2046 2004

“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, exquisite camerawork, and superbly used music, 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 (Zhang Ziyi), 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.” — Geoff Andrew, Time Out  

“It’s wonderful – a rich, glamorous and acutely human work with superb performances by Leung and the four gorgeous actresses.“ — Richard Corliss, Time