2046

2046 (2004) is a hotel room number in Hong Kong. Chow Mo-wan is a journalist writing science fiction; in his story people travel to a place called 2046 because nothing changes there and you can recover what you lost. The rest of the film is the women he meets at the hotel and his inability to stay with any of them. It is taken as a sequel to In the Mood for Love; Chow is the same character and the loss from that film is carried into this one. It is not a direct continuation so much as the later years of the same man. Wong Kar-wai shot it over more than five years. Filming began in 1999, the script kept changing through the process, and the edit ran to the last moment. When it screened at Cannes in 2004 the print reached the festival at the last minute. That method has a consequence: some performers enter the film in footage shot years earlier, and they did not know themselves how much space their characters would occupy. The cast is large: Tony Leung Chiu-wai, Zhang Ziyi, Gong Li, Faye Wong and Maggie Cheung. Christopher Doyle, Lai Yiu-fai and Kwan Pun-leung shot it. The number 2046 is also political. The fifty year guarantee of autonomy given when Hong Kong was handed to China expires in 2047, so the film describes the last year in which nothing changes. It runs 128 minutes. Good for: Wong Kar-wai, visual density, and memory and regret. Less good for: the narrative is scattered and the timeline is never explained. The science fiction passages do not fuse with the rest. Chow's treatment of the women goes unexamined throughout.