a waltz of unhappy romances orchestrated by Wong Kar-wai

Twenty years after its release, 2046 returns to the screens thanks to a 4K (ultra-high definition) restoration which relaunches this baroque object, a large cage of reflections where impressions of the past and visions of the future swirl. Released in 2004, the film marked a limit state in Wong Kar-wai’s cinema, a fascinating stage of aesthetic crystallization, but worrying in its absolutism.

We know in fact the propensity of the Hong Kong filmmaker, a great obsessive, to get lost in his own films, to get bogged down in the twists and turns of endless filming. The movie 2046 came out of the thigh ofIn the Mood for Love (2000), his shots having started at the same time among the same characters, before going through four years of spasms and intermittences. Until coming close to an accident at the Cannes Film Festival, where its screenings were first canceled before the film arrived at the last minute. It was also the filmmaker’s last openly Hong Kong film, at a time when the peninsula was losing its special regime.

While its gestation augured a knotty, labyrinthine film, 2046 revealed itself under a completely different face, more like a collection of short stories with its dotted narrative. After ruining himself in Singapore’s gambling dens, Mr. Chow (Tony Leung at the height of elegance), a journalist in need of freelance work, returns to Hong Kong in 1966, a period of strikes, demonstrations, and soon a curfew. He locks himself up in the Oriental Hotel to write a futuristic novel entitled 2046according to the number of the room opposite.

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