Time Out of Mind

There are no ordinary shots in Wong Kar Wai's 2046 and no ordinary sounds--which is remarkable, given that you've seen and heard everything before. Latin-beat pop hits of the 1960s alternate on the soundtrack with Callas's favorite Bellini arias, while familiar old-movie types--the pencil-mustached dandy with the pocket handkerchief, the sheath-dressed beauty with upswept eyelashes and foot-high hair--eye each other on murky staircases, or float in the aquarium lighting of the hotel room where they make love, or sometimes just stand and pose against a wall, whose surface (you may depend on it) will be interestingly distressed and richly colored. Each moment seems not so much experienced as recollected, either from previous Wong Kar Wai films (In the Mood for Love, Days of Being Wild) or from a still-earlier cinematic glow, which Wong filters for you as if through a prism.

Even the big novelty of 2046--Wong's use, for the first time, of computer- generated sci-fi imagery--has a reminiscent air, since these fragments of a film-within-the-film represent the imaginings of a 1960s pulp writer. Their shopworn futurism makes a touchingly thin and plasticky disguise for the protagonist's yearnings, which he focuses not on the years to come but on a past that was beautiful but didn't work out.

You've heard that one before. You've seen it, too. But from moment to moment, Wong makes it new.

Subscriber Login

User Name

Password

Subscribe Now!

The only way to read this article and the full contents of each week's issue of The Nation online is by subscribing to the magazine. Subscribe now and read this article -- and every article published since for the past five years -- right now.

There's no obligation -- try The Nation for four weeks free.

• Get The Nation at home (and online!) for 68 cents a week!
• If you like this article, consider making a donation to The Nation.
• Reprint this article. Click here for rights and information.