Love and desire: with 2046, Wong Kar-wai completes his masterpiece.(FILM)(Movie Review)

ALONG WITH ANG LEE'S Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, Pedro Almodovar's Talk to Her, and Peter Jackson's Lord of the Rings, an early candidate for greatest film of the new century is Wong Kar-wai's The Borrowed. For those film buffs scratching their heads right now, and for those Wong freaks alarmed that they somehow missed it, relax: There is no movie called The Borrowed. It's a title I made up for Wong's two most recent films, 2000's In the Mood for Love and the new 2046. Premiering at Cannes last year, 2046 is being touted as a "loose" sequel to In the Mood for Love, with only a tenuous connection to the earlier film, probably because sequels to arty obscure foreign films aren't as easy to market as the sixth Star Wars movie. Not by any stretch of the imagination, however, is 2046 only a loose sequel; it's the second half of a three-hour epic that In the Mood for Love begins. In interviews Wong has talked about them as one, with both shot at around the same time. If nothing else, the psychology of 2046's central figure, the womanizing playboy Chow (Tony Leung), is more or less unfathomable if you haven't seen the first film, in which his wife cheats on him and he falls hopelessly in love with the forsaken wife of the man who is stealing his own.

Even if you're a fan and you've seen most of his work, including the best known, 1994's Chungking Express, Wong Kar-wai isn't an easy director to get a handle on. …