Romance with a cynical edge

Few films have been more keenly anticipated in Cannes than Wong Kar-Wei's 2046. More than four years after the Hong Kong director's hugely admired In The Mood For Love, it finally arrived in town last night in the nick of time, 12 hours late and still wet from the lab. It's a leading contender for the Golden Palm, not least because the Jury President, Quentin Tarantino, is a well-known devotee of Wong's work.

2046 is almost a sequel, certainly a companion piece to In The Mood For Love. Tony Leung resumes his character from that film, a journalist in Hong Kong in the late Sixties. Still obsessed with his earlier, unconsummated love for a married woman, he works at a futuristic novel called 2046 which is, he knows, really all about his past.

2046 is also the number of the rented apartment next door occupied by a series of women, with whom he has relationships both platonic and erotic.

Much here is as before: the gorgeous frocks, the period songs, the missed connections and mood of melancholy yearning, the lush, dream-like imagery courtesy of cinematographer Chris Doyle, a world leader in his field.

But the mood - and, in Wong's work, mood is paramount - is somehow different, darker: Leung's romanticism has a cynical edge and the political unrest in Hong Kong in 1966 has changed things forever. The film is about letting go of the past, but it is also steeped in nostalgia for a lost, more innocent world.