2046: The Disappearing Act as High Art

2046: The Disappearing Act As High Art
by Dileep Rao

Wong Kar Wai's latest film to reach these shores will appear under the Fox Searchlight banner. 2046 is a strange but beautiful film, moody, erotic and fluidly mesmerizing. I saw it on DVD on a CRT at my house, so my experience wasn’t exactly the same as it will be in the theater, but this disclaimer said, the film is beautifully shot, exquisitely designed and glows with the kind of care that is rarely lavished on films anymore.

The film follows the life of a Mr. Chow Mo Wan (Tony Leung Chiu Wai) in Hong Kong, recently arrived from an extended trip to Singapore. He makes his living as a newspaper hack, though he has far greater artistic ambitions and sensitivities dwelling behind his Clark Gable-esque smile and leer. Chow exudes a sexual ease that is at once confident and charming but without a dominative note in its tenor. This is a deeply refreshing break from two currents in American cinema: 1) that sexual prowess or energy must in its essence blare dominance, particularly by men and 2) the desexualization of Asian males that is fairly constant throughout their depiction in the medium here.

This is a Chinese film, but one that is reminiscent of forties American noir and French and Italian films of the sixties and seventies. Leung embodies a fractured character, one who is laughing through his sexual conquests and his enforced teflon emotionality that allows no one to anneal to his surface. There is clearly, even early on, something lost in his past that hangs over him in the film. This is pretty standard for a noir setup and for films of this nature as a rule.

What is absolutely different about Wai's film is that it begins to fold into the reality of a novel the character has written, moving through a metastatic reality that funnels his pain from the world he lives in to the unreality he now, for long stretches, inhabits. Chow has several romances of differing shades. His coupling with Bai Ling (Zhang Ziyi) is torrid and filled with an exuberance that is missing from most erotic relationships in modern cinema.

Ziyi feels so alive and mercurial, she proves to be more than the nubile and feisty kung fu wunderkind she seems in the only films of hers that have made a big splash here. In 2046 she is archly funny, seductive and emotionally brittle. When her anger snaps, it's like hot metal broken on an anvil and every feeling behind that anger comes pouring out on screen. Chow deflects her love for him as strongly as his will can hold him.

Tony Leung is an actor of marvelous charm and intelligence, and he conveys hints of things hidden inside himself that aren't just pablum or generic, but specific and can't fit through his cognition or he'd step down a black hole. He exudes this and it layers the film emotionally to match its depth visually. The film achieves things easily that are not to be seen in years of films one sees at a cineplex here.

Which is not to say this film is for everyone. It's in Chinese, which I find stimulating, but since I don't speak it, I'm reading the film while watching it. The pace and rhythm are less Chinese, Hong Kong or even Asian so much as they are French and American noir. This is not the shaken cocktail method of cutting and intercutting fast motion camera rotations and rhythms that modern American films are too happy to indulge in and may, by comparison, seem sedate. The film is not in tone.

There are some incredible visual tricks, the CGI work is really pretty terrific and Wai knows exactly how far to use it before it would become a weak and unbelievable part of what he's showing us. His camera lingers in strange ways and wanders at times that feel more organic than the overstatic or over cut slice and dice of high style Hong Kong (and now even more so, American) pictures. Wai is clearly a student of human behavior and has something profound to say about how difficult the effort of our will makes our own lives and yet we must.

The plot of 2046 is less important than the portent of its mood and motion. Something is always happening somewhere, even if it's on a train headed for 2046. We begin to understand why it is so hard to get off that train: Wai points out that we're the ones who built it and the journey is a solipsistic one, a railroad into the internal oblivion of self preoccupation.

Dileep can be reached at dileep@babblog.com.