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- guardian.co.uk, Friday May 21 2004 10.08 BST
Impossible visual richness ... Zhang Ziyi in 2046
Four years ago in Cannes Wong Kar-Wai had a smash hit with his romance In The Mood For Love, about a man and a woman, played by Tony Leung and Maggie Cheung, having a melancholy, platonic affair in parallel to the adultery of their spouses.
A year later he presented his enigmatic short film In The Mood For Love 2001, showing the same characters in modern Hong Kong. His sensationally lush and languorous new film, 2046, is clearly an extension of this drama, unfolding on a canvas of sometimes almost glutinous richness - part sequel, part variation on a theme - with a startling narrative like something by Dennis Potter.
Leung plays Chow, a rackety journalist and pulp-fiction author in sixties Hong Kong, living in a cheap hotel and escaping the painful memories of a failed liaison.
He's a raffish bachelor with the cruelty of a natural heartbreaker and a knack of inspiring love in beautiful women while being too wary and worldly, or just too shallow, to return their passion. Chow's emotional life is displaced into a sci-fi novel he is writing called 2046, a Kubrickian fantasy of a hi-tech global train network with a service called 2046 in which people can reclaim their memories.
The action is interspersed with Chow's futurist vision with characters in fictional guises. It looks sensational, though sometimes resembling the kind of luxury goods commercial that Wong Kar-Wai has made (for BMW cars).
Meanwhile, Chow indulges a passion for the women who live in Room 2046. Bai (Zhang Ziyi) is a beautiful girl who falls in love with him. Wang (Faye Wong) is the hotel proprietor's daughter who develops a tendresse while collaborating on a novel. And Gong Li plays a mysterious gambler.
The director and his cinematographer, Christopher Doyle, contrive their familiar close-ups and shabby interiors, often showing an eye for a beautiful female sashaying up stairs. In watching the film we are marooned in a virtual "present" time of exquisite unhappiness. It is an absorbingly mysterious, richly sensuous film.
