2046 (Wong Kar-wai, 2005): Prince Charles Cinema, 3pm
This screening is part of the Wong Kar-wai season at the Prince Charles Cinema. You can find the full details here.
Time Out review:
Wong Kar-Wai’s
long-awaited, sumptuous follow-up to ‘In the Mood for Love’ makes for a
rapturous cinematic experience. It’s not just the stunning production
design (William Chang), exquisite camerawork (Chris Doyle, Lai Yiu Fai, Kwan Pun Leung) and superbly used music (various artists and composers, including Shigeru Umebayashi),
which together give the film the febrile intensity of a
nineteenth-century opera (Bellini features on the track). It’s also the
subtlety and complexity that distinguish Wong’s charting of the
emotional odyssey undergone by Chow Mo Wan (Tony Leung) as he goes
through a series of relationships with different but likewise lovely
women: a prostitute (Ziyi Zhang), a gambler (Gong Li), a cabaret singer (Carina Lau), and his landlord’s daughter (Faye Wong). With
such beauties surrounding him, you’d expect Chow to be happy, but the
film mainly takes place in the mid-’60s, the years immediately following
his heart-breaking encounter with a married woman (Maggie Cheung in ‘In
the Mood for Love’). It’s a relationship that still shades and shapes
his reactions to every woman he meets, and it therefore also influences
the allegorical sci-fi novel he’s writing, set in the year 2046 (after
the number on a hotel-room door) but inspired by his own memories and
desires… Wong intercuts scenes from this book with Chow’s various
affairs and non-affairs, allowing Wong to build layer upon bittersweet
layer of meaning in a work as cerebrally rewarding as it is sensually
seductive. It may help if you grasp the many allusions to Wong’s earlier
films (including, notably, ‘Days of Being Wild’), but it’s far from
necessary. This, after all, is undeniably real cinema.
Geoff Andrew
Here (and above) is a season trailer.
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