What is 2046? It is a hotel room, a year on a calendar, the title of a science-fiction novel, and the name of a place no one is supposed to leave. In Wong Kar-wai’s hands it is also a mood — gold light through cigarette smoke, a waltz that keeps circling back on itself, a man who writes about the future because he cannot stop living in the past.

The man is Chow Mo-wan, the same wounded romantic Tony Leung played in In the Mood for Love, now a sharper, sadder figure: a newspaperman and pulp author who moves through women the way other people move through cities, always arriving too late to feel anything but the loss in advance. 2046 is the film about everything that did not happen behind that door.

A hotel, a year, a novel

Chow takes a room in the Oriental Hotel, next to the number that haunts him, and begins serialising a story called 2046 — about a train bound for a place where nothing ever changes and from which no passenger has ever returned, except one man who decides to come back. The fiction bleeds into the life: the women around Chow become the passengers, and the question the film keeps asking is whether you can ever truly leave the year, the room, the person you have decided to grieve.

Released in 2004 and shot in fits and starts across roughly five years, the film reached its Cannes premiere only hours after the final cut was struck. That sense of a work assembled out of time, memory and revision is built into its bones — 2046 does not advance so much as it circles, returns, repeats with small fatal differences.

Light, smoke and the Christopher Doyle look

This is among the most beautiful films of its decade. Christopher Doyle, Lai Yiu-fai and Kwan Pun-leung shoot the hotel corridors in crimson and gold and let the camera dwell on a hand, a cigarette, the rim of a glass, a clock. William Chang Suk-ping — production designer, costumer and editor at once — gives every frame the density of a memory you are not sure is yours. Shigeru Umebayashi’s recurring waltz and Peer Raben’s cues turn the whole thing into a piece of music about repetition.

The women of room 2046

Around Leung’s deliberately closed-off Chow, Wong assembles one of the great ensembles of modern Asian cinema. Zhang Ziyi’s Bai Ling — the call-girl who comes closest to cracking Chow open and pays for it — is the film’s most wrenching performance, all bravado and exposed nerve. Faye Wong doubles as the landlord’s lovelorn daughter and as the delayed-reaction android of the sci-fi sections, an unforgettable image of love that always answers a beat too late. Gong Li, Carina Lau, Takuya Kimura and Chang Chen pass through; Maggie Cheung haunts the edges in flashback.

The unofficial close of a trilogy

2046 is the loose final panel of Wong’s 1960s cycle, after Days of Being Wild and In the Mood for Love — the very room number that gave the earlier film its secret address. Where In the Mood for Love is diamond-cut, a single ache held perfectly still, 2046 is its sprawling, restless aftermath: the same man, years later, unable either to repeat the feeling or to escape it. It is best understood not as a sequel but as the long echo of one.

That structure is also the film’s great risk. 2046 diffuses where In the Mood for Love concentrates, and viewers who want a clean line will find it maddening. But give yourself over to its rhythm and it becomes one of the most haunting things Wong has made — a film about the impossibility of going back, told by a man who keeps trying anyway. A beautiful, imperfect masterpiece about the years we would rather invent than remember.

Tags: drama