popularity, and now recognised as one of the world's great working directors, the mystery and anticipation surrounding his future projects has grown exponentially. The film that almost brought the Cannes Film Festival to a standstill (he delivered the final print a mere three hours before the screening), will finally screen as part of this year's Telecom New Zealand International Film Festivals.

2046 is an unusual amalgam, both a science fiction film (as much as it will be in Wong's hands), and a sequel to In The Mood For Love (itself a continuation of a story from his earlier film Days of Being Wild). Fans of the director will no doubt clamber for tickets, and even those who have never experienced a 'Wong Kar-wai' film would be well advised to see 2046 on the biggest possible theatre screen, if only to admire the beauty of Christopher Doyle's photography (a long time collaborator with Wong). But as a word of warning, 2046 is very much indebted to the rest of the auteur's canon, and has so many intertextual references, that it's easy to get lost in its labyrinth of stories.

If the work of an auteur is the direct result of his or her obsessions, then Wong has long since been battling with his memories and time. Like his other films, 2046 is filled with failed romances, missed opportunities and unrequited love. Critic Stephen Tao described Wong's films as filled with desires unsatisfied, and it is for this reason that they are all the more potent. His characters never quite 'get the girl' or ride off into the sunset. Even the final moments of Fallen Angels or Chungking Express, his most upbeat films, feel pyrrhic at best.

But this is why Wong Kar-wai is the perfect salvation for the romanticist; his films are gritty and real, while remaining dreamily layered and poetic. I only have to watch the opening credits of Happy Together or Days of Being Wild to fall hopelessly under his spell. For me then, 2046 is a perfect accompaniment, a dreamy unstructured meditation on stories, characters and ideas I've grown to know over the course of at least six films. Here, Wong is facetiously putting his theories about time and regret to the test, taking the character of Mr. Chow (Tony Leung) from In The Mood For Love, and placing him in the theoretical limbo of 1966 Hong Kong. Holed up in a hotel writing stories for a meagre salary, Chow embarks upon a number of doomed affairs with the inhabitants of room 2046, each time substituting his lover for the memory of Su Lizhan (Maggie Cheung from In The Mood for Love, who appears in a brief cameo). At the same time, Chow writes a science fiction story about a train called 2046, where people go to recapture lost memories. Wong, who often uses politics as metaphors for the personal, renders 2046 – the final year of the famous '50 year promise' to leave Hong Kong unchanged after its reversion back to Chinese rule – as a virtual futurscape, where time and memory have become intertwined and souls wander aimlessly rummaging through their past.

Still as wonderful as the imagery is, and is beautifully conceived as this is, it's difficult to admit that 2046, perhaps the most intimate and personal of Wong's films, is decidedly aloof. Traditionally Wong has used a loose structure, exploring minor plot points or using repetition and routine as a metaphor for love, particularly in his dual mirrored films (Chungking Express and Fallen Angels), but here, Wong seems determined to use loose references to his previous films as entire story strands. Only those familiar with the entire story of Mimi (Carina Lau) and Yuddy (the late Leslie Cheung) from Days of Being Wild will likely register her significance when she appears as Lulu (and later calling herself Mimi) and speaks about her former boyfriend, who she travelled to Singapore to find.

However, this is the information age, and in the era of the hyperlink, Wong has created something specifically intertextual, perhaps not for any lofty educational purpose, but rather, because he can. Like all of Wong's work, it seems as though every frame were a new discovery for him, a new idea, conceived and executed with wide eyed wonder. Then it seems only fitting that a talent as remarkable as Wong's would somehow manage to get away with using himself as his only influence.

For those willing and devoted Wong Kar-wai fans, this is a perfect summation of every film he's made since Days of Being Wild (excluding perhaps his wuxia extravaganza Ashes of Time), and more interestingly, it seems to bring his obsession with memory and time to a close, finishing on an image that has all the poignancy of his previous films, but even more so for those who've seen In the Mood for Love.