E-Mail This Article to a Friend Hot dates Wong on 2046; Bertolucci on The Conformist BY GERALD PEARY

Those watching Wong Kar-wai’s 2046 may be confused. Is this moustached, womanizing, pulp-writing Chow Mo-wan the same clean-faced, platonic, non-literary Chow Mo-wan we saw in Wong’s 2000 film In the Mood for Love? Both Mo-wans are enacted by the wonderful Tony Leung. "The characters should be totally different," Wong insisted at a press conference following 2046’s world premiere at Cannes 2004. Then he contradicted himself. "But as I tried to change things, they kept reminding me of before. Like my characters, the more you try to forget, the more you remember. So you should just live with it. That’s the message of the film."

"We started with Bukowski and ended with Clark Gable," Wong joked, describing his reconfigured hero. "I get all these questions about the moustache. But you see, that’s not my problem."

Does the new Mo-wan err by rebuffing a woman who truly loves him? "He’s not making just one mistake," Wong replied. "He makes lots of mistakes. He rejects a woman, but he’s rejected by a woman. There are so many chances we miss in life, and all we have left are the memories."

Wong is notorious for altering his movies as he shoots, frustrating his performers, and tinkering with the editing until the last possible moment. Nobody was surprised that 2046 arrived at Cannes several days late, necessitating an end-of-the-festival Competition screening. "This film is very complicated," the director explained. "We had to use three different companies — France, Hong Kong, China — and we had to reshoot images to match backgrounds. We also had problems at the finish with special effects. We should say that this version is complete, the final editing, and we put an end to the project. We had to give up some things. I’m very glad there’ll be a DVD, so someday we’ll get all the performances.

"The joke was, ‘When will the film be finished?’ ‘In 2046.’ That joke is over. I’m so glad."

Alberto Moravia’s novel Il conformista ("The Conformist") came out in Italy in 1951, after the war, and it’s an unforgiving attack on his country’s embrace of fascism. You’d have to search hard to find a creepier protagonist than Moravia’s Marcello, who as a boy murders a potential pederast in cold blood (or thinks he did) and then as a gloomy adult works for Mussolini’s secret police, helping to get his partisan former professor and the professor’s wife assassinated by a fascist hit squad.

You won’t see Marcello in the street stomping recalcitrants with his boots — his fascism takes the form of bourgeois fitting in, of being as "normal" as possible, with a wife and child. Moravia was repelled by his protagonist; on the last page, in the novel’s most contrived moment, he has Marcello killed off by Allied planes. In making his 1970 film version, which is getting a week at the Brattle in a new 35mm print, Bernardo Bertolucci has explained how he switched Moravia’s tale of "fate" — there’s no deus ex machina airplane — to a Freudian film of the unconscious.

Whose unconscious? At the time, the future director of The Last Tango in Paris was into psychoanalysis, and he discovered, he says in interviews, that he was more aggressive than he thought. Aggressive against whom? His kindly dad, who like the murder victim in the story was an anti-fascist professor during the war. Il conformista is a death-of-the-father movie, with rightist Marcello (Jean-Louis Trintignant) acting out the Oedipal wishes of leftist Bernardo. It’s also one of the most sumptuously shot works in cinema, thanks to DP Vittorio Storaro. And Dominique Sanda as the professor’s bisexual wife (check out her tango with Stefania Sandrelli) delivers one of the most torrid performances in movies — Casablanca’s Ilsa as toughened up by Marlene Dietrich.