Ray Pride

Wong Kar-Wai's high swoon of style suffocates some viewers; his trial-and-error manner of shooting bankrupts financiers with each new production. He tells the same story again and again: a man, usually Tony Leung, longs for the image he holds in his head of a woman, often Maggie Cheung. He lavishes himself with loss. Few filmmakers are so predisposed to glamour and beauty, and Wong's work with master cinematographer Chris Doyle and production-designer-costumer-editor William Chang is suited to Oscar Wilde's apothegm that "Beauty is a form of genius, is higher, indeed, than genius, as it needs no explanation." Wong himself could not explain the layers to "2046," and why should he? He's made cinema, now lean back. Leung's writer, lost in his fantasies in a dump of a hotel called the Oriental, who has the same name (Chow Mo-Wan) as Leung's beaten-down romantic of "In the Mood for Love," whose melancholy features are freshly creased with a comic caterpillar of a mustache but otherwise holds the same heartfelt, wretched wonder at the world of woman, of light and smoke, of peeling wallpaper and skin-tight cheongsams, of rain and tango and quiet, desperate want. Crepuscular decrepitude has never seemed so fresh. The science-fiction interludes in the writer's pulp narratives are sleek and narcotic, and attempting to interpret them is a waste of a perfectly good glimpse of non-narrative heaven. It's not the perfectly tooled slice of despair that is "In the Mood for Love," but the restless coiling of time and memory is singular and masterful. "Love is all a matter of timing," Chow broods, "It's no good meeting the right person too soon or too late. The voluptuous "2046" is right now. With Zhang Ziyi, Faye Wong. 129m.

"2046" opens Friday at the Music Box.

(2005-08-30)

Also by Ray Pride

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Michael Winterbottom's "9 Songs" sketches the physical relationship of a mismatched London couple, a grizzled, fortyish "glaciologist" named Matt and 21-year-old Lisa, a skinny barmaid on antidepressants, through nine concerts at London's Brixton Academy, which alternate with the explicit details of their sexual acts
(2005-08-23)

Begin the penguine
For whatever mysterious reasons, the alchemical miracle so far in 2005 has been the American version of "The March of the Penguins."
(2005-08-23)

Tip of the Week
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All that useless beauty
The business pages of the metropolitan dailies love the cascading success of the "March of the Penguins" as it passes "Bowling for Columbine" to be the second-highest-grossing documentary of all time, behind "Fahrenheit 9/11." Cute, easily anthropomorphized yet still mute and mysterious, these sleek Emperors are a template for whatever the imaginations of children, adults and reporters might need them for
(2005-08-16)

Tip of the Week
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Down to the bone
(2005-08-09)

Tip of the Week
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The Raconteur
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Bye-bye Bucktown
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Tip of the Week
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Basket ball
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Bay's Day
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