Skeptical viewers may suspect, with some reason,
that Wong Kar Wai has been making the same movie for a number of
years now – their subjects include displacement across time
and space, romantic yearning, color and light, loneliness and
reverie. When he changes up the formula, let’s say by making his
lovers two men (Happy Together) or by goosing the ennui with lavish
science-fiction inserts (2046), it only seems to intensify the
familiar feelings of gentle anxiety and punch-drunk desire. “We love what we
can’t have, and we can’t have what we love,” Wong once told an
interviewer, and over and over his films seem to find new approaches
to that same disconnect, traveling roads that wind through familiar
surroundings but offer a slightly different view of the landscape.
