ART? PERFUME COMMERCIAL?

Just saw 2046.

The film is the most succinct compendium of Wong Kar Wei's
themes to date. It covers most of the bases, with many of the same actors.
It seems to be pretty much the same film as In The Mood For Love, just
somewhat less oblique and thematically clearer and from such clarity comes
the big question.... Is this what it's all about?

Because 2046 is beautifully photographed, staged and designed. Wong's eye
for a wallpaper pattern, the gloss of lipstick glinting Faye Wong's
bee-stings laser accurate. His use of Latin American meringue, samba and
tango in an Asian milieu, unexcelled. His ability to record Tony Leung
musing in breathy voiceover, one of a kind. But at what point does it all
stop being art and start becoming high-class perfume commercial? When the
ideas run out, the copy wanes and you start shooting hundreds of rolls of
film of beautiful actresses pretending to be red-wigged robots walking up
and down long corridors voguing to camera. That's when. I waited for a
heavily accented French voice to whisper 'Shanghai, pour L'Homme', the film
to stop and a giant Philippe Starck perfume bottle to dissolve into sight.
Maybe that's a bit harsh, but there's nothing here that Wong hasn't done
before, written before, shot before that's just been given an extra
slathering of self-importance - all the Asian A-List are there: Tony Leung,
Gong Li, Faye Wang, Maggie Cheung, that chick from Flying Daggers - slowed
down and preserved in aspic. There's also the stench over overindulgence on
the production side. Suddenly the credits are freighted with French
associate and executive producers - perhaps they think he's the next Jerry
Lewis - rather than just the HK gangsters who financed his best work. And
for a film that barely features a wide shot, let alone an exterior, the
presence of Macau, Hong Kong and Shanghai crews suggests mountains of
discarded footage.

I'm not a big fan of the new slow style Wong's rediscovered. More stylized
and precious than it ever was in Days of Being Wild or Ashes of Time it only
mires the film in his unshackled fetishistic proclivities... Endless shots
of distressed plaster, lipstick and Tony Leung's spiv moustache. Moreover,
when the camera was going beserk it provided a hard counterpoint to the
mannered prose and imagery of his signature dialogue/monolgue. Now that Wong
has decided his images are 'important' - or important enough to fix on,
really close, for a very long time, whilst people repeat things they've
already said in this film or one or more preceding films, then the dialogue
doesn't seem so lyrical, the ideas not so mysterious. And it's not helped by
the fact that his writing is off it's game this time round: nothing
adventurous, dangerous or charming. In fact it started to come close to a
Zucker Brothers Parody of a Wong Kar Wei film - much like the way Wes
Anderson's Life Aquatic seemed an overfunded parody of his work and themes -
and when that's the case, it's time to change your game, or resuscitate your
ideas from the source.

It is certainly not time to make a film with Nicole Kidman.