[Insert date]
★★★★½ (or, 10/10 sad train rides)
Released in 2004 as the spiritual (and chronological) sequel to In the Mood for Love (2000), 2046 is a film about longing that can’t find its shape. It takes the same character, the same hotel room (2046/2047), the same haunted restraint, and pushes it into sci-fi, melodrama, and future-noir. It shouldn’t work. It does. 2046 by wong kar-wai
Chow Mo-wan, now a pulp writer and a rougher-edged womanizer, moves between memory and invention. In the “real” 1960s Hong Kong, he flirts with a series of women: the stoic gambling queen Bai Ling (Zhang Ziyi), the sweet but unavailable Jing-wen (Faye Wong), and echoes of his lost love, Mrs. Chan (Maggie Cheung, glimpsed in flashback). In the “future” 2046, he writes a story about a train leaving for a place where lost souls try to recapture lost love.
Where In the Mood for Love was about what was almost said, 2046 is about what’s said too late, or to the wrong person. Chow claims he’s moved on. He hasn’t. He pays other women to pretend, he writes stories where robots cry, he laughs at love while composing elegies to it. [Insert date] ★★★★½ (or, 10/10 sad train rides)
Zhang Ziyi’s Bai Ling steals the film. She plays a woman who gives herself entirely to Chow, knowing he won’t give back. The Christmas Eve scene—where she waits, dresses up, then silently destroys the room—is as raw as anything Wong has ever filmed.
You don’t watch 2046 for plot. You watch it for the feeling of missing someone you haven’t lost yet, or holding onto a love that already left ten years ago. It’s a film about the stories we tell ourselves so we don’t have to say: I’m still not over it. It does
In the Mood for Love , Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind , Chungking Express , crying in the dark.