This potentially explosive story of two "drinking buddies" (as Chow insists they are) in danger of tumbling head-over-heels in love would be enough for most films. But Bai Ling is only one of the girls, and one of the plot elements, in "2046," and whether that's a strength or a weakness I'm not entirely sure. Chow's other flings include a mysterious Cambodian gambler known as the Black Spider (played by another Chinese superstar actress, Gong Li) whom he meets in Singapore, and whose real name turns out to be Su Li-zhen, although she's not the same woman as Cheung's character. (As far as the puzzling symbolism in this movie goes, that's just the tip of the iceberg.)

Then there's Wang Jin-weng (Faye Wong), the gawky, androgynous daughter of Chow's landlord. She's the one Chow flips for, although (or because) she's the most conspicuously unavailable; he's helping her pass letters to and from her Japanese boyfriend, to evade her disapproving father. While Chow seems cold and heartless with firecracker Bai Ling, who loves him, he's as paralyzed as a smitten schoolboy with Wang Jin-weng, who barely notices him. You may want to reach into the film and pop some sense into him, but I suppose we're meant to think that after the first Su Li-zhen he's become trapped in a fateful circle of doomed love.

Chow narrates his adventures with the women (a total of six) who drift through "2046" with considerable tenderness and a measure of self-knowledge. But it's almost as if he has no influence over the actions of the shy, cruel and wounded lady-killer he has become since "In the Mood for Love." "Love is always a matter of timing," he tells us -- and we can all identify, I suspect, with the idea of meeting the right person at the wrong time. But Chow and his creator absorb this fatalistic principle as if it were a Buddhist koan, following it from drink to drink and girl to girl into a condition of permanent aesthetic and spiritual paralysis.

Any attempt to summarize this film falls into the traps set by Wong's peculiar narrative technique. He's never been much interested in conventional plot, and "2046" hopscotches backward and forward in time, looping in circles and ellipses between real events and puzzling fragments of Chow's allegorical science-fiction novel. It's pretty much all lovelorn mood and louche atmosphere, and even for Wong's hardcore fans 129 minutes may be a lot of mood and atmosphere.

Does it help to explain that Chow's story (entitled, of course, "2046") is about a Japanese adventurer (pop icon Takuya Kimura) taking a long train ride to (or from) a mysterious future where the past can be recaptured? And that along the way he becomes erotically and/or romantically entangled with a series of beautiful androids who strongly resemble the parade of hotties in Chow's life? Does it help to mention that the year 2046 is when China's promise to maintain Hong Kong's separate political and economic system will expire, or that it was the number of a hotel room from "In the Mood for Love" where Chow stayed?

Not much, I suspect. Those elements are shards in the fractured glass of "2046," but the amount of light they shed on the whole is debatable. What will make the movie irresistible, to those viewers with the patience for it -- or masochistic endurance, if you prefer -- is its prodigious visual sensuality and its emotional commitment. You may feel lost or bewildered at times in "2046" (and I certainly did), and you may feel that Chow is suffering from self-inflicted wounds. But every new adventure with every new girl vibrates with possibility, and the filmmaking is so stunning that you may not care that this is less a movie with a plot and characters than a hermetically sealed universe of romantic regret.

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