After the concentrated perfection of "The Hand" -- Wong Kar-wai's fraction of the anthology film, Eros -- the defects of this one are apt to appear the more glaring. Ostensibly it's a sequel to his close-to-perfection In the Mood for Love. Or anyhow the action picks up shortly after it in 1966, and centers around the same protagonist (Tony Leung), although the love-'em-and-leave-'em libertine and spicy science-fiction writer of the current film bears little resemblance to the inhibited piner and Grub Street drudge of its predecessor, even allowing for the ravages of a broken heart. (The title refers both to the time-setting of his s-f tales and to the number of his next-door hotel room.) There is a patchwork feeling here, jammed and jumbled, diffuse and desultory, partly the effect of a fragmented narrative and a heavy dependence on the cement of voice-over, and partly the effect of a visual grab-bag that includes a lot of slow-motion, a bit of black-and-white, and extended re-enactments of the hero's visions of the future, sometimes animated, sometimes live-action, always in an illustrational style that postdates the science fiction of the mid-Sixties. The director's painterly eye ensures, at the same time, a great deal of beauty; and the wide, wide screen affords him more room than ever before for empty space, out-of-focus space, purely compositional and coloristic space. This thing of beauty, though, is rather a scatterbrained beauty, a gorgeous space case. Some hefty ideas, to do with impermanence, loss, memory, alienation, are lugged up and down the arduous stair-step structure: we skip quickly past the characters played by Gong Li, Carina Lau, and Faye Wong, before we spend some quality time with Zhang Ziyi, and begin to work our way back, in reverse order, to Faye Wong (still going forward in chronology) and then (withdrawing into the past) Carina Lau and Gong Li. With small overlaps, the scheme goes more or less A-B-C-D-C-B-A. We can almost perceive that the top step -- the peak of the pyramid -- the Zhang Ziyi piece -- might have attained the independent perfection of "The Hand," if held to similar length. The lower steps are stubbier, and slipperier. And where the Antonioni and Soderbergh fractions dragged down Eros, Wong manages to drag down 2046all by himself. (2005) — Duncan Shepherd