Visually Impressive that’s probably the idea that comes to mind when one thinks about Wong Kar Wei. I just watched “2046” the title is a vague reference to the year that Hong Kong’s — where the plot took place — special administrative region agreement with China will expire. In “2046,” Kar Wei exceeds all expectations about his visual proposition of films.
Every frame in 2046 is a poem, masterly composed; the idea of a frame within a frame to convey the sense of being all-time watched that he started in “In the Mood for Love” is used here too, but more subtly, his characters can see the past, — or the future? — through a hole in a sort of slice of a tree trunk, alluding to the idea that “in the past, when people had secrets they didn’t want to share, they climbed to a mountain, find a tree and carve a hole in it and whisper the secret into the hole then covered it with mud.”
2046 is the last of a trilogy by Kar Wei, including “Days of Being Wild,” “In the Mood for Love,” and “2046”; as in most intelligent trilogies, such as Three Colors by Krzysztof Kieślowski, there are some connections and patterns among the three films. Still, those connections are unclear, even though the same actors represent the same characters who seem to be different people 20 or 30 years later, as frequently happens in real life.
What moved me about this film is the depth of emotions conveyed by the characters, the pain of loss, but more than the pain of loss, the pain of living through a set of emotions that time and again end up being buried along with a myriad of feelings, sensations, reactions, and more in a place where nobody can see them, but still, they hurt. All these Hong Kong characters living in a surreal world full of muted colors create a chaotic, fiercely vicious, but stunning mosaic of stories, of love stories.
What does the image have to do with “2046”? Probably nothing; however, the film inspired me to continue this continuous search for the art of mundane things, the beauty of the aberrant.
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