Non Sequitur (A Reflection on Wong Kar Wai’s “2046″ and “In the Mood for Love”)
August 1st, 2009
“2046.”
If you fell in love with Mr. Chow (Tony Leung) and Mrs. Chan (Maggie Cheung) — who, along with Zhang Ziyi, was in Zhang Yimou’s “Hero” — in Wong Kar Wai’s “In the Mood for Love,” you shouldn’t miss this wonderful masterpiece of a sequel!
If you haven’t seen “In the Mood for Love,” you’d still appreciate the great film that is “2046″ (just like some people must have seen “Before Sunset” without seeing “Before Sunrise”). But I think the weight of our empathy with the travails of Mr. Chow stems from having known what he has gone through in the previous film.
It’s now a toss-up between Claude I-forgot-this-french-canadian’s-surname’s “Leolo” and Wong Kar Wai’s “2046″ as my favorite movie of all time.
Incidentally, doesn’t Tony Leung bear an uncanny resemblance to the late R.J. Leyran?
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Non Sequitur (A Reflection on Wong Kar Wai’s “2046″ and “In the Mood for Love”)
by Michael Ian Lomongo
(For the late R.J. Leyran, who bears an uncanny resemblance to Tony Leung)
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I do think that “2046″ is a very worthy sequel to “In the Mood for Love.” At first, it doesn’t appear to be that way. The only connection with the latter film seemed to be that it was the same Mr. Chow (the erstwhile writer of martial arts stories but moved on to writing sci-fi…) and his adventures in love and loving after the ill-fated affair with Mrs. Chan (Maggie Cheung).
After seeing “2046,” I’ve reached these conclusions:
2046 is the number of the room that Mr. Chow and Mrs. Chan stayed in the night she didn’t want to go home. This scene wasn’t shown in both films but Mr. Chow mentioned it in “2046.”
Mrs. Chan probably separated with her husband. The child she was with when she moved to the apartment that used to be occupied by her landlady was the fruit of that one night tryst with Mr. Chow. She went back with the vain of hope of somehow meeting up with Mr. Chow again. When she called up the office of Mr. Chow when he was in Singapore, it was because she was with child. But she couldn’t bear to speak because she didn’t want to be a “bother” to Mr. Chow.