Such indirection and ambivalence typify the politics of…

““Such indirection and ambivalence typify the politics of Wong's work. He's not in any conventional sense an ideological filmmaker. "It's never been my intention," he said at the Cannes press conference for 2046, "to make films with any political content whatsoever." A cautious man allergic to grand pronouncements, he doesn't make message movies, much less give political speeches or man the barricades. The rise of China has been the biggest story in the world for the last 20 years--no place has felt this more deeply than Hong Kong--yet Wong's work is notable for its apparent lack of interest in post-revolutionary China, either in its Maoist incarnation or today's hyper-capitalist model launched by Deng Xiaoping, whose death appears in a news report Lai watches in Happy Together. It's not that he doesn't thing about political issues, but he weaves his ideas (and they are intuitions more than ideological stances) into the intricate fabric of his work. This makes him ripe for interpretation, especially by critical admirers who, almost to a one, prefer to think of him as being some sort of social radical whose political ideas bubble beneath the surface of his work.””

— Wong Kar Wai, John Powers