2046 UPDATE
A.O. Scott of the New York Times is one of the first critics to weigh in on Wong Kar-wai’s 2046, which finally arrived in Cannes, albeit a bit later than expected.
Writing in his “Critic’s Notebook” column, Scott says the film is “full of lush, melancholy sensuality and swathed in light as lustrous and supple as the Shantung dresses all of the actresses seem to wear. The title, by the way, refers both to a hotel room in Hong Kong in the late 1960′s and a high-speed train racing through the future, and one of the film’s themes (aptly enough, given the drama surrounding its arrival) is time. The characters are always falling in and out of love too soon or too late, and the chronology glides forward and backward.
“Like other work from this director, 2046 teases the boundary of incomprehensibility. It is a series of moods, nuances and gorgeous moments — seductions, couplings, tearful partings — with the usual connective tissue left out, or implied in title cards or voice-overs. After the two screenings in the early evening, quite a few viewers rushed back to see it again Thursday night, to experience its intoxicating beauty one more time, and also to figure out what on earth it was about.”
“In watching the film,” writes Peter Bradshaw in The Guardian, “we are marooned in a virtual ‘present’ time of exquisite unhappiness. It is an absorbingly mysterious, richly sensuous film.”
