Word: chowing
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...Chow is the hero of 2046, Wong's first feature since In the Mood for Love four years ago. Like that film and most of the others that have made him the most respected and imitated writer-director in Hong Kong, perhaps in all Asia, it is a stethoscope monitoring the troubled hearts of people who have the attitude but not always the aptitude for love. At $15 million and more than two hours in length (20 minutes longer than any of his earlier pictures), 2046 is the grandest project of a man who, in an age of coarse...
...When last seen, at the end of in the Mood for Love, Chow was mourning a failed affair with Su Lizhen (Maggie Cheung) and making a pilgrimage to the ruins of Angkor Wat. He was told that to bury a sad secret, one should find an ancient hole, whisper the secret into it, then cover it up. That was 1967. It's a few years later, and Chow has taken residence in room 2046 of the Oriental Hotel, where several bewitching women cross his path. One is Lulu (Carina Lau), who traps herself in a series of volcanic affairs...
...neighbor is Bai Ling (Zhang Ziyi), a dance-hall hostess and prostitute. Her arguments with Chow over his lady guests veer into flirtation, and soon she too is making his bedsprings squeak. Bai Ling makes one rash transaction: she gives her heart to Chow, who wants her only as a playmate. The one sedate lady in the hotel is its owner's older daughter Jingwen (Faye Wong), pining over a broken affair with a Japanese man (Takuya Kimura). She encourages Chow, a journalist who writes erotic books on the side, to switch to science fiction. Soon she is helping...
...screen. With the dexterity of a cardsharp, Wong shuffles the present, the recent past and the distant future, mixing reality, memory and fantasy. The main action of the movie takes place on consecutive Christmas Eves in the late '60s, but each scene has reverberations of others from Chow's past and from the novel. What anchors each of the stories for the viewer are the faces of the actresses. No explanations are needed when Zhang is lasering a stare as bold as a shout or Lau is sobbing herself to sleep or Gong Li is flashing an imperious gaze...
...Love is a matter of timing," Chow observes. "It's no good meeting the right person too soon or too late." Chow intersected with all these women too soon or too late. Wong Kar-wai got all of them at the apogee of their craft and allure. That's part of his filmmaking process: to sculpt the role to the performer. "If you want to make a film with an actor or actress, there must be something that attracts you. I'm trying to exploit that quality, which they might not even be aware of. So I normally...