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2046 (Daily Variety, 2004)

 
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PostPosted: Wed Feb 27, 2013 9:32 pm    Post subject: 2046 (Daily Variety, 2004) Reply with quote

Title: 2046: (Hong Kong-France-Italy-China)



Author(s): Derek Elley

Source: Daily Variety. 283.35 (May 24, 2004): p5.

Document Type: Movie review

Full Text: COPYRIGHT 2004 Reed Business Information, Inc. (US)
www.variety.com

Full Text:

A Block 2 Pictures presentation, in association with Paradis Fritos, Orly Films (France)/Classic (Italy)/Shanghai Film Corp. (China), of a Jet Tone Films production, with participation of Arte France, France 3 Cinema. ZDF-Arte. (International sales: Fortissimo Film Sales, Amsterdam/Hong Kong,) Produced by Wong Kar Wai. Co-producers, Elie Heumann, Marc Sillam, Amedeo Panaghi.

Directed, written by Wong Kar Wai Camera (Duboi color, widescreen), Christopher Doyle, Lai Yiu-fai Kwan Pun-leung; editor, William Chang: original music, Peer Raben, Shigeru Umebayashi; production/ costume designer Chang; art director, Alfred Yau; sound (Dolby Digital), Claude Letessier, Tu Duu-chih; special effects, BUF. Rcviewed at Cannes Film Festival (competing), May 20, 2004. Running time: 123 MIN.

Chow Mo-wan Tony Leung Chiu-wai
Su Lizhen Gong Li
Tak Yakuya Kimura
Wang Jingwen/
wjw 1967 Faye Wong
Bai Ling Zhang Ziyi
Lulu/Mimi Carina Lau
cc 1966 Chang Chen
Mr. Wang/Train captain Wang Sum
Ping Lam Siu-ping
slz 1960 Maggie Cheung
Bird Thongchai McIntyre
Wang Jiewen Dong Jie
(Cantonese, Mandarin, Japanese dialogue.)

Both yeahsayers and naysayers of cult hit "In the Mood for Love" share at least two good reasons to check out its long-in-the-works companion piece, "2046." Mainland actress Zhang Ziyi proves she's a star of major range and luminosity (especially on the heels of Zhang Yimou's martial artser "House of Flying Daggers"), while Hong Kong leading man Tony Leung Chiuwai carries the pic with the charm of a young Clark Gable. Suffused with much the same retro languor and visual style as "Mood" but considerably more substantial in content and genuine emotion, "2046" is still of niche appeal but could rack up fractionally more returns on its star power alone.

The 123-minute version unspooled in Cannes' competition is likely to differ from what finally reaches Asian and European theaters this fall (a U.S. distrib deal has yet to be finalized). Some skeletal B&W CGI work depicting a futuristic city looks still to be colorized and the soundtrack finessed (though at screening caught there were no startling flaws).

Pic would benefit from about 10 minutes of trims in its final reels, and Wong, a notoriously indecisive fiddler, is sure to take a more considered look at the movie following its mixed-to-positive reception. For the record, "2046" set a new Cannes record for last-minute arrival in competition: After missing two daytime slots, six reels arrived only three hours before its black-tie evening screening, and the remainder only a half-hour prior.

If "Mood" was an over-elaborate hors d'oeuvre, with repeated variations around one couple's affair in '60s Hong Kong, "2046" is more like the main course, a visually seductive reverie on memory and regret refracted through a serial womanizer's experiences with four different women during the same period. Arthouse fans of "Mood" will need no urging to see this second helping; doubters will be rewarded by a much more substantial and varied meal.

In a typical piece of neo-Godardian playfulness, title has a both a concrete and less concrete meaning--the number of the hotel room in which the couple in "Mood" conducted their extramarital affair as well as the date of Hong Kong's final integration into China (after 50 years of being a "special administrative region" following Brit rule).

To a richly scored romantic soundtrack, pic opens in the year 2046, when a vast train network is meant to span the world. "Every now and then a train leaves for 2046," says the Japanese voice of Tak (TV drama star Takuya Kimura), "but no one ever comes back--except me." Cut to Tak and his lover, silent femme-bot wjw 1967 (singer-actress Faye Wong), whom he's trying to convince to return with him. She says nothing, so he exits alone.

Cut to Singapore, 1966. The lead from "Mood," Chow Mo-wan (Leung, encoring), is trying to persuade his lover, Su Lizhen (Gong Li, almost unrecognizable in scarlet lipstick and beehive period hairdo), to leave with him on a boat to Hong Kong. She demurs, too, and Chow leaves alone.

By now the movie has shifted into a recognizably "Mood" mode--dark, burnished lensing of interiors (oranges, yellows and moldy greens prominent); choice musical accompaniment (from Bellini's "Casta diva" aria, through Latino rhythms, to cocktail lounge songs like Nat "King" Cole's "The Christmas Song (Merry Christmas to You)"); most of the action shot in medium-closeup with a shallow depth of field. As Chow moves from being a struggling pulp writer to a professional gigolo, pic basically follows him through three further liaisons, all intro'ed on Dec. 24, between 1966 to 1969. The women all lodge in room 2046, with Chow residing in 2047.

First up is goodtime girl Lulu (Carina Lau, in little more than a cameo); that brief affair is cut short by her murder. Next comes the more spacey Wang Jingwen (Wong again), elder daughter of the hotel's owner (Wang Sum). She's in love with a Japanese guy whom her father disapproves of, and Chow writes a sci-fi novel ("2046"), inspired by her and her b.f., in which two lovers flee to the future.

Just when "2046" looks to turn into an overly convoluted rerun of "Mood," story switches to the last of Chow's amours, an all-business, up-market hooker from mainland China called Bai Ling (Zhang). In a 25-minute section, with a slightly more conventional look that's like a mini-feature of its own, Chow and Bai become drinking pals, bosom buddies and finally lovers, leaving her heartbroken, him bruised, but both pretending otherwise. It's the subtlest, most emotionally engaging part of the movie, bringing substance to the whole conceit, with Leung and, especially, Zhang both aces.

Last 50 minutes is in the form of an elaborate development-cum-recapitulation, as Wang returns to the story, she and Chow are shown having an affair, and the latter's novel is visually excerpted, with the opening sequence of the whole picture now starting to make sense. But as other characters are reintroduced (Bai, then Su), film slowly starts to repeat itself for diminishing returns, with even Cole's "Christmas Song" losing its freshness. Structure of this whole section, and especially the final 15 minutes, needs a serious second look by the director.

Though the whole futuristic idea never really gels, it does, however, make final sense. Pic's theme is very simple: the impossibility of returning to the past ("Why can't it be like before?" says Bai) and employing wisdom in retrospect. That's why nobody returns on the 2046 train.

Tech credits are fractionally less sumptuous than on "Mood," though the re-creation by production designer William Chang of '60s Asia and his costuming (men's suits, women's tight-fitting cheongsams) is actually more realistic than purely design conscious. One conceit may escape non-Chinese speakers but brings a strange linguistic perversity to the movie--Leung and Wong speak only Cantonese, while Zhang and Gong speak only Mandarin, two almost mutually unintelligible dialects which no one blinks an eyelid at.

For the record, Maggie Cheung, who played Chow's lover in "Mood" and was originally to have reprised the role here, is billed as making a "special appearance," one so fleeting that it totally escaped Cannes viewers. In fact, she's only in the movie for a couple of seconds, as a woman rolling on a bed lensed from overhead. Gong's character has the same name as Cheung's in the previous movie, and at one point Chow, in a simple way round last-minute recasting, tells her: "I once knew a woman with the same name as yours."

Elley, Derek
Source Citation (MLA 7th Edition)
Elley, Derek. "2046: (Hong Kong-France-Italy-China)." Daily Variety 24 May 2004: 5+. Infotrac Newsstand. Web. 28 Feb. 2013.


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PostPosted: Sat Mar 02, 2013 12:39 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

2046: A Film Odyssey

By Richard Corliss Monday, Sept. 27, 2004

Time Magazine


Read more: http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,702196,00.html#ixzz2MMzK9RJd



Chow (Tony Leung Chiu-wai) is a ladies' man. He knows how to attract them and keep them at a distance. Having been burned in an earlier affair, he is loath to reveal to them the ache of lost love at his core. Yet he needs a woman; he seems happy only when he can nod off, in a taxi, on a kind lady's shoulder. He sounds like a weary cynic, but underneath he is like every Wong Kar-wai character: a melancholy romantic. And he has the bruises to prove it.

Chow is the hero of 2046, Wong's first feature since In the Mood for Love four years ago. Like that film and most of the others that have made him the most respected and imitated writer-director in Hong Kong, perhaps in all Asia, it is a stethoscope monitoring the troubled hearts of people who have the attitude but not always the aptitude for love. At $15 million and more than two hours in length (20 minutes longer than any of his earlier pictures), 2046 is the grandest project of a man who, in an age of coarse and facetious movies, has the mission to reestablish the romantic tone of the grandest old films�where two beautiful people would gaze into each other's eyes and go about breaking each other's hearts.

That makes Wong, 46, the cinema's reigning romantic. But in his dark shades and friendly hipness, he is too cool to plead totally guilty to that charge. "Romanticism means you follow your heart more than your mind," he said last week as he alighted in Hong Kong during a hectic promotion tour that took him to Shanghai, Chengdu, Guangzhou and Beijing. "If that's the case, my films are 75% romantic; the other 25% is the realities, the problem solving and luck." As for himself, he laughs and says he's "60% romantic." Which sounds like the other 40% is talking.

The release of 2046 was delayed by realities, problem solving and luck, most of it bad. The SARS epidemic disrupted filming last year. The futuristic computer imagery, which opens the film in dazzling fashion, took more time than expected. Mostly, though, Wong is a notorious perfectionist in an industry that believes fast is good. (Johnnie To, Hong Kong's top auteur of commercial films, has directed 13 features in the four years since In the Mood came out.) Wong promised that 2046 would open at the Cannes Film Festival this May, yet he kept shooting until days before the premiere. The film missed a scheduled screening and had to be shown later that night. For his trouble, Wong and 2046 went home without a prize.

Wong's work habits may exasperate those around him. But a question remains: is the movie good? And the answer is no. It's wonderful�a rich, glamorous and acutely human work with superb performances by Leung and the four gorgeous actresses.

It's clever, too. "The idea for the film," says Wong, "comes from the promise the Chinese government gave to the Hong Kong people: 50 years of no change" in its political and economic systems after the 1997 handover by Great Britain. "So 2046 is the last year of that promise. And I think, is there anything that is so unchanged in people's lives? When we fall in love we wonder: Will they change? Will I change? How can we make this moment last forever? So we start with that."

When last seen, at the end of in the Mood for Love, Chow was mourning a failed affair with Su Lizhen (Maggie Cheung) and making a pilgrimage to the ruins of Angkor Wat. He was told that to bury a sad secret, one should find an ancient hole, whisper the secret into it, then cover it up. That was 1967. It's a few years later, and Chow has taken residence in room 2046 of the Oriental Hotel, where several bewitching women cross his path. One is Lulu (Carina Lau), who traps herself in a series of volcanic affairs. "She didn't mind sad endings," Chow notes in the film's narration. "The male lead could change, as long as she was the leading lady." Chow's cast of sexual co-stars changes almost nightly. His hotel-room bedsprings squeal like a medieval torture device in the unwilling ears of his next-door neighbor.

The neighbor is Bai Ling (Zhang Ziyi), a dance-hall hostess and prostitute. Her arguments with Chow over his lady guests veer into flirtation, and soon she too is making his bedsprings squeak. Bai Ling makes one rash transaction: she gives her heart to Chow, who wants her only as a playmate. The one sedate lady in the hotel is its owner's older daughter Jingwen (Faye Wong), pining over a broken affair with a Japanese man (Takuya Kimura). She encourages Chow, a journalist who writes erotic books on the side, to switch to science fiction. Soon she is helping him write a novel called 2046, in which Chow creates an android version of Jingwen. The novel is set in a futureworld where people go to recapture lost memories. Chow can't escape his memories: of Su Lizhen and another woman with the same name, a casino gambler (Gong Li) who once did him the favor of allowing him to fall in love with her.

Confused? The plot is complex in print but pellucid on the screen. With the dexterity of a cardsharp, Wong shuffles the present, the recent past and the distant future, mixing reality, memory and fantasy. The main action of the movie takes place on consecutive Christmas Eves in the late '60s, but each scene has reverberations of others from Chow's past and from the novel. What anchors each of the stories for the viewer are the faces of the actresses. No explanations are needed when Zhang is lasering a stare as bold as a shout or Lau is sobbing herself to sleep or Gong Li is flashing an imperious gaze. Or when Faye Wong, in our last glimpse of her, is captured in a slow-motion, slowly encroaching close-up that fades just as she is about to smile. It is an image�a kiss from the camera�of desirability that can be fully appreciated only when it slips away.

"Love is a matter of timing," Chow observes. "It's no good meeting the right person too soon or too late." Chow intersected with all these women too soon or too late. Wong Kar-wai got all of them at the apogee of their craft and allure. That's part of his filmmaking process: to sculpt the role to the performer. "If you want to make a film with an actor or actress, there must be something that attracts you. I'm trying to exploit that quality, which they might not even be aware of. So I normally don't ask actresses to play other people. It's just: 'Be you.'"

Before actors join a Wong Kar-wai film, the director says, "They don't know the whole story, but they know their story. Zhang Ziyi, because she knows she's going to play a ballroom dancer in the '60s, has to be given a lot of homework. I have to give her all of these films from the period, so she can understand the gestures, the actions. And also I give her all the costumes, because she has to get those manners down. Gong Li's character is a gambler, so Li headed down to Macau incognito to watch gamblers at work. She's very serious. She needs to have a lot of preparation. Faye Wong, she doesn't need to do that because we've worked [together] before, and she always tries to make herself very relaxed."

It makes one wonder how he will direct Nicole Kidman on a film project that may materialize next year. Wong is teasingly oracular on the plot and setting: "The only thing I want to say is I always conceive of Nicole Kidman as the woman in a Hitchcock film. I think the woman in Hitchcock is always very dangerous, or in danger. And Nicole is both."

Directing one of the world's most famous and adventurous actresses might be intimidating for someone who, as he notes, "didn't go to film school. I don't have any technical training. The way I make films is the only way I know." But he knows his mad method works, in large measure because of two men who have been his closest collaborators on most of his films. William Chang, the editor, production designer and costume designer, is both the architect and the first critic of Wong's vision. Cinematographer Christopher Doyle matches the director's artistry and energy with a luscious camera style that sees beyond surfaces into essences. He takes ravishing pictures of troubled souls.

Wong, of course, is their inspirer. And to begin a project, all the inspiration he requires is one strong, suggestive image. "You need to have the image," he says. "Sometimes you can start with the look of an actress or a certain space. In Eros, I started with the image of a single hand."

Continues...


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PostPosted: Sat Mar 02, 2013 12:39 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

In an age when many serious directors, especially in Europe, are making films with graphic sex, Wong remains a gentleman in matters of the groin. 2046 does have one vigorous bedroom encounter, with the nude Leung and Zhang Ziyi attractively entangled. But the erotic knockout punch is a kiss�sudden, brutal, passionate and 35 seconds long�between Leung and Gong Li. They go at each other like two drowning strangers giving each other CPR. Now that's sexy.

"To describe a so-called love scene, or intercourse, is very boring," Wong says, reluctant even to use the word sex. "There must be a point to your focus. In Eros, it's about the hand, not the actual act."

The Hand, his contribution to the three-part Eros (the other parts are by Michelangelo Antonioni and Steven Soderbergh), has no nudity; all sex is suggestive. But the film is called Eros, not Sex; and his episode is throbbingly erotic, as well as a fable about love, lust, loyalty and the ravages of ego in a beautiful young woman who will not always be young or beautiful.

In 1963, a tailor's apprentice named Zhang (Chang Chen) is called to the apartment of a notorious courtesan, Miss Hua (Gong Li, again). As he waits for his audience the sounds of lovemaking trouble and arouse him. Miss Hua, when she greets him, notices his excitement, orders him to remove his trousers and caresses him with her expert hand. It could be said that Hua is merely extending Zhang a professional courtesy. But she is also humiliating the young man�and, she must know, earning a new devotee with a sexual gesture that means little to her, everything to him.

Over the years, Hua's web of erotic and financial alliances unravels. Wealthy lovers tire of her imperiousness; the gigolo she supported (and whose exertions Zhang overheard that first day) has found younger flesh to exploit. She can't pay the tailor bills, yet Zhang remains her faithful couturier and courtier, flattering Hua on her waist size, whispering compliments to a woman in need of them and, finally, secretly, paying for the dingy hotel room she's forced to move into. Gratitude, or desperation, leads her to ask, "Do you have a wife yet?" "No." "How about me?" It is an eloquent three words with at least three meanings: an expression of noblesse oblige, an admission of defeat and an acknowledgment of how much this tradesman has meant to her.

Their last meeting reprises, as in a symphony, the motifs of the first movement but with a new gravity and tenderness. A touch of the hand, a kiss on the face, a few tears and their time is over. In this cinematic short story�as delicate as Guy de Maupassant's, as terse and acute as Raymond Carver's�Wong touches on his old themes of romance and remorse. Chang Chen, looking like a younger Tony Leung in mustache and '60s clothing, gives a mature performance; but Gong Li is the eye magnet. As Hua the regal manipulator, she ages and diminishes, allowing the viewer to escort her on her appointment with tragedy. Give the lady a big hand.

Wong is not perpetually stuck in the 1960s, though his past three films reside there. He had planned to set The Hand in 1930s Shanghai, and shoot it in that city, but the SARS outbreak restricted travel around Asia, forcing him to film in Hong Kong. As fears of an epidemic intensified, the entire production was disrupted, with some Taiwan crew members having difficulty getting to Hong Kong. "Their wives just went crazy," Wong says. "They couldn't accept their husbands working on such a dangerous film, in such a dangerous city. But the men still came."

In the end, nothing could prevent Wong finishing 2046.

A four-year shoot might seem torture to some directors. Not this one. "For me," he says, "to make films is like a circus. We should just go from one town to another, always on the road, stopping when we think we should stop. To me, if there's no Cannes, you can make 2046 for another year." Is it a circus or a love affair, whose ending he both dreads and prays for? As Chow says in the movie, "You can't leave 2046. You can only hope it leaves you." Filmmaking for Wong Kar-wai is like an addiction, benign but incurable.

"It's very hard," he acknowledges. "At the end you just want to get away from it. A few weeks ago, we finished the final mix. And I realized that you have to say goodbye to this project, and you feel very, very ..." His voice trails off. "I know it's not easy. I know it's not a normal practice to make a film for four years. And I'm not sure we'll be able or willing to do that again in the future. This is a very special film. It is the hardest to let go. But you have to let go. And that's it."

Which is stronger: his love for the challenge and camaraderie of making a film or the heartache he feels when it's over? Maybe the two emotions are equally potent, since Wong makes movies that blend those two subjects: the coming together, the drifting apart. The maker of a film as splendid as 2046 should be eager to let it go, to share his treasure with the world. Instead there's an emptiness worse than postcoital or postpartum depression. That's the secret, whispered into a hole, by a man who is 60% romantic, 40% showman and 100% movie artist. He's like Chow in 2046, watching the most amazing woman walk out of his life.

In 2046 Jingwen reads a story Chow has written about her and finds the ending too sad. Could he please change it? We are happy to do that for Wong Kar-wai. He should realize that his unhappy ending is, for others, a beguiling beginning. His vanished beloved can now find a new suitor�millions of moviegoers, who will embrace the beautiful creature, who are ready to be put in the mood for love.

The End.
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PostPosted: Sat Mar 02, 2013 12:48 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

In the Mood for Rapture

By Richard Corliss | Cannes Monday, May 24, 2004

Time Magazine


http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,641205,00.html

Forget what you've heard about Hong Kong-based writer-director Wong Kar-wai: that he's the tall dude in the cool shades who makes superhip movies the international art-house set loves for their languorous rhythms, their gorgeous-garish visual tones, their iconizing of alienation, their pioneering of a sultry cinematic language. Forget too the completion anxiety that attended his new film 2046—four years in the gestating, with scenes still being shot a few weeks ago, and which came so close to missing its slot in the Cannes Film Festival that, for the first time in memory, the screening times of three other official selections had to be changed at the last moment. And please try to ignore the melancholy fact that, though the Cannes jury gave four of its eight prizes to Asian directors and actors (including the Best Actress award to frequent Wong muse Maggie Cheung), none of them went to the festival's finest film.

All this is true, but for the moment put it aside. What you need to know, what 2046 makes unavoidably clear, is that Wong Kar-wai is the most romantic filmmaker in the world. In incandescent images of glamorous performers, he details love's anguish and rapture, which are often the same thing. Beautiful women throw themselves at handsome men—Leslie Cheung and Tony Leung Chiu-wai—and the men often step aside. Love, the playwright Terry Johnson wrote, is something you fall in. Wong's films make art out of that vertiginous feeling. They soar as their characters plummet.

2046 is a sequel of sorts to Wong's In the Mood for Love, which premiered at Cannes in 2000 and enjoyed worldwide acclaim. That movie, set in Hong Kong in 1962, concerned the furtive affair of a married journalist, Chow Mo-wan (Leung), and a married woman (Maggie Cheung) who lives in the same boarding house. The new film follows Chow's erotic adventures for the next decade or so, mainly with the alluring Bai Ling (Zhang Ziyi), and occasionally dips into the past, in reveries of Lulu the vamp (Carina Lau) and the tragic-masked Su Lizhen (Gong Li). Chow is now a writer of science-fiction novels. They take him and the audience into the year 2046, where he dallies with the android Wang Jing-wen (Faye Wong).

"He thought he wrote about the future," the film's narration says of Chow, "but it really was the past. In his novel, a mysterious train left for 2046 every once in a while. Everyone who went there had the same intention: to recapture their lost memories." Chow Mo-wan, then, could be Wong Kar-wai, or indeed any other writer who becomes fascinated by his own creations; he plays with them, tries to discard them, is haunted by them as by lost memories. The movie goes further: it suggests that, once they are born in a writer's imagination, these fictions, these women are alive. They can fall in love, which is wonderful for them to feel, and they can experience the pain of love, which is wonderful for us to see.

Wong's films are a snap to decode for anyone familiar with the tropes of classic movie romance. Consider just three. Music: a slow samba can seduce two strangers into moving to each other's emotional time, and 2046 sways to Perfidia and Quizás, Quizás, Quizás. Cigarettes: everyone puffs away pensively; the fumes wrap the characters in a retro-chic warmth as they dedicate themselves to that mesmeric movie rite, the sacrament of smoking. The kiss: 2046 has one of the great ones, between Chow and Su. He stands her against a wall and presses mouth to mouth. He moves back, and we see Su's lipstick violently smeared. A tear courses down her right cheek, then another down her left. It is a kiss like an assault; it has crushed not just her lips but her heart.

The camera, John Berger once famously said, is a man looking at a woman. Movie romance is certainly a snapshot of a beautiful woman suffering. The main function of Chow—played by Leung as a sensitive gigolo whose smirk can mature into a sigh—is to direct our glance to all the fabulous women in the cast. The camera, mainly manned by Christopher Doyle, prowls around the women like a lover in the first flush of passion. It captures and caresses the actresses' radiance: Lau's bold sensuality, Faye Wong's elfin resiliency, Gong Li's fragile hauteur. Zhang, in a panoply of pouts, flirtations and surrendering smiles, is at her most ravishing and nuanced, especially when swathed in the spectacular cheongsams of costumer designer (and editor and production designer) William Chang.

This year is still relatively young, and Wong's romantic epic, in the version shown at Cannes, is not quite finished. Still, we say that—because of its passion, its craft, its belief in the grace and pain of love—2046 is the film of 2004.

Read more: http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,641205,00.html#ixzz2MN1ngMXo
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PostPosted: Sat Mar 02, 2013 1:04 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

Movie review
Romance and regret, in past and future


Wong Kar-wai's swoonily beautiful "In the Mood for Love," released in 2000, was an ode to love and to restraint: Two people, Mr. Chow...

By Moira Macdonald, Seattle Times movie critic

http://seattletimes.com/html/movies/2002452142_twenty26.html



Wong Kar-wai's swoonily beautiful "In the Mood for Love," released in 2000, was an ode to love and to restraint: Two people, Mr. Chow (Tony Leung Chiu-wai) and Mrs. Chan (Maggie Cheung), living in adjacent apartments, are unhappily married to other people in 1962 Hong Kong. They adore each other but cannot conceive of dishonor, and so the romance mostly takes place in lingering looks, delicate touches, words that mean something else, and melancholy strains of music that wrapped itself around the would-be lovers like gentle arms. Unforgettable in its mood and elegance, it was perhaps the finest film of the year.

Now Wong returns with "2046," which picks up where "In the Mood for Love" left off, and then floats away to another plane entirely. The new film doesn't have the jewel-like perfection of "In the Mood," but it shares some of the first film's mesmerizing, almost hypnotic quality — and, like the first film, it's often so visually beautiful that you get lost in it, forgetting the real world. "2046" isn't entirely successful: It's very high-concept and can be difficult to follow. But when it was over, I immediately wanted to watch it again, to dive back into its ravishing pool.

Leung, looking emptied-out and sad, is the star of this film, sporting a stringy little mustache that looks like a feeble attempt at suaveness. (Cheung returns only briefly.) Chow, a journalist in the earlier film, is now a writer of pulp fiction, and the film feels like a series of short stories or novellas, told in fevered prose. He's a different man from the first film; he's evolved into a bit of a cad; dissatisfied and angry at the past. Living in a seedy hotel, Chow becomes involved with a series of enigmatic, exquisite women with hurt in their eyes. Their silk cheongsams fit their curves like second skins; their '60s bouffants float on their heads like crowns.

Faye Wong is the landlord's young daughter, in love with a Japanese man. Ziyi Zhang, in a performance infinitely more nuanced and heartbreaking than anything she's ever done on screen, is the call girl in the next room. Gong Li, her posture as straight as a fresh cigarette, plays the gambler Su Li Zhen — which is, mysteriously, the name of the character Cheung played in "In the Mood for Love." Chow tells her that he was once in love with another man's wife, also named Su Li Zhen. "When I think back," he says, "the whole thing was like a dream." He grabs her and kisses her, violently and hungrily; this is no dream.

The film floats between these stories and another, set in a futuristic city in the year 2046, where people can go to recapture lost memories. It's filmed (by the brilliant cinematographer Christopher Doyle, with Kwan Pun Leung and Lai Yiu Fai) with burnished colors and a gauzy softness, as if shot through lace. And the moody music from Nat King Cole (echoes of "In the Mood for Love") and Shigeru Umebayashi suggest romance and nostalgia; a memory now almost gone.

Wong isn't so much a storyteller in these films as a mood creator, and "2046" beautifully creates an atmosphere of romance, passion and regret. In one haunting scene (reminiscent of the carriage scene in another tale of love and restraint, Martin Scorsese's "The Age of Innocence"), the color fades to black and white as we see a man and a woman side by side, perhaps in the back seat of a taxi or bus. His hand, with deliberate, painful slowness, rests on her knee. Her own kid-gloved hand moves it away, ever so gently.

Moira Macdonald: 206-464-2725 or mmacdonald@seattletimes.com


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PostPosted: Sat Mar 02, 2013 1:17 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

In the mood for Leung

The charisma of Tony Leung, star of the new "2046" and among the biggest stars in the world, is as potent offscreen as on.

By Stephanie Zacharek

Friday, Aug 5, 2005 03:10 PM PDT

http://www.salon.com/2005/08/05/tony_leung/



The notoriously obsessive, if brilliant, director Wong Kar Wai spent four years working on his most recent feature, “2046.” The picture before that, the sultry brocade tone poem “In the Mood for Love,” was initially supposed to involve four months of shooting; the schedule ultimately stretched to 15. For two of the greatest faces in the movies today — Maggie Cheung and Tony Leung, who starred in the film — it must have felt something like being under a grueling fairy-tale spell, the sort of thing that leaves you perpetually exhausted even when you’ve dreamed you’ve gotten sleep.

We’ve been told the camera never lies, but that doesn’t mean it necessarily tells the truth about its motives. What if the camera, with its notoriously seductive gaze, is capable of addiction? The more it gets, the more it wants: First it has Leung for four months, then for 15. So would four years be too much to ask? The camera doesn’t just love Leung; it doesn’t want to let him out of its sight. He’s everything it wants in a man, and more — old Hollywood by way of modern Hong Kong — and the camera sees a reflection of its history in his very face.

Leung, 43, has been starring in Hong Kong movies for close to 15 years. (His full name is Tony Leung Chiu Wai, and he’s not to be confused with Tony Leung Ka Fai, the actor who appeared in the 1992 film of Marguerite Duras’ novel “The Lover.”) Leung is one of Asia’s (and therefore, the world’s) biggest movie stars, the sort who’s perpetually trailed by gossip columnists and paparazzi. But he can walk around virtually unrecognized in New York (outside of Chinatown, that is). Even so, astute Western moviegoers have had plenty of chances to see him: The early years of his film résumé (which followed a successful TV career in Hong Kong in the ’80s) include John Woo pictures like “Bullet in the Head” and “Hard-Boiled.” In the past two years alone, American audiences might have seen him in the deftly multilayered cop thriller “Infernal Affairs” (he also appears in one of its two sequels) or as a third-century assassin in Zhang Yimou’s “Hero.” But Leung may be best known — among Western moviegoers, at least — for his work with Wong, which spans six pictures, beginning with “Days of Being Wild” (1991). In 2000, he won the best actor award at Cannes for “In the Mood for Love,” playing Mr. Chow, a soulful, wounded married man involved in a would-be romance with Mrs. Chan (Cheung), the wife of the man with whom his own wife is having an affair. And in “2046,” a semi-sequel to “In the Mood for Love,” he plays a version of the same character, although it seems he’s been changed and hardened by experiences that the movie only hints at.



It’s an astonishing performance, one that builds on the earlier character even as it wholly reinvents it. This Mr. Chow has the same smoldering elegance as the one we met in the earlier picture. But unlike the tender, ruminative, courtly man of that picture, this Mr. Chow channels whatever damage he’s suffered into a kind of emotional cruelty, largely inflicted on the fragile, sensuous call girl who has fallen for him (played by Ziyi Zhang). It’s as if this Chow is a new man who, perhaps as a form of cosmic punishment, has been fitted with the painful memories of the old one, without having been granted the gentlemanly resources of kindness and compassion that might help him deal with them. Leung takes a familiar character — one for whom, in “In the Mood for Love,” we may have come to feel something like love itself, as we watch him stroll through the shimmery shadows of early-1960s Hong Kong with Cheung (who appears only briefly in “2046,” like a mirage of a memory) — and shows us both his vulnerability and his sour, ravaged core. His behavior pains us, but we can’t turn away from him. His charisma goes to work on us like a kind of sweet suffering.

Those are complex strands of feeling and characterization for any actor to manage, particularly when he has no idea what the movie he’s starring in is about: Wong generally doesn’t give his actors scripts, instead shaping the story and characters as he goes along. And “2046″ — which is partly a story of restlessness and desire in mid-’60s Hong Kong and Singapore, and partly a deeply touching futuristic dream romance between androids and humans — is an adamantly nonlinear, challenging picture. But Leung’s performance is seamless and confident — so much so that when I met with him briefly in New York last spring, to talk about “2046,” I wasn’t prepared to speak with an actor who appeared to be completely lacking in guile, to the extent that he didn’t know (or, perhaps more accurately, didn’t care) how to play the movie-star/interviewer game.

In other words, I expected to talk to a movie star, and a person showed up instead: It threw me totally. I don’t just mean that Leung showed up in casual, comfortable clothes (which he did), or that he — how do the people who talk to movie stars all the time usually put it? — “picked at the salad in front of him as he considered my question” (which he didn’t — there were no salads, although he did consider my questions). We had two 15-minute conversations, split by a surprisingly brief interlude in which the publicist whisked him off to be photographed by the New York Times. (He returned to me, claiming to have told the photographer that he hadn’t yet finished our interview, even though I’d been promised only 15 minutes anyway.) In person, Leung is so direct that he sometimes gives the impression of betraying intimate confidences even when he isn’t; and, particularly at first, his face is so impassive that you can’t read anything off it except ingrained politeness. (Most actors will give you something to read immediately, maybe partly to throw you off the trail of who they really are and what they’re really thinking, but probably mostly to smooth the way for the interview ahead: They’re playing a role, so are you, and it’s best just to jump in and get on with things.) It seems at first that Leung simply saves everything for the camera. That’s not a bad strategy as far as acting goes, but anxiety-provoking for anyone whose job it is to put him at ease — in this case, me.

But the more I listened to Leung, the more I suspected that this soft-spoken, pensive guy recognizes the difference between being a movie idol in his own mind, and in his heart. He told me things he has told numerous other interviewers who, in their allotted 15 minutes, asked precisely the same questions that I did, which is only fair: The same questions deserve nothing more than the same answers. At one point, he explained to me why he loves acting as much as he does — largely because “you can hide behind someone and express your feelings; you can cry in front of others without being shy.” Then he looked at me squarely and said, without even a hint of self-consciousness, “I’m a very shy person with very low self-esteem” — not as if he were confiding anything particularly personal, but as if he were stating an irrefutable fact. I’ve since found other interviews in which Leung has said almost the exact same thing, which I see not as an exhausted response to the same old questions but as an insistence on his part to convince people that it’s true.

Leung trusts Wong Kar Wai implicitly, he says, and not just because he has been working with him for 15 years. “I love his way of making movies,” Leung says, “and we’ve known each other for quite some time, staring with ‘Days of Being Wild.’ We’ve built a lot of trust in each other, and that’s the most important thing.” He also acknowledges that his working relationship with Wong is different from the one he forges with other directors. “We are very strange. We seldom talk on the set. We don’t see each other, besides work. And he never tells me anything about his personal life — although I tell him a lot about mine,” Leung says with a glimmer of mischievousness. “I think he needs to know, if he’s going to shoot me. But he never tells me anything about himself. So for me, he’s quite a mysterious person. But as working partners, we are quite happy working together.”

Even so, Leung has no reservations about the difficulties and frustrations of working with Wong. He recalls showing up on the set the first day and having Wong tell him that he wanted him to play the same character he played in “In the Mood for Love,” but in a different way: “Like a new man, a new character, but with the same name and same identity, but like somebody else.”

Leung says he didn’t question Wong’s directive, because he had no idea what the story was about. “But it’s very difficult for an actor to do that. I had already gotten used to the origin of Mr. Chow, his body language, his gestures, his tempo, his voice. So it was really difficult. That’s why on the first day I asked Kar Wai if I could have a mustache — to make myself believe I’m somebody else. At least I’d have something to hold on to.” Wong refused at first, but Leung insisted — he felt he couldn’t find his way into the role without it. And visually as well as emotionally, his instincts were on target: Mr. Chow’s pencil mustache gives him an oily elegance; it’s a sliver of a symbol that defines the difference between the old Mr. Chow and this new one, whom Leung refers to as “dark and mean,” a “cynical playboy.”

And yet, even playing this new and rather cruel Mr. Chow, Leung doesn’t completely submerge his vulnerability. It would be impossible to do so, and when you see him in person, you understand why. Leung is a decidedly masculine presence on-screen and off, but in front of the camera, in particular, there’s also an alluring softness about him — his masculinity is defined not by macho posturing but by pure comfort within his own body. You can see this in the way he moves in “In the Mood for Love”: Even though Mr. Chow walks with his hands placidly at his sides — the mark of a man who, you’d assume, is constantly afraid of making the wrong move — his gait is assured and steady, hinting at a bold, if underplayed, sexuality that’s anything but businesslike.

But even that’s nothing compared with the muted expressiveness of Leung’s face. In “Infernal Affairs,” Leung plays an undercover cop who has all but erased his identity for the sake of his job. He reveals shadowy, playful traces of the person he used to be to the psychiatrist who’s been assigned to treat him: He has a small crush on her, but it’s the sort of charming infatuation that dances beneath the surface. We get an even more intensified sense of his anguish when he runs into an old girlfriend, out walking with her young daughter (who, we realize in a deftly played moment, is actually his child). He and the woman chat, filling the awkward space between them with useless words.

Leung’s eyes betray everything and nothing: Other actors may seem most vital when they’re playing “happy” or “funny,” but Leung’s velvet-brown eyes can telegraph whole chapters of feeling with a single glance — even their despair twinkles with life. His smile is easy but sly, and it usually seems to take its cues from his eyebrows: In “Chungking Express,” where he plays a cop pining for the haughty flight attendant who has ditched him, we first catch sight of him walking his beat, his peaked policeman’s cap perched low over his eyes. He looks only vaguely movie-star handsome, until the hat comes off. Then his whole face opens up, and the eyebrows are the key. Quizzical, worried, vaguely amused: They speak a shorthand of their own, even when the rest of his face appears to be giving away nothing.

I studied Tony Leung’s eyebrows intently in the 15-plus-15 minutes I had with him, and I can attest to their almost mystical properties. I’m deeply embarrassed to admit that, very early in the interview, I started to ask Leung a question about “In the Mood for Love” — a picture I adore — only to realize I couldn’t for the life of me remember its title. I riffled through every secret hiding place in my brain for the correct arrangement of words, but it was nowhere to be found. This mortifying blip lasted for an interminable 20 seconds or so (although the stumbling, stupid silence on the interview tape seems to go on for 20 minutes), after which I had the good sense to make a complete moron of myself by consulting the IMDb printout I’d brought with me.

It’s funny, but up to that point I hadn’t thought I was nervous at all, even though I’ve loved Leung’s work since I first saw him (in “Hard-Boiled”) more than 10 years ago. He’s a megastar in Asia, and a megastar to me: I would probably have been more nervous talking to, say, Cary Grant, but perhaps not much more. I realized that by not seeming like a movie star, Leung had completely disarmed me. If I were a camera, I’d know just what to make of Leung’s face. But because I’m only a person, the best I can do is search it as if it were a kind of emotional map, and marvel at the inadequacy of words to describe what I see there.

Stephanie Zacharek is a senior writer for Salon Arts & Entertainment.


Last edited by Sandy on Wed Jun 04, 2014 1:04 am; edited 2 times in total
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PostPosted: Thu Apr 11, 2013 12:24 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

2046 - Sony Website
http://www.sonyclassics.com/2046/main.html
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