Digital dream

REVIEWED: 2046

When the lovers - or nearly lovers - part at the end of Brief Encounter, Les Parapluies de Cherbourg, Lost in Translation and Wong Kar-Wai's In the Mood for Love, to which this singular film is a sort of sequel, we take it on trust that they will each be forced to settle for half a life at best. Wong's greatest achievement here is to turn the disappointment and decline the earlier film promised into something incongruously exhilarating. The film may meander, but, featuring luscious photography by Christopher Doyle and two others, it is never less than intoxicating.

2046 follows Tony Leung's Chow, a journalist with ambitions to write popular fiction, as he returns to Hong Kong from Singapore still devastated by the romance he never quite had with his married neighbour Su Li Zhen (Maggie Cheung, glimpsed only briefly here). When Chow spies the digits 2046 on a hotel room door he remembers a liaison he once had with Su Li Zhen in a similarly numbered room and attempts to move in. Sadly, the landlord can only offer him the room next door. Chow agrees and, much changed from the man we met in the earlier film, begins a series of unsatisfactory affairs with various bewitching women.

While tarrying with Zhang Ziyi's flighty good-time girl, Faye Wong's quiet enigma, and a glamorous gambler played by Gong Li, Chow conceives a science fiction story set on a train journey back from a place called 2046. In the story, Chow's younger alter-ego finds himself falling for an android (Faye Wong again).

Inevitably, given the wild scenario, 2046 suffers from occasional outbreaks of pretentiousness and long periods of virtual incoherence. But, combining beautiful recreations of 1960s lounge style and cool futuristic interiors, the picture, like others by this director, has a knack of connecting directly with those bits of the brain we normally use for dreaming.