(Herald rating: * * *)
A sequel of sorts to 2000's achingly sad In The Mood For Love, this film may entrance audiences who thought the earlier picture was not sufficiently rhapsodic, but for the rest of us it will be impressive but frustrating.
In Mood, the story - about
apartment-block neighbours thrown together by the infidelities of their spouses - always managed to be visible through the film's visual and metaphysical flourishes.
In 2046, the kind of film that Kubrick might have made if he'd been adapting Proust, substance never stands a chance under the sustained assault of style. Cinematographer Christopher Doyle - now with collaborators Kwan Pun-leung and Lai Yiu-fai - give their imagination free rein and it's hard to see anything in the film beyond the febrile and fantastic look of it.
Chow, the handsome journalist of Mood, is now down on his luck in 1960s Hong Kong, a pulp-fiction hack living in a rundown hotel and recovering from an affair-gone-bad in Singapore with a gambler (Gong Li) whose name happens to be the same as Chow's lover in the last picture.
Confused? We haven't started yet.
For reasons that seem more self-fulfilling than logical, Chow becomes fixated on Room 2046 and uses it as the title of a sci-fi novel he's writing in which the characters take a train to the year of the same number where "everyone has the same intention, to recapture their lost memories".
Some argue that this movie, which was four years in the making and had some scenes shot only days before it screened at Cannes, is the work of the most romantic film-maker in history. At the same time, the style has the formal rigour of Greenaway or Godard.
In the end, though, it is almost utterly unmoving. For a film that is supposed to be a love story, that's not enough.
CAST: Faye Wong, Gong Li, Maggie Cheung, Tony Leung Chiu Wai, Zhang Ziyi
DIRECTOR: Wong Kar Wai
RUNNING TIME: 123 minutes
RATING: M, contains sex scenes
SCREENING: Academy, opens Thursday