On the specific achievement of Wong Kar-wai's 2046 and what it does with the films that preceded it.

Wong Kar-wai's 2046 is officially a sequel to In the Mood for Love, in that it follows one of that film's characters forward in time. But it is also in dialogue with Chungking Express and Happy Together: it is composed partly from footage shot for those films that was never used.

This recycling of footage is not a practical economy. It's a formal statement. The characters who appear in 2046 are haunted by earlier versions of themselves — literally, since the same actors playing the same characters appear in footage that has the quality of memory rather than present-tense narrative.

The science fiction element — the train to 2046, the androids who may or may not love — is Wong's most unusual formal choice and his most revealing. The world of 2046 is a metaphor for memory: a place you go to where nothing changes. The tragedy of the characters in that world is that they have found somewhere nothing can hurt them and nothing can happen.

2046 is Wong Kar-wai's most melancholy film and his most formally complete, which is appropriate: it is the film where he says goodbye to the universe he built across fifteen years.