A Film Canon

One of Wong Kar-Wai's most enigmatic films, 2046 is the last part of the informal trilogy that includes Days Of Being Wild and In The Mood For Love. It feels less like a continuation of those films, however, than an eccentric, sprawling footnote. Like a collection of out-takes released on the heels of an outstanding album, it's full of spectacular moments that never quite cohere - or feel like they're intended to quite cohere - into a single, unified statement. As a result, it's arguably the film in which long-time collaborator Chris Doyle's cinematography is most anarchic, breaking away from the restraints of narrative and direction to create a vision of how a cinematographic auteurism might appear. In their earlier collaborations, Doyle's genius was to construe space and time as functions of colour, usually through some analogy between cinematographic and musical composition. In 2046, this becomes the motor force of what little narrative exists, as Chow Mo-Wan's (Tony Leung) dissociation from the romance of In The Mood For Love is presented as a jumble of affairs that are both real and imaginary, and alternate between a mythic past and the science-fiction world evoked in the title. It's this retro-futurism, and the way in which it prevents the audience anchoring themselves or Chow's narration in a diegetic present, that allows Doyle to create a visual tone-poem, whose dominant key is the tungsten-green of Chow's apartment complex. This atemporal, aspatial zone is the crowning achievement of Doyle's work with Wong, and seems ultimately less concerned with cinematography than spectrography, as if to aestheticise frequency spectra as the common denominator between light and sound waves, at least at the level of representation. Combined with Wong's thematic and technical fascination with imperceptibly slow and delayed motion, it feels as if the centre of the film lies beyond the viewer's sensorium, in the realm of some android perception that can only be accessed vicariously, though a magical-mechanical surrogate that transcends the camera, and even the unusually loose, sketched CGI visuals.