The Banquet
Postcard From Cannes - LA Weekly, May 2004
by John Powers
After Fahrenheit 9/11, the hottest ticket was Wong Kar-Wai’s 2046. The canny British critic Derek Malcolm, who annually runs a book on the results, had initially made it the favorite for the Palme d’Or. All that changed when 2046 wasn’t ready for its first scheduled showing. Suddenly, the sacred Cannes programme had to be rearranged. Scandale! “Stanley Kubrick had his film ready for Cannes,” one Cannes insider told me. “Erich von Stroheim did not ask for more time. Does Wong Kar-Wai think he is greater than Kubrick and von Stroheim?” I doubt it. But he sure pissed people off.It’s too bad, for 2046 is one of the most beautiful and entertaining works of Wong’s career, a dreamy, nostalgic sequel to In the Mood for Love. Now wearing a Clark Gable mustache, Tony Leung again plays Chow, whose unrequited love for Maggie Cheung in the last film has turned him into a cad, a ladykiller torn between his yearning to recapture the love he’s lost and a romantic sadism that’s all the more insidious because he smiles so sweetly. My favorite scenes at this year’s festival came in Leung’s erotic byplay — first delightful, then cruel — with the beautiful young Zhang Ziyi of Crouching Tiger fame, who startled everyone with her passionate, heartbreaking performance. Although some critics accuse Wong’s movies of looking like fashion ads, this misses the point. His great brilliance is to create the slickest, most beautiful surfaces — gorgeous sets, exquisite photography, ravishing actors — and make this seemingly perfect world ache with all the painful melancholy its beauty contains but can’t properly express. For all his Western-seeming stylishness, Wong is profoundly Chinese.
While Zhang Ziyi was the film’s great revelation, 2046 also provided the sheer pleasure of watching Tony Leung, who moves with perfect grace, uses the camera to capture the most delicate effects and (take note, Sean Penn) understands that the most powerful gestures are often the quietest: He turns Chow’s tiniest smile into a lethal weapon. Not only does Leung have the chameleon genius of a great character actor — you should race online to get a DVD of his dazzling work in Infernal Affairs — he’s one of the world’s greatest movie stars, with all the casual glamour that implies.
It named Maggie Cheung Best Actress for Clean, though she wasn’t nearly as good as Zhang Ziyi,