I enjoyed it but it's certainly not everyone's cup of tea. If you know Wong Kar Wai, you're halfway there. His films are usually pretty nice to look at, but pretty arduous to watch. This one comes in at over 2 hours, and it goes at a pretty leisurely pace, and there is not a heap of dialogue. Instead, you are treated to a lot of long, intense looks, where emotions are conveyed through facial expressions rather than through words.
It's basically a story about a man's various love affairs. Much has been made of its relationship to In the Mood for Love whihc is a very similar film, in fact centred on the same main character as 2046, but I do not think it is necessary to see ITMFL to be able to appreciate 2046—I saw it so long ago I can't remember the detail. In this film, Chow is a writer, and much of the contemporaneous story is echoed in parts of the sci-fi novel he is writing, parts we see.
So this tale recounts the various women in Chow's life, and the various ways in which one can feel love, or express love: unrequited love, physical love, filial love, pitying love. And so each of his relationships with these mostly beautiful women are played out on screen in a very langourous and lazy way, filled with longing and disappointment and regret and hope.
That said, I did almost nod off at one point. It is very slow moving, which is not for most people. But it is absolutely amazingly beautiful to look at, and long after you leave the cinema you can still feel yourself in WKW's highly stylized world of Hong Kong in the 1960s.
3 comments:
Was it a good film though (beyond the visual)?
m!key
I enjoyed it but it's certainly not everyone's cup of tea. If you know Wong Kar Wai, you're halfway there. His films are usually pretty nice to look at, but pretty arduous to watch. This one comes in at over 2 hours, and it goes at a pretty leisurely pace, and there is not a heap of dialogue. Instead, you are treated to a lot of long, intense looks, where emotions are conveyed through facial expressions rather than through words.
It's basically a story about a man's various love affairs. Much has been made of its relationship to In the Mood for Love whihc is a very similar film, in fact centred on the same main character as 2046, but I do not think it is necessary to see ITMFL to be able to appreciate 2046—I saw it so long ago I can't remember the detail. In this film, Chow is a writer, and much of the contemporaneous story is echoed in parts of the sci-fi novel he is writing, parts we see.
So this tale recounts the various women in Chow's life, and the various ways in which one can feel love, or express love: unrequited love, physical love, filial love, pitying love. And so each of his relationships with these mostly beautiful women are played out on screen in a very langourous and lazy way, filled with longing and disappointment and regret and hope.
That said, I did almost nod off at one point. It is very slow moving, which is not for most people. But it is absolutely amazingly beautiful to look at, and long after you leave the cinema you can still feel yourself in WKW's highly stylized world of Hong Kong in the 1960s.
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