Click here to listen to Tony Leung Interview for 2046 (Cantonese)

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Set mostly in the 1960s, 2046 - comprises three intersecting stories. The linchpin is Chow, played by Tony Leung, who is reprising his character from In the Mood for Love. In the earlier film, set in Hong Kong in 1962, Chow, who takes a stab at writing martial arts novels, presumably never consummates a mutually sublimated affair with Maggie Cheung's Su Li Zhen, although they know that their spouses are seeing each other. Frustrated, he leaves for Singapore.

In 2046, Chow has returned to Hong Kong, but this soft-spoken man has become a hedonistic, mustachioed sleaze ball. He has numerous one-night stands and earns extra money hosting dinners for low-lives and letting out his room to their women. Still a writer, Chow is in the midst of penning a science-fiction novel set in the year 2046 - hence the title - on a train where people go to recapture their lost memories, but never return.

As the film unravels in non-linear fashion, we realize that he is trying to forget another Su Li Zhen (Gong Li), a gloved, one-handed gambler with whom he had been involved in Singapore. She is the film's past. In a seedy Hong Kong hotel where room 2046 is loaded with meaning (it had been the rented room where Wong wrote in In the Mood for Love), several women represent the present, mainly Bai Ling (Zhang Ziyi), a ballroom dancer/prostitute who stops turning tricks out of love for him, but also Wang Jing Wen (Faye Wong), the owner's "decent" daughter who is in love with a Japanese man.

The future, a visualization of Chow's novel, features Faye Wong again, this time as an android, with Wang Jing Wen's Japanese lover (Kimura Takuya) as Chow's alter ego. Wong, with help from composer Peer Raben, attaches a type of music to each of the women: blues for Gong Li, 1960s dance music for Zhang Ziyi, and classical for the Faye Wong of the future.