I’ve often been critical of movies that flaunt the director’s artsy “visual” prowess while neglecting or disdaining the essence of story telling. In turn, I’ve been criticized for this bias by those modernists (or post-modernists, if you prefer) who, weaned and comfortable with the abstract, do not need coherence or “meaning” as part of their art.
David Lynch is the most popular current exponent of non-linear, non-narrative films which rely on the unhinging sense of mood to dominate the viewer’s landscape. Discomfort and confusion are not unwanted, rather, are useful tools to capture the viewer’s emotions. BLUE VELVET and MULHOLLAND DRIVE both benefitted from this magic to keep the viewer dizzy. The effect in both films was to force your focus and enhance tension.
Historically, the director most imitated in this form is Hitchcock, and the movie most responsible, VERTIGO. Hitch was the most intuitive and intelligent commercial filmmaker of his era, a master of making images that forced his audiences into uneasy exploration of their deepest fantasies.
Wong Kar Wai does a similar thing with 2046, even more than his previous movie, IN THE MOOD FOR LOVE, to which it is a kind of sequel. He too is dealing with a man’s obsessive love for a woman. Mr. Chow (Tony Leung), in the first film, was a newspaperman living in a shabby Hong Kong hotel. He was separated from his wife by emotion, distance and work. In his loneliness, he encountered an attractive and also lonely woman, Su Li Zhen (Maggie Cheung). Chow discoverved that his wife and Su Li’s husband were having an affair. They spent most of the film falling in love with each other and barely avoiding consummation. In the end she left.
The bare bones of the story was secondary to the mood: the garish colors, lush romantic Western musical score, and over all, noir elements abounding to abet the fatalistic aura of doomed romance. Its province was the lighted and shadowed night, populated by forlorn losers, habitues of night clubs, clinging to the women of the night.
Now, we have Mr. Chow, some time later, embittered by loss and his haunted memories of it. He looks like Bogart in his slouching suits and posture, ever present drink and cigarette, his espoused cynicism which he wears like Rick Blaine prowling his Casablanca café before Ilsa returns. But he is much more articulate than Rick ever was. Chow is a writer who has turned his memories into sardonic fiction. 2046 is the hotel room in which his great love resided and it is also the year that Hong Kong reverts to China, and the setting of a sci-fi story into which he interweaves his memories.
Wong (voiced by his character Chow)is too sentimental and too intelligent to really be a noir or Lynch or even Hitchcock clone. He is saddened by the inevitability of lost love, observes clinically that lack of timing is often fatal, understands that once love is lost, it can never be forgotten, recaptured, or repeated. He also knows that the loser is doomed to re-cast his lost love in a constant and futile search for the past.
Wong’s directorial style is to keep his actors off balance as much as his audience. He films without a script, demands multiple takes to strip away technique and bare true emotions. Like Hitchcock he concentrates his attention on the women in his movies, weaving voyeuristic scenes choked with obsession and scenes of cruel rejection.
Because the grip of memory is his theme, his women all have troubled pasts, lost loves, mysterious sad auras, which add to their allure. Gong Li (a great star in such classics as JOU DOU, FAREWELL, MY CONCUBINE and CHINA BOX) plays a gambler that Mr. Chow meets in Singapore. Zhang Ziyi (of CROUCHING TIGER..and HOUSE OF FLYING DAGGERS) is a Hong Kong “hostess.” Both have lost lovers, both attract Chow. One rejects him, he rejects the other. There are other women, the daughter of the hotel proprietor who yearns for her forbidden boyfriend, a “dancer” who is murdered by a jealous lover, and Maggie Cheung re-appears briefly. Chow uses all as fodder for his “fiction,” admits that he feels more comfortable in that world than in reality.
As in MULHOLLAND DRIVE some characters, scenes, repeated references, remain obscure. Perhaps they are like Dylan’s personal lyrics, or strands of abandoned movements. The mood is so intoxicating and images so riveting that you easily excuse any discomfort as just another part of life that lies just beyond your reach. like your lost loves.
David Lynch is the most popular current exponent of non-linear, non-narrative films which rely on the unhinging sense of mood to dominate the viewer’s landscape. Discomfort and confusion are not unwanted, rather, are useful tools to capture the viewer’s emotions. BLUE VELVET and MULHOLLAND DRIVE both benefitted from this magic to keep the viewer dizzy. The effect in both films was to force your focus and enhance tension.
Historically, the director most imitated in this form is Hitchcock, and the movie most responsible, VERTIGO. Hitch was the most intuitive and intelligent commercial filmmaker of his era, a master of making images that forced his audiences into uneasy exploration of their deepest fantasies.
Wong Kar Wai does a similar thing with 2046, even more than his previous movie, IN THE MOOD FOR LOVE, to which it is a kind of sequel. He too is dealing with a man’s obsessive love for a woman. Mr. Chow (Tony Leung), in the first film, was a newspaperman living in a shabby Hong Kong hotel. He was separated from his wife by emotion, distance and work. In his loneliness, he encountered an attractive and also lonely woman, Su Li Zhen (Maggie Cheung). Chow discoverved that his wife and Su Li’s husband were having an affair. They spent most of the film falling in love with each other and barely avoiding consummation. In the end she left.
The bare bones of the story was secondary to the mood: the garish colors, lush romantic Western musical score, and over all, noir elements abounding to abet the fatalistic aura of doomed romance. Its province was the lighted and shadowed night, populated by forlorn losers, habitues of night clubs, clinging to the women of the night.
Now, we have Mr. Chow, some time later, embittered by loss and his haunted memories of it. He looks like Bogart in his slouching suits and posture, ever present drink and cigarette, his espoused cynicism which he wears like Rick Blaine prowling his Casablanca café before Ilsa returns. But he is much more articulate than Rick ever was. Chow is a writer who has turned his memories into sardonic fiction. 2046 is the hotel room in which his great love resided and it is also the year that Hong Kong reverts to China, and the setting of a sci-fi story into which he interweaves his memories.
Wong (voiced by his character Chow)is too sentimental and too intelligent to really be a noir or Lynch or even Hitchcock clone. He is saddened by the inevitability of lost love, observes clinically that lack of timing is often fatal, understands that once love is lost, it can never be forgotten, recaptured, or repeated. He also knows that the loser is doomed to re-cast his lost love in a constant and futile search for the past.
Wong’s directorial style is to keep his actors off balance as much as his audience. He films without a script, demands multiple takes to strip away technique and bare true emotions. Like Hitchcock he concentrates his attention on the women in his movies, weaving voyeuristic scenes choked with obsession and scenes of cruel rejection.
Because the grip of memory is his theme, his women all have troubled pasts, lost loves, mysterious sad auras, which add to their allure. Gong Li (a great star in such classics as JOU DOU, FAREWELL, MY CONCUBINE and CHINA BOX) plays a gambler that Mr. Chow meets in Singapore. Zhang Ziyi (of CROUCHING TIGER..and HOUSE OF FLYING DAGGERS) is a Hong Kong “hostess.” Both have lost lovers, both attract Chow. One rejects him, he rejects the other. There are other women, the daughter of the hotel proprietor who yearns for her forbidden boyfriend, a “dancer” who is murdered by a jealous lover, and Maggie Cheung re-appears briefly. Chow uses all as fodder for his “fiction,” admits that he feels more comfortable in that world than in reality.
As in MULHOLLAND DRIVE some characters, scenes, repeated references, remain obscure. Perhaps they are like Dylan’s personal lyrics, or strands of abandoned movements. The mood is so intoxicating and images so riveting that you easily excuse any discomfort as just another part of life that lies just beyond your reach. like your lost loves.
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