2046 Review
by Matthew Montchalin (mmontcha AT OregonVOS DOT net)September 11th, 2005
Bullet trains of the present must someday evolve into timewarping supertrains of the future, speeding past towering skyscrapers at night, all with the awful, awful rumbling and shaking that that sort of supersonic speed ought to entail. Unfortunately, there's simply no mocked up city with trains passing cameras on dollies moving half as fast. None of that sort of thing, it looked instead like some mattes 30 feet away, and a few humdrum trains going along, accompanied by a loud soundtrack in the background. Anything fancier must have exceeded the budgetary constraints imposed on the director, Wong Kar Wai, who was content to use a stationary camera with an occasional shot of an elevated supertrain or two, but the shots are few and far between, and they seem more incidental to the story than pivotal. In fact, most of the movie is shot up close and indoors, not even in a mall to speak of.
2046 is a "human relationship" type movie, and that would have suited me just fine if the casting director had only chosen a wider assortment of actors (in terms of shapes and dimensions) than were employed. I had a very hard time telling the actors apart. If you get past the couple outdoor shots - they were probably intended to represent the fantastic vision of the main character, a science fiction writer - you will find nearly all the rest of the movie shot indoors.
Now, for the most part, wherever the camera pointed, you'll find lots of hues of yellow on red, behind tinted backgrounds of orange and brown, with precious few colors outside that part of the spectrum, a far cry from a beautiful movie, if you ask me. Heck, an animated movie like "Sky Blue" or "Metropolis 2" (the remake, not the original) is far more beautiful than this one is.
Before you walk into the theater, make sure you don't accidentally confuse 2046 for the Winterbottom film "Code 46" (the one where governments have to stop people from hybridizing themselves with clones from prior generations). This one is called 2046 because that is the year just before Communist China swallows up Hong Kong, after 50 years of preparing for the occasion.
Coincidentally, 2046 is the number of a room in a hotel where the main hero, a science fiction writer, is spending his life in the 1960s and 1970s (I could be off by a few years here and there) writing about the future as he sees it. Maybe that's why there are a couple shots of elevated supertrains in the distant future. It's pretty hard telling when the movie is dealing with the future as opposed to the present.
I cannot be as generous as another reviewer has been in calling this movie an object of art, or a piece of luscious, intoxicating beauty. I guess it's because most of the movie seemed to come off as a muddled mess of faded colors just off yellow. Color editing software in postproduction might have helped, I don't know. Perhaps the director told the cameraman to put a yellow filter on the lens, who knows. In any case, it just wasn't that beautiful to me. And although I fell asleep in the middle of this movie, it could not have been for more than ten or fifteen minutes, and that short a period of time is not enough to make me hold back on stating my opinions.
The budget may have been in the millions, and the women may have been decked out in long, flowing evening dresses, and the men may have been in two piece business suits with starched collars and ties - everything as thoroughly westernized as it gets - it takes more than dressing the actors up with a wardrobe from a frilly, flowery, Federico Fellini film to make up for the terribly slow pace, lack of plot, and action. Good movies have something called 'overlapping' - where the actors deliver their lines simultaneously. In this movie, they took their time, politely waiting for the other actor to finish (and then some), before coming up with the next line of dialog. It certainly didn't seem natural to me.
If I didn't say it before, maybe I'll say it now- I was expecting a whizbang science fiction movie, and that's not what it turned out to be. It's a "human relationship" movie where girls naturally dig "sharp dressed men" - it's all unexplainable, I guess - but in this case, it's a woman falling in love with a diminutive, weasely, pencil-necked, chainsmoking Japanese science fiction writer - our hero - who is, himself, bent on having his way with the daughter of a hotelier. Picture an oriental version of "Paris Hilton" falling for an oriental version of "Woody Allen" (with a little moustache perched above his upper lip), and he's constantly sucking on his cigarette and puffing smoke like the little train that could. (Who the heck gave this movie a green light, anyway?) Some reviewers have likened this movie to an oriental version of an earlier Burt Reynolds movie "The Man Who Loved Women" but sinc I haven't seen that one, I guess I'll have to say that imitation is the sincerest form of flattery. In a world as big as this one, there's a lot of plots to go around. At least they didn't cast a 400 pound sumo wrestler in the role of the Japanese science fiction writer bent on seducing the daughter of the hotel.
There are lots of romantic escapades (or beddings) of various actresses, nothing too graphic that I can remember, but then again I did fall asleep for about 15 minutes in the middle. I guess the main hero to this movie - the guy who is supposed to be an accomplished science fiction writer - is so good with words that women fall in love with him from the quality of his writing, and not from the quality of his appearance. Notwithstanding the suit and tie, and the cigarette glued to his lips.
As for a music soundtrack, don't expect to hear sitar music, rock music, or anything close to being reminiscent of the Far East. There are lots of polyphonic violins upon violins, and choruses of violins and pianos, like the whole world is in love with pseudo-symphonic chamber music. Maybe a drumbeat or two could have really helped out on this movie. In fact, the Far East has become so thoroughly modernized that you get to hear that Bing Crosby (?) "Chestnuts Roasting" song several times before the movie is done.
Equally to my surprise, the concept of birthdays (and Christmas) has metamorphosized into a cost/benefit dollar-counting accounting activity, and the main character has (to his credit?) discovered that it is commercially feasible to make a living off of throwing birthday parties to himself, just be sure to invite famous luminaries who have presumably heard about him, and they will lavish him with gifts so all he has to do is cash them in after the parties are over, but that is just of the little subplots to this movie.
As I said before, this is a "human relationship" type movie. But there is also the part of the movie that represents the writer's visions coming true, and that includes androids that really know what falling in love is like, and that means exclusive devotion, I think. And that says quite a bit when the androids look just like real people. This part of the movie is the main reason I would see it one more time, if only because I lost track of what part of the movie was in the 1960s, what part of the movie was in the year 2046, and what part of the movie was in Room 2046. Yes, the movie was shot that non-linearly.
Script or Dialog D
Direction C
Photography B+
Sets & Locations C+
Music & Sound C+
Plot B
Car Chases F
Shooting/Explosions F
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