In the mood for loss Wong Kar-wai goes back to the future BY PETER KEOUGH
	2046 Written and directed by Wong Kar-wai | With Tony Leung Chiu-wai + Gong Li + Ziyi Zhang + Kimura Takuya + Faye Wong + Carina Lau Ka Ling + Chang Chen | A Sony Pictures Classic release | Cantonese + Mandarin + Japanese | 129 minutes | Jane Pickens

When last we saw Chow Mo-wan (Tony Leung Chiu-wai), the somber scribbler in the ’60s Hong Kong of Wong Kar-wai’s In the Mood for Love, he was whispering his secret into a hole in the stonework of Angkor Wat. What was it? I presume the name of his beloved, the married woman whose husband was having an affair with Mo-wan’s wife, and with whom he was playing out a chaste charade of their mutual betrayal.

In this sequel of sorts, Mo-wan is back, much transformed, having given up the Don Quixote of illusory ideals for the Don Juan of immediate gratification. Losing the love of one’s life will do that. His is a hellish promiscuity, desperate not so much for love as for loss. The director, however, has not changed much: like Mood, like his 1991 film Days of Being Wild, which was set in the same time and place and involved the same intractable questions, this is a film of surfaces, atmosphere, and fluid but delimiting time.

2046 brings Wong full circle: having taken up the hedonism of the self-destructive antihero of Days, the aging Mo-wan discovers that neither self-denial nor self-indulgence makes a dent in the prison of time, space, and desire. The best one can hope for is to sublimate loss into a ravishing work of art, like Mood, or to a lesser extent, Wong’s denser, more ambitious, but less poignantly focused 2046.

Or into a pulp science-fiction novel. Even a broken-hearted lothario needs to make ends meet, so Mo-wan serializes a story set in 2046, the year of Hong Kong’s final reintegration into the mainland. It’s more a place than a time, attainable by the futuristic bullet trains Wong renders in Matrix-like CGI. People go there, as Mo-wan intones, "to capture lost memories. Because in 2046, nothing ever changes. But nobody knows if that’s true or not. Because no one has ever come back."

Maybe that’s because 2046 is also a hotel room, the place where Mo-wan and his lost love enacted their non-affair in Mood. Mo-wan moves into the room next door and keeps tabs on the changing tenants. There’s Wang Jing Wen (Faye Wong), daughter of the hotel owner, whom he falls for, probably because she’s in love with a Japanese man her father refuses to let her marry. There’s the prostitute Bai Ling (Ziyi Zhang), with whom Chow engages in the tradition of eating at a restaurant at Yuletide while listening to Nat King Cole’s "The Christmas Song." Their rendezvous are jokingly but strictly monetary, until they’re not.

The room, though, is subject to memories as well, and so the film wanders off to other encounters that are variations on the same futility. Su Li-zhen (Gong Li), the "Black Spider" with the same name as Mo-wan’s unrequited love in Mood, is a gambler who bails out Mo-wan when his luck runs out in Singapore. Love kindles . . . and is lost again.

But not really. Mo-wan writes these characters into his novel, making them android attendants on the bullet train to the future. He reproduces his doomed loves in a Kubrickian setting with ersatz women who are a cross between sex dolls and noh actors. Meanwhile, Wong interweaves episodes from past and future, using titles varying from the specific ("24 December 1967") to the absurd ("1 hour later"; "10 hours later"; "1000 hours later"). More cogent are the musical links, from pop songs alluding to previous films (Nat King Cole’s "Quizas, Quizas, Quizas," from Mood) to plaintive strains from Bellini and Wagner operas. Throughout, Mo-wan repeats the act of whispering a secret into a hole and sealing it up, a mantra useful in picking up women. What’s the secret of 2046? Perhaps that it’s not the love that’s lost but the moment, and that the loser is condemned to relive it forever.