Wong Kar-Wai is getting ready to shoot a new film early next year, and, up to now, there’s been no information about the plot that Wong will largely cut out of the finished movie, as is his wont. Which major characters will be completely removed? What ending will be replaced with a completely different sequence filmed just weeks before the premiere? Which costly scenes will be shot, only to be deleted at the last moment?
At last, some details have emerged about the story that, let’s face it, is probably not going to be in the movie. The Playlist is reporting that it will be an adaptation of a short story from Jiajia Zhang’s collection, I Belonged To You, and that Zhang is co-writing the screenplay, which Wong probably won’t use.
The short story, “Ferryman,” is about an affair between an artist and a young woman in Changchun, a city in the far northeast of China. Considering that In The Mood For Love began as a mainland comedy called Summer In Beijing, Chungking Express was more or less made up as production went along, and 2046 was first about a hitman in Bangkok and then about a policeman in the future, the only thing that can be said with any certainty is that this movie will go through innumerable delays, before premiering at a major festival several years from now.