If you're already a convert -- particularly if you've got ''Mood" and 1991's stunning ''Days of Being Wild" under your belt -- there should be nothing holding you back from heading out to the theater right now. ''2046" takes characters, themes, and even lines of dialogue from those two earlier films and stirs them into a new and mind-altering cocktail; it's not a sequel so much as the third side of a prism through which Wong can shine light on a vibrantly fallen world.
Tony Leung Chiu Wai once again plays Chow Mo-wan, the heart-stricken near-adulterous lover of ''Mood" -- except that he seems a completely different man. By 1966, six years after the events of the earlier movie, Chow has morphed into a brilliantined Hong Kong cad, a journalist who beds a succession of beautiful women and whose heart is never dented. Once timid, now brazen, he drops enough references to the lost love of his life for a viewer to sense he has consciously taken up hedonism as a sort of personal numbing agent. As little physical contact as there was in ''In the Mood for Love," that's how much sex there is in ''2046." Even the walls look ripe to the touch.
The women Chow romances and discards make up a who's who of Asian film actresses, coutured within an inch of their lives and passing through different stages of love and regret. Carina Lau reprises her ''Days of Being Wild" role as the hotblooded tootsie named Lulu -- or is it Mimi? -- while Faye Wong, the adorable punkette from the director's ''Chungking Express," plays the daughter of Chow's landlord, an achingly ardent girl in love with a young Japanese businessman (Takuya Kimura). Her father disapproves, and Chow agrees to act as go-between; his passing but earnest crush on the girl might not exist if she weren't gazing so helplessly at another man.
