“Love is matter of timing. It is no use meeting the right person too early or too late.” The deliriously beautiful, science-fiction inflected follow-up to Wong Kar-wai’s international smash, In the Mood for Love, 2046 unfolds first in 1960s Hong Kong, shortly after the end of the earlier film’s affair. Chinese film superstars Tony Leung, Faye Wong, Gong Li, Zhang Ziyi and Maggie Cheung all star or appear in this intoxicating opus to love’s transience, constructed in four romantically focused story arcs that unfold non-chronologically—with staggering emotional force. Tying these plotlines together are the apartment complex implied in the film’s numerical title, and the series of Christmas Eves on which many of the film’s main events occur. A film of immense visual beauty with a degree of self-consciousness rarely seen in the director’s work, 2046 feels like the fullest expression of Wong’s punch-drunk aesthetic.
