In the Mood for Love

Last summer I wrote, "2046 in its punch-drunk highs and disappointing lows serves to retroactively paint In the Mood for Love in a glowing light, actually improving the memory of its poetic romance." Indeed, watching In the Mood for Love again, this sentiment rang ever more true. 2046, Wong Kar-Wai's sorta-sequel, is a more overtly passionate, punch-drunk film, dizzying as it spans years and displays its character's imaginative approaches to remembering the quiet love affair which In the Mood presents. When reviewing 2046, I commented that In the Mood was the better film: more subtle, richer in its connotations. But it now seems to me that, while this may be true, 2046 is the film I prefer; or rather, I like the films more in conjunction with one another than separately. The romance seen onscreen in In the Mood is poignant, often sweet, and evocatively moody but its power becomes more apparent (to me at least, on this particular viewing) nearer the end of the movie, when the lovers part, and even more so in the follow-up, in which Tony Leung's character struggles to remember and re-connect with his memory, filtered now through the scrim of frustrated nostalgia and yearning romanticism. Or maybe I'm just a sucker for lost causes.

2046

Writing about Wong Kar-Wai can feel like dancing about architecture, or more accurately, trying to draw a blueprint based on an inexplicably moving dance. Through slow-motion, gorgeous color, music for which the word "evocative" doesn't begin to do justice, exquisite sound design, rhythmic editing, and the sympathetic and often beautiful faces of his actors, Wong's films weave a web of seductive grace, leaving you too bedazzled to resist the narcotic bite of the director. He has us at hello, or rather, at the moment Nat King Cole beckons in his honeyed voice and Zhang Ziyi casts a fleeting, teasing glance in our direction.

Actually, 2046 (2004) is only the third Wong Kar-Wai film I've seen, but there were moments which proved more dreamily overpowering than anything else I'd witnessed in his work (or that of most other filmmakers'). Ultimately, though, I find In the Mood for Love (2000) his richest and most satisfying work overall, and at times 2046 lurks in its shadow. This is appropriate enough given that the latter film is in fact a sequel, or "sequel" as my Netflix sleeve describes it, to Mood. The quotation marks are actually appropriate, as 2046 is often entirely tangential to the earlier film, though more often it is not. Dancing through several lovers, across different genres, and over concurrent late-sixties Christmases, but sticking closely to Mood's protagonist Chow Mo-Wan (Tony Leung) and the hotel in which he stays, the film has its ups and downs, but oh, those ups...