Screened at The Frida Cinema
“It’s no good meeting the right person too soon or too late.”
Awe yes, the one true love. Gone. Forever. Those glimpses of euphoria from In the Mood for Love (2000)? Gone. Now, it’s become nothing but a shallow pit. An android-like conversion of a human – in this case Chow Mo-wan. A reckless f**k-phase of distraction to hide from reminisce. Your memories have resorted to being the prime source of income. Your desperation peaking a bit at the end of each fling. Potential romance is just for projecting in every instance. This feels like the state of defeat, the conclusion, and there are no happy endings here.
Mo-wan states that “2046” has no meaning to him other than a room number, and yet he uses it to oblige an erotic science-fiction dystopian novel that centers that combination into a future despite it referring to a past. Bai Ling almost feels like she’s having her own “true love” phase and yet Mo-wan is at such a distance from her that it’s easy for him to see past it; just as easy as it is for everyone in this universe to see past Mo-wan’s everlasting failure, to never bare a full connection with his demise. Living in 2047, but nobody has moved on. Mo-wan says he is the only one who has returned from 2046, but that’s a lie. His head is still living isolated in that room every single day. Each new encounter a game of Russian Roulette with no bullet. Cooped up in a writer’s block, not just on paper, but via woman to woman as well.
This is Hell.
It’s probably going to require another watch for me to fully digest this — not to mention a first-time watch of Days of Being Wild (1990) — but consensus for now is I loved it. Nobody saw this coming…
Verdict: A
All-Time Favorites, Wong Kar-wai Ranked
“2046” is now available to rent on Amazon Prime.
Burning the Celluloid 
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