City Of Women, Dogs, And Comics
2046
Directed by Wong Kar Wai
Wedding Crashers
Directed by David Dobkin
The Aristocrats
Directed by Paul Provenza and Penn Jillette
If not for the quartet of superb female performances in Hustle and Flow, Wong Kar-Wai's 2046 would feature the year's most exquisite display of female emotion. Instead, it is the most exquisite exquisite display simply because Wong doesn't deal with Hustle and Flow's daily grind-2046 is all sublimnity.
Wong uses actor Tony Leung as his playboy figure, Chow, a Chinese journalist who, with a hint of regret, is musing on his muses. Chow reconsiders his attraction to various women and the way that he treats them-in his past, in the present and in his imagination. 2046 has the pulse of contemplation rather than drama. It shifts time periods and states of reality at will. Wong contrives its "story" from Chow's reflections on his love life. The central relationship with the tenant of a next-door apartment, Miss Bai Ling (Zhang Ziyi), who is either a playgirl or a hooker, is as compelling as the different liaisons he remembers: Carina Lau as Miss Lulu, the original resident of the apartment; Gong Li's Black Spider, a vamp from the past who reappears at a crucial moment; and the landlord's daughter Miss Wang (Faye Wong), to whom Chow becomes a confidant. He then takes her as the subject-a futuristic automaton-of his imaginary novel.
It's all meant to be slightly confusing yet distinct (just as the title, which should be spoken as four separate numerals), because Wong intends it all to blur into abstraction. What's exquisite about 2046 is that both male and female quandaries achieve precise and satisfyingly profound expression. Postmodernist that he is, Wong doesn't merely tell several love stories; the little black book of Chow's libido becomes a classically stylized (1960s-based) way of analyzing the nature of all love affairs. Wong busily refracts Chow's sex history and Man's sex history. (One date sequence highlights actual doubled image refractions on the camera lens so that the vis-à-vis between a dating couple is seen-examined-twice.) 2046 attempts to expand, while deepening, the popular notion of romance. Leung has the strong actorly resources (cute yet cunning facial movements) to hold down the film's narrative center. Sometimes his candor recalls Marcello Mastroianni's in Fellini's very similar City of Women, enabling Wong to emphasize the mercurial excitement of the women's emotional flourishes. As a result, this is also a postfeminist movie because the women's desires and pangs stand equal with Chow's Male Principle. Old-fashioned fidelity is not at issue, but lust and surrender, which combine into a spiritual concern.
Projecting into the future is Chow's (Wong's) method of pondering the morality of romantic behavior; he ultimately seeks a morally satisfying intimacy. (Thus, this movie is far sexier than Michael Winterbottom's grimy, dully explicit 9 Songs.) The opening symbolism of a hole in a tree where Chow whispers his secrets is, of course, vaginal. (A mere biological flip for an artist whose best love story remains the gay-themed Happy Together.) As in Thomas Hardy's The Well-Beloved, Chow seeks the essence of Woman in all women. 2046 is not about being swallowed up, but man advancing into the soul of his Ideal. It's predicated on academic theory about the male gaze, but outside of Ingmar Bergman and Robert Altman's female studies-and Hustle and Flow-I can't think of another movie that so thoroughly challenges such theory. Ziyi, Li, Lau, Wong and a brief appearance by Maggie Cheung achieve a sensuality that is emphatically not inscrutable. 2046's love scenes convey a chivalrous, androgynous empathy. (After sex, Chow gallantly covers a lover's bare behind-a motif from The Conformist.)
On one level, 2046 could be called the greatest date movie of all time. But that would be superficial, reading its alluring surfaces as no more than Chinoiserie. Though Wong and cinematographer Chris Doyle delight in design, that's still half the experience Wong intends. 2046 confirms Wong's fascination with modern Western tropes-it's an esthetic romance. One of several music themes is Bellini's opera Norma and Nat King Cole (a motif carried over from Wong's In the Mood for Love). He enlarges the pop self-consciousness that seemed so novel when his breakthrough film Chung King Express coopted "California Dreaming."
2046 dreams about romance, consciously reviving the aura of Lelouch's 1966 A Man and a Woman-as much a cultural touchstone as the pulp novels Chow cocreates with Miss Wang. Despite some brief newsreel flashes of student protests and Cambodia in the 60s, Wong pays little mind to politics. His futuristic speculations are not utopian, just sheer, wishful, private sentiment-tied to the way other eras evoke and codify the experience of being in love. (In the futuristic fantasia of Chow's novel-also titled 2046-he impersonates a Japanese cybernaut (Takura Kimura) hugging a female android for warmth. This, at last, is the perfect visualization of Roxy Music's porno/sci-fi classic "In Every Dream Home a Heartache," the acme of modern romanticism. Such aching drama becomes youthful spectacle in Zhang Ziyi's scenes, yet it's strongest in Gong Li's seasoned pathos. The kiss between Tony Leung and Gong Li-a half minute long-contains the bruising, lipstick-smeared profundity of both promise and lost hope. And isn't that the mature essence of Romance?
The first half hour of Wedding Crashers makes you expect a comedy classic. Vince Vaughn and Owen Wilson, playing divorce counselors, are also dogs who scheme to bag babes by cruising at the nuptials of complete strangers. It begins with such hilarious aggression (Dwight Yoakam and Rebecca DeMornay as greedy divorcees) that Vaughn and Wilson's antic complete a satirical portrait of neurotic, new-millennial American appetite. They are allured by the catering as much as the available sex.
Director David Dobkin can't make the humor grow; it devolves into a Meet the Parents knock-off. Just shy of vulgar, there remains the spirit of a perfect, mythic joke premise. The Aristocrats is Wedding Crashers' competition. This documentary analysis of the classic, forbidden vaudeville joke that comics tell each other reveals the hidden, depraved idiosyncrasy of American culture. In a good year for docs, this is a favorite. It explores the vulgarity Wedding Crashers just can't, letting a large spectrum of comics expose their libidos and test cultural limits that Vaughn and Wilson in the end hold sacrosanct. Bob Saget, Mario Cantone and Whoopi Goldberg do awesome versions of this Rosetta Stone routine where erotomania, taboo and scatology mix. More discussion about the semantics of using either "Aristocrats" or "Sophisticates" or "Debonairs" as a punchline might have lifted this movie to greatness. Instead, settle for wild, scary, hilarious liberation.
-A.W.