2046
Director : Wong Kar Wai
Hong Kong, 2004
"Green, how I want you green.
Under the gypsy moon,
all things are watching her
and she cannot see them"
So says Lorca in his 'Romance Sonambulo', and the words keep resounding through my mind, through the subtle green filters that we revisit and revisit, through the green of absinthe eyes; green, how I want you green.
A Hong Kong girl has fallen in love with a Japanese man, whose business posting is ending. The relationship is forbidden by her father, and so she brings it to an end. At the moment of his departure, unsure how she really feels, he asks her to leave with him. She does not answer, gives no indication. He leaves abruptly. Now she wanders the empty rooms revisiting the scene, telling him she will leave. Rehearsing and rehearsing for a scene that is already past. You know the feeling. We've all wanted to go back, to a time before, and live in our own created stories where nothing is changed.
In the year 2046 a vast rail network spans the globe
A mysterious train leaves for 2046 every once in a while
Every passenger going to 2046 has the same intention
They want to recapture lost memories
Because nothing ever changes in 2046
Nobody really knows if that's true
Because nobody's ever come back
Except me
2046 has close links with one of Wong Kar Wai's previous works, 'In The Mood For Love', but it is not necessary to see it to appreciate 2046. They share a character, Chow, and 'In The Mood For Love' gives his past. He was a neighbour to Su Li-Zhen, and in time they discover their spouses have been cheating with each other. The pair form a platonic relationship writing a martial arts serial together, but eventually develop feelings. Chow asks Su to leave him with for Singapore. He waits, she does not appear, so he leaves. She arrives, too late.
Chopped up throughout 2046 in multiple story arcs, we find that in Singapore Chow met another woman called Su Li-Zhen and fell in love. When he asks about her past, she says she will reveal all if she can beat him at high-low. But he can't, she has the game rigged. Later, he asks her to leave with him and is presented with the same game, and the same outcome. He notes "she found an indirect way of rejecting me".
What is 2046? It is a room number, to begin with. The room number where he wrote the martial arts stories with the original Su, and the apartment he tries to rent in Hong Kong only to be told it is being refurbished (in reality, someone has been stabbed in it). He instead rents next door, 2047, allowing him to watch the comings and goings of the inhabitants of 2046. Intrigued by the co-incidence, he begins to write a newspaper serial of an erotic science fiction story set in 2046, based on people and experiences he has known.
Many of us escape the mundanity of our lives in the fantastical. Kafka worked in an insurance office for his entire life, escaping home to the dark midnight world of his story imagination as a way of putting together and making sense of the strange alien feelings of an indifferent world. 2046 is a story for all of us, for anyone who ever loved and lost and thought for even a second about maybe going back.
2046 is not the science fiction part of the story however. As he becomes a facilitator for the Hong Kong woman, whose name is Wang Jing Wen, receiving letters from the departed Japanese boyfriend at his address to avoid her father intercepting them, the two form the same platonic friendship experienced by Chow with the first Su Li-Zhen. They even begin writing a martial arts serial together. 2046 is the idea of revisiting something past in an attempt to regain the feeling, and Chow is doing that here, just as he did with the second Su Li-Zhen, forever seeking to return to that feeling. The message of the film, voiced briefly, is that it is possible to meet the right person at the wrong time. Wang Jing Wen is revisiting the boyfriend who left, rekindling the relationship. In fact there is barely an event, gesture or word spoken which is not echoed somewhere else in the film, and even this film is echoed in other Wong Kar Wai films. The circle grows and grows. 'In The Mood For Love' featured Chow telling his secret to a hole in a tree then stopping it up to seal it in, so that it would ever be known. This theme is revisited at the beginning of 2046, and several times more, only here the hole has grown huge.
In reliving his platonic romance, Chow begins to fall in love with Wang Jing Wen. He begins a new story, 2047. The number is significant, one removed from 2046. 2046 is where you go to revisit, in 2047 Chow is returning from 2046, the only person ever to do so. He has realised that going back is not the answer. On the return journey, we see Chow (who in this story is a Japanese man) wrapping up his arm like someone going through a drug withdrawal. We are told the journey from 2046 is a very long and difficult one; it is the process of moving on and giving up the past.
When Chow begins to write 2047, the character is a combination of himself and Wang Jing Wen's Japanese boyfriend. He casts her as a malfunctioning android with delayed emotions, someone whose responses are to an event already gone. He has seen her this way from his room 2047, conversing with the empty room of 2046. But he comes to realise that the character is as much himself as the Japanese man, that he has been seeking 2046 and is doing so again with his emotions for Wang Jing Wen. He repeatedly asks her to leave with him, receiving a non-response not unlike that received (from his perspective) from the two Su Zu-Shen's. Putting it down to her delayed responses, he keeps repeating the request, but gradually comes to realise it is not malfunction that causes her non-response, she is in love with someone else, just as Wang Jing Wen is. Was Su 1 in love with someone else? Probably not, we know the ending of 'In The Mood For Love' that Chow didn't see. Was Su 2? Perhaps.
While the stories of the two Su's, Chow and Wang Jin Wen travel along and intersect like a busy rail junction, wrapped in and around them is a separate story of Bai Ling. Chow treats Bai poorly, showing us an unromantic, cold, unattractive side of his personality we have not seen before. Since his return from Singapore he has become a serial womaniser, never wanting to become attached. He observes Bai when she moves into 2046, and she has to bear witness to his nocturnal hammerings in the adjacent bedroom. His first proper meeting with her has a tone of disrespect; Chow's friend (who is married and expecting a child) takes a liking to Bai, and Chow (who is constantly in need of money throughout the film) says he will set him up with her for a fee. The fee is taken and he fobs his friend off with excuses over the telephone until the friend gets fed up waiting and goes direct to her door. Chow arrives to find his friend protesting that he paid Chow good money to set up this meeting. Chow tries to explain and says he was playing a trick on his friend. He tries to give Bai a gift to apologise. She refuses; she is also strong and independent and we sense she is used to playing off lovers herself. The money is immediately significant; she does not mention it as an outrage to honour, and there are hints that she is, has been, or sometimes fulfills the role of a high-class prostitute. Chow persists, and eventually overcomes her resistance to hand her the gift. The balance of power has been established with him.
He says they should be drinking buddies, but soon end up in bed together. For Chow this is just another encounter, but it means something more for Bai. He tries to give her money, she immediately recognises this as a symbol, a means of maintaining emotional distance. Trying to hide her own emotions, she says she will take only $10, a discount rate, and she will charge him the same every time he wants to come back. He visits often.
He returns from a break to find her in his room. She says she hasn't brought home other men since they first got together, she wants him to offer the same commitment. He flatly and coldly refuses. She says they are through and leaves.
When we meet her again, she is clearly not doing so well. She drinks too much, she is in a small apartment. She confesses she has been seeing an old man for money. She is leaving for Singapore, she wants Chow to leave with her; a reversal of his familiar role from the three other relationships. He turns her down with the same cool lack of emotion. We may think he is being unkind, but his direct answer is something he has not received from his similar situations. Bai will never have to wander through life wondering what it all meant, he has saved her from the anguish he suffers himself.
Our setting for much of the film is 1960s Hong Kong, and there are occasional brief interludes of contemporary political events that don't quite seem to fit. Why? An answer lies again in 2046. The British handover of Hong Kong to China in 1997 guarantees 50 years of special self-regulated status for Hong Kong. 2046 will be the final year, in 2047 Hong Kong reverts to full Chinese control. The 1960s setting is a throwback to the childhood of director Wong Kar Wai (born in China in 1958 and moving to Hong Kong in 1963); overall the tone of nostalgic revisitation and the desire to remain in a fixed past are his, perhaps for Hong Kong itself.
Nothing in '2046' is particularly resolved, we have the same unfinished, uncertain tangled tales as we have in life itself, and even then they are chopped up and presented non-consecutively; stories even run into other films without being direct sequels or prequels. For this refusal to play the linear neat-and-tidy Hollywood game, Wong Kar Wai has occasionally found unfriendly critics in America, but has been well received in Europe as part of the art film tradition. 2046 can proudly sit as an equal among any company. American critics are caught in their own 2046 - looking for the same old thing back over again, a timeless world where no-one need be troubled by change and unanswered questions. '2046' is itself an unanswered question, and far better for it.