Quartile rating: 7.5/10 · 1 rating
Women enter and exit a science fiction author's life over the course of a few years after the author loses the woman he considers his one true love.
Wong Kar-wai's languid, melancholic companion piece to In the Mood for Love is a visually ravishing work — Christopher Doyle and Kwan Pun-Leung's cinematography is among the most sumptuous of the decade, and the ensemble (Leung, Zhang Ziyi, Gong Li, Faye Wong) delivers emotionally layered performances. The film's fractured, non-linear structure and blurring of the sci-fi fantasy sequences with Tony Chiu-Wai Leung's womanizing present make it deeply distinctive — a meditation on memory, loss, and the impossibility of recapturing the past. The plot, however, is deliberately elliptical to the point of narrative diffuseness; characters drift in and out with beautiful but sometimes frustrating opacity. The ending is characteristically understated, earning emotional resonance more through atmosphere than resolution, though it lacks the devastating punch of its predecessor.