There is a scene in 2046 where Tony Leung, reprising his role from In the Mood For Love_, sits in bed as he attempts to write a martial arts novel with Faye Wong’s character. Accustomed to only writing pulp romances, his character has no idea how to tackle the genre, and does so through the sensibilities of another love-lorn romantic. This scene seems to sum up Wong Kar Wai as an artist, as he is a filmmaker who has tackled two of Hong Kong’s biggest genres, the crime movie (_Chungking Express and Fallen Angels_) and the wuxia epic (_Ashes of Time), and has done so as filtered through his romance-tinted sunglasses. 2046 is a film that is possibly revealing in regards to Wong’s process as an artist and how he approaches material.

2046 is about a writer who hides his own past pain by pretending to be a casual lover, though doing so is not his nature. He lives in an apartment building where a former lover was murdered by a jealous boyfriend, “2046” being the number of the apartment she lived in, as well as the apartment belonging to his lost love from IN THE MOOD FOR LOVE. The writer lives next door, in 2047. To him, it represents a place where memories dwell, so he writes an erotic science fiction story about it, where a futuristic dystopian megalopolis is connected by a series of trains, and the characters go to “2046”, a place where things never change and memories stay the same, so there is no loss or sadness, yet the character in his story is the only person who has chosen to return from there. The various women who move in and out of his neighboring apartment inform the story and his state of mind, as they reflect his memories of the past.

Even though 2046 is a film that features characters from Wong’s previous films, it’s a film that stands well by itself, as his films are more about the mood they evoke than the story itself. Most of Wong’s dialogue is incidental, the characters instead reveal themselves in mirrors and reflections in a manner that recalls Ingmar Bergman’s best work, though the protagonists always build from a voiceover foundation, a tool Wong uses well. 2046 again had Wong visiting another genre through his glasses, that genre being science fiction, however the story within a story is what separates 2046 from Wong’s other films, the tale of the lovesick writer infusing genre with romanticism may make 2046 the key to Wong’s cinema.