2046

It took almost as long as the year itself, but 2046 has finally reached these shores. This, if you recall, is the companion piece slash sequel to In the Mood for Love that's been five years in the making. The film that arrived late at Cannes and was withdrawn at the eleventh hour from the EIFF after writer-director Wong Kar-wai decided it wasn't quite there yet.

So, was it worth the wait? Can it live up to expectation?

Inevitably not quite. The problem is that it's an intended masterpiece, a touch too self-conscious and self-indulgent for its own good.

The performances as a whole can't be faulted, even if one might cynically suggest that Maggie Cheung does more with her wordless 15-second cameo than flavour-of-the-month Zhang Yiyi can with her 30-plus minutes.

Nor can the set ups, camera movements and cuts which, combined with the narrative elisions and ellipses – the unsaid and the absent as important as what is there and is said – provide a textbook example of how to make and convey meaning in purely cinematic terms.

The fatal flaw is that sometimes this meaning seems external rather than internal, more Wong Kar-wai's remembrance of films past than protagonist Tony Leung's remembrance of things – or more specifically – relationships past.

Mostly these concerns dovetail, as when Tony Leung's difficulties writing a wuxia story recall and parallel the troubled production history of Ashes of Time, where the director found himself in the middle of the desert with an all-star cast and inspiration not coming; or the repeated shots of an alleyway streetlight flickering in the rain; or the game Leung and Gong Li's Goddess of Gamblers – who shares her name, Su Li Zhen, with Leung's lost love – repeatedly play and which finds equivalences in the Greenaway-style numerological games of the title itself.

But the science fiction aspects of Leung's titular story – a Tarkovskyan interzone where past, present, future, real, imaginary and symbolic merge – come across as less his visions than those of the director, being rendered through CGI and more reminiscent of Blade Runner, Akira or The Fifth Element 1990s postmodernity than the in-camera techniques of, say, Last Year at Marienbad, Alphaville or Solaris 1960s modernity.

Still, even if 2046 fails to reach the intended heights, Wong Kar-wai has set the bar so high that his film's failure must be translated as a success by any other name.