© 2010 by James Clark
Whereas, for all but curmudgeons, the vicissitudes of the lovers, showing from out of In the Mood for Love, elicit a direct and memorable response, the second phase of reversals for one of those lovers, in Wong Kar-Wai’s 2046 (2004), proves much harder to warm up to. Though the visual and aural design of the latter film is very similar to that of the former, and though even much of the two narratives is shared, we are made to engage 2046 with energies never brought to bear by the closely revealed twisting of Mrs. Chan and Mr. Chow.
Apparently the film released later was in the works earlier, but the writer-director could not fix upon a structure to deliver its goods (those goods themselves mountainously difficult to bring to sufficient resolution). The two films, then, are aspects of one cinematic package, In the Mood for Love being a more readily presentable introduction. It was one thing to launch a spare duet (a “chamber-music” work) redolent of a devastating crisis, whereby attractive soloists could form an ensemble action of limited and immediately assimilated powers. But the writer had come to be haunted by the full ramifications of those casualties, lightly touched upon by impingements there of the world at large. In awkwardly (understandably so) proceeding toward that arena, Wong Kar Wai—hitherto never a conventional practitioner—began to exasperate his production coterie and the film world at large, losing, along the (very long) way his longstanding genius cinematographer, Christopher Doyle, who subsequently went on record as opining that the chief had expended all his ammo in producing that singularly profitable hit, and could not move on to other forms of entertainment. So laconic and elusive were his working methods, even a close partner in making unique sparks fly hadn’t a clue about what he was driving at! And that impasse speaks to not only the content of 2046, but the wider sphere of attempting serious innovation by means of consequently big-money-losing ventures, like those of Demy and Lynch, which eventually result in careers, if not terminated, massively complicated and compromised.
Just as Demy and Lynch made sure they could be mistaken for entertainment technicians, by serving up widely (enough) exciting expressive factors germane to their ulterior motives, Wong Kar-Wai, largely by reason of the efforts of design virtuosos like Doyle and art director and editor, William Chang, and his own hearty devotion to pop music, could seem to be simply in league with MTV. Ratchet up the sexiness, the hit tunes and the violence (in Lynch, physical violence as well as emotional violence) to quite overwhelming levels, and the factors of dramatic content can seem (if seen at all) to be dispensable. But it is the full-throttle drama that accounts for the gale-force styling, and that feature is especially difficult to bring to an effective salience in 2046.
The most direct signal emanating from that process of intent (that climax) wafts out from the elder daughter of the owner of Chow’s claustrophobic Hong Kong hotel to which he has returned in 1966, besieged by her father for having broached a love affair with a personable young Japanese man (reminding us of Mr. Chow and his torment in Movie A), and forced to see him return home without her. In the flow of a budding friendship with the guest, she expresses concern for his safety as an exponent of porn novels: “Don’t you worry about your reputation?” She would be acutely alerted to coercive dangers in view of her father’s priority of being seen to be in line with a society-confirmed hatred of Japanese, dating from WWII. But, in his second shot at the crown colony, Chow (whose day job involves doing stories for a scandal rag) has made sure of flying well under the radar of the social probity that picked off him and his likewise “too polite” beloved first time round. He gently closes that little misunderstanding (doing that little half-smile, provisioning his near-misses throughout) with, “Maybe I’m not such a nice guy,” a hard claim to sell, in view of his large, quietly affectionate eyes and handsome composure. The scene changes and we find her showing him a vast collection of magazines which have run “action” stories by her. (He had already begun work on a sci-fi novel with overriding erotic content, in a constant struggle to find new profit centres. He also struck up [while she was getting some attention at a psych ward] a quasi-platonic relationship with her younger sister. In the room next door [#2046, the number of Mr. Chow’s place for marshal arts story writing and for being alone with Mrs. Chan, and the reason for his settling there], in addition to the sporadic occupancy of the sisters, there came to reside, severally, two ladies of the night he had much to do with, “Lulu” and “Bai Ling,” the latter’s work as a taxi-dancer and sometime prostitute linking to the former’s Caucasian name and obsessiveness about a playboy who got away, to shine at us Demy’s “Lola,” [from the film by the same name] compulsively lamenting the departure of the love of her life). As that narrative arc indicates, this is far from a compact little duet. In strict contrast to the scenario of In the Mood for Love, 2046 depicts a huge warren comprising the underside of the city, wherein no one seems to venture out of doors and into mainstream experience for any noticeable length of time, and it is almost always the middle of the night.
Movie A was a sedate mugging of a couple whose sensitive venturing toward love put them (unbeknown as such) in deadly contradiction with the machinery and gratifications of religion, ethics and science as hitherto understood and revered with murderous intensity. Movie B features one of the victims, as good as left for dead, back in circulation and loaded for more that Lulu. It is this understated noir and sci-fi adventure (bricked over with myriad instances of faltering form, so far from the riveting rightness of Mr. Chow and Mrs. Chan) that constitutes the lively heartbeat and sophisticated excitement of 2046.
Before going into that payload, we should recognize the plausibility of Wong Kar-Wai’s grasp of, not only Demy and Cocteau (Chow remarks to Bai Ling that a dinner of “lamb” [complemented by “snake”] “brings out the beast in me”), but Lynch—Wong’s 1991 production, Days of Being Wild, featuring a “Lulu” implicating Lynch’s Wild at Heart’s “Lula;” the adjacent rooms 2046 and 2047 implicating Eraserhead’s Henry and the prostitute across the hall (at rooms 26 and 27). (Chow had come to live at the hotel in bringing to her home a very drunk Lulu and noting that magic number on her door. A couple of days later, returning her key, he is informed she has left and that she has left a room sprayed with blood. We all know how messy cool-guy Henry’s room got, after he sliced up the baby. In Lulu’s case, it was a jealous “drummer” who did some sharp [but not fatal] drumming.) Working at the level we are trying to fathom here, the young filmmaker would be quick to comprehend who his real allies are, and would insert riffs in recognition of that alliance, and in happily providing his work with geysers of hard-to-evoke sensibility. Just as Demy dished out harmless nonsense about Max Ophuls being the inspiration for his Lola, and Lynch praised Stanley Kubrick for his irresistible musical taste, Wong Kar-Wai leaves the impression that Martin Scorsese and Quentin Tarantino were keys to his art. Such obfuscation makes its point only if you can recognize the possibility of filmmaking that does not boil down to ethical facelifts for the wear and tear of contemporary affronts, or cogent excitements contexted to be readily folded back into conventional presuppositions, and instead busies itself with a hitherto undiscovered alloy of dynamics well-suited, in physical fact, to the métier of film, but also cruelly unsuited, due to the social and economic motives of the film industry.
The extraordinary circumstances that weigh upon Chow and his intimates locate the concrete specifics of their action within a sensual pitch demanding close attention. Virtually the whole film takes place in either Chow’s hotel (“The Oriental,” its name posing an aspect to be superseded by the transcending intent of that protagonist) or in an imaginative product emanating from his base there. Near the beginning of his stay, Chow is on the public phone at the entry desk, seen only as a torso blocked off by furnishing aspects of its commercial preoccupation. He’s doing some business apropos of a project he’s thinking of titling, Diary of the Bazooka Hero, regarding a girl with large breasts. This resort to weaponry cues us up about his being in a war calling for an especially measured maturity. How’s he doing? Encountering the marvellously groomed, lovely, sombre and apprehensive long-lost Lulu, her face a mask seemingly daring (especially due to her hard eyes) anyone to smile, he becomes intent on having her remember his once kindly tending to the miseries of her being abandoned by a playboy. In doing so he becomes a candidate to fill the shoes of—to be measured against—a number of protagonists from films occupying a special place in Wong Kar-Wai’s life and work: the rather hapless, colorless male lead of Last Year at Marienbad (1959), coaxing with a dour persistence a woman at the resort to remember what they once shared and to elaborate therefrom in order to make a decisive break with timorous self-indulgence; also creeping up on his second sortie is the “too polite,” “too thoughtful” “Roland Cassard,” who wanted to renew proceedings with Lola; in a quite different vein there is “Sailor” (Chow had returned to Hong Kong by boat) a raunchy Elvis-type and major crime figure, trying to be Mr. Right for the “Lula” of Lynch’s Wild at Heart (1990). Chow may be doing quite an experiment in transformation on himself at this point, but he’s going nowhere with Lulu. In her he tangles with a figure he describes as not minding a brisk turnover in leading men as long as she holds forth as a very conspicuous “leading lady.” She carries a torch for some jerk not because she doesn’t see him as such, but because he’s vital for a role she feels uniquely equipped to perform to no one’s advantage but her own. (She had, he tries to remind her, fallen for him because he resembled Mr. Wrong. Lola had the same experience with the American sailor, “Frankie.”) As someone, therefore, quite insanely lost in the past and wallowing in the bathetic perks that stunt entails, she inadvertently reiterates for him that there’s something amiss in his orientation toward the memory of Mrs. Chan. (A snippet of one of his erotic offerings, seen at the outset, refers to a sci-fi trip—by train!!—ahead to the year 2046, where “nothing changes,” to spotlight him as a sensibility resorting to questionable dynamics.)
Closer dealings with “Wang Jing” (the daughter targeted by the landlord along the sightlines of Mrs. Chan and her landlady) nudge him toward such a reorientation. From Room 2046, two things wash over him (elaborating the gifts her graceful carnality provides intuitively), we being in a better position than he to gather the specificity of their portents—a situation emphasizing his suspension before a multifaceted and often opaque obligation. There are her stiletto shoes tracing dance patterns across the floor; and there are, in Japanese (which he does not understand, not having, like us, the benefit of instant translation in subtitles), the following phrases, both elementary (as befits an elementary program in conversational Japanese) and ironically alluding to personal and interpersonal successes which, at the moment, totally elude both of them. “I understand…Let’s go…Sure…You know what I mean…I got it…I can go…Got it…Definitely…I’m definitely going…” Chow may not have caught the jist of her Japanese lesson, but he does “get it” about the outrage of her virtual imprisonment and about the gradual inducement to love that her presence maintains. The actress, Faye Wong, exudes a clear-eyed and fragile delicacy, not unlike that of Catherine Deneuve in Demy’s The Young Girls of Rochefort, where she, as a teacher of entry-level ballet, involves herself with dance patterns and longs to be elsewhere, in her case, Paris. This is neither the only nor the most startling confluence of blonde Caucasians and dark Chinese. Inserting Wang Jing into a depicted futurist novel later on, where she plays an android with an almost birdlike sensibility, Wong Kar Wai can bring Faye Wong even closer to the timbre of eerie beauty so characteristic of young Catherine Deneuve, whom Roman Polanski cast as someone struggling to maintain sanity, in his film, Repulsion (1965). A milestone in Chow’s difficult attaining to the competence (the cool) of his role model, “Michel,” (“Mike” [Hammer]), when with the two versions of Lola (namely, Lulu and Bai Ling), comes in his dealing with Wang Jing’s kid sister, by jokingly insisting, “Come back when you’re a little older.”
His first run at the noir and sci-fi depths lurking within futurist composition, a serial, titled 2046, regarding someone resembling Wang Jing’s Japanese lover, remains locked into the financial priorities of soft-core porn and his personal fantasy about an exotic realm where long-lost loves bloom again, as capsulized by the sentimental aphorism, “All memories are traces of tears.” But a liaison with the next occupant of Room 2046, a taxi-dancer with very firm ideas about marriage, constitutes for Chow the flaming of a teachable moment. His force-of-nature boss, “Ping,” happening by and noticing what a sexpot resides next door, he is eager to become one of her customers; and Chow, stressing how classy and expensive she is, puts on some airs about being able to arrange things. Ping jumps the gun, the girl, Bai Ling, a feline, very young-looking beauty, played by actress, Ziyi Zhang, with adolescent hardness, stoicism, emotional daring and humor, puts Chow in his place apposite to the oiliness of Dean Martin’s crooning on the soundtrack, and he feels compelled to give her a little gift to smooth over coarseness-generated embarrassment he thought he had dumped forever. After much violent rebuffing his wanting to put their relationship on a more agreeable footing, she imperiously relents, sneering, “This time I’ll give you face.” Such a moment, and the scenes involving their proceeding on that basis, comprise the work’s most finely nuanced highlights. As some kind of kin to Lula’s Sailor, Chow’s lovemaking with this one of the Eastern Lolas resounds with squealing bedsprings, loud groans, gasps and cries. Despite being repeatedly shown as a torso and legs striding in slow-motion—immediately linking to Mrs. Chan at the noodle shop—she can be seen here, if we look closely, to be carrying a whip. As with Lula, whose lovemaking could be heard from a considerable distance, who wanted “Love Me Tender” from her Elvis, Bai Ling, for all her martial fervor, had constantly in mind a pronounced fidelity as the only way to go. But unlike Lula’s premium upon warmth, Chow’s (for a time) almost steady girl appears to be some kind of parishioner of Lynch’s arctic “Cowboy,” prizing tidiness far above tenderness. “If you find the right person, why waste time on others?” Seen being jilted by a guy she was grooming for her domestic exclusivity, she gets Chow to tell her about Singapore—where the bounder was supposed to take her—and she gazes dreamily into the residual imagery as compensation for missing out on a marital dividend. (“Is it fun there?”) Though this lively sensualist (increasingly expressing her fondness for him) would once have seemed just right for a reconnoitre of the “beyond polite” and its retainers upon some semblance of affection, Chow has, from the perspective provided by Wang Jing, already outflanked her egotism and the poison of her conventional tastes. But the scenario does not leave it there, wanting instead to show us that, by insisting on paying her for each and every encounter and by genially blocking her advances, he is giving up on what he does somewhat realize to be an athletic heart, conflicted, and therewith a vessel of some promise for his surreptitious discoveries. In the intense body language between them, she can see he is impressed, however unsteadily. And we can see—in moments like that when, feeling insulted by money’s being the bottom line, after he leaves, more than selfish hurt in her face, a tear runs down her cheek and then she smiles defiantly in turning away—that her comportment here cannot be covered by the word, “cheap.” Her performance under such pressure reveals depths of caring that surprise us, just as goofy Lola’s interpersonal delicacy leaves us in awe. With her clinging to Chow signalling volcanic ends, she almost completely resigns herself to his never loving her, breaks into his room and waits for him to return. After a playful skirmish beginning with covering his eyes from behind, she strides up to him with a tightly rhythmic gait (a mixture of fear and cockiness in her eyes), a pattern of movement we’ve seen somewhere else, namely, from “Alice,” going through her job interview (accompanied by Marilyn Manson’s rendition of “I Put a Spell on You”) for porn stardom, under the intense and guarded gaze of “Mr. Eddy,” in Lynch’s Lost Highway. Alice, becoming Eddy’s steady girl, as we’ve discovered, was good for lots more than fellatio (as was Lula). Both women were instances of Beauty in conjunction with a Beast, an interplay in which both sides stood to gain wisdom. So, too, with Bai Ling and Chow. After some particularly rough times for the bedsprings, there is a pause during which she demands he stop seeing the woman he was with the night before. “I’d pay anything to be with you every day.”/ “No…Retail, but no wholesale.”/ “Do you treat every woman this way?”/ “All but one?”/ “Who?”/ “My mother.” She slaps him. Then she says, “I don’t care if you love me or not. I’ll love you anyway,” and we can’t help hearing the Manson band’s “I don’t care if you don’t want me…Cause I’m yours, yours, yours…anyhow!” The complex and thrilling musicality of this breakup seems to have been composed with DVD viewing in mind. As such, the parting shot is far more an expression of no longer being sure he’s doing the right thing, than a flip brush-off and reflexive check-in with the memory of Mrs. Chan—“If you’re ever in the mood, I’ll see you.”
Wang Jing, back from the hospital—and still having to listen to salt-of-the-earth tantrums from her father (“Aren’t you ashamed?”), the rough patch glossed over (recalling Mrs. Chan’s shower) by full-bore opera discs (opera being, in addition to a wellspring of primeval power, the planet’s premier venting of resentment-based, runaway ego)—finds in Chow a kinship in writing martial arts inventory, and also finds him (despite palpable fondness for her) willing to facilitate correspondence with her man in Tokyo, in the form of having his letters addressed to him (shades of, and improvement upon, the letter-from-Japan mix-up as to loose-cannon, Mrs. Chow). It is not hard to detect there effective intimacy far more sustained than what is to be found in the smash-ups with others in bed. Catching the evanescence of the dynamics Chow struggles toward, there is a passage from one of the letters read by Wang Jing—“Are the feelings we have like a rainbow after the rain? Or did that rainbow fade away long ago?” She provides food for thought to Chow, in his hitherto strictly mercenary literary efforts, by remarking that her story-writing is “just for fun.” He, jokingly but also pointedly, tells her that her work is so good it could “put me out of business.” He has a bad cold and she finishes one of his stories. He remarks to a colleague, “She can write raunchy prose with the best of us.” He finds her a paying job as a coat check girl in a club, and on Christmas Eve takes her out for dinner. (She is a bit peeved at being dragged away from the season’s good tips.) Finding her depressed as well as irritable about the slowness of the snail mail, he takes her to his office to use the phone. She glows. He has said to himself, about beginning to love her, “Feelings can creep up on you unawares,” just as he accounted for falling in love with Mrs. Chan. But, in thus propelling her to Tokyo, his mood now is one of resignation and bemusement, in contrast to the funereal grief that battered him all the way to Angkor Wat and an act of precious self-dramatization and refusal to find new riches in his life. “I felt like Santa Claus that night…I didn’t find the warmth I wanted, but maybe that was for the best.” Just as she leaves, he revamps his 2046 sci-fi porn (now 2047) to show the Japanese visitor and his android squeeze on the train back from the place where epiphanies are said to be regained. The man has not been successful; he delights in the hostess (depicted as Wang Jing, but inducing the kind of go-for-broke associated with Bai Ling, yet suffused with Faye Wong’s graceful carnality) and he wants her to come all the way home with him. She doesn’t answer. She never answers. The lover concludes, “She never loved me, because she was in love with someone else.” Chow muses, “I had begun imagining myself as a Japanese man.” His cool story, choc-a-block with eerie and luscious appurtenances (full-saturation lighting, distressed clothing fashions and a downtown that covers the entire planet), folds back to 1960s Hong Kong, and his struggle to fathom a love so right going wrong. The resilience of that “futurist” writing indicates that he has significantly moved beyond the mystical acquisitiveness of Angkor Wat. In a world of competing affections, setbacks are the rule. In a world of sensual focus, beauty disappears. But there are consummations not requiring the finality of romantic pairings and everlasting happiness. “Love is all a matter of timing.” Indeed, the love Wang Jing literally goes crazy about does have its dominant patterning. But Chow has put himself within range of another form of love, lending an ironic tinge to his pop song axiom about timing. That the thread of 2047, as to loving someone else, does not include Mrs. Chan’s situation, discloses how far Chow has moved beyond that resentment- and bathos- eliciting outrage. “I gave her a copy of my 2047… I hope she read it.” She read it alright. “I like it a lot. But the ending is too sad… Can you change it?” He sits in front of his manuscript, fountain pen poised. He sits for 10 hours… 100 hours… His solicitude and her slip into bathos have been trumped by the demands of truth. All smiles, the warrior-dad is now happy to go off to Tokyo for the wedding. Chow smiles. “Congratulations!” On first learning of Chow’s job-description as a “journalist,” in vetting him for occupancy of a “decent” hotel, he (as an opera buff) brightens up and goes so far as to call him a “fellow artist.” In a context of public violence, rioting, in Hong Kong—“homemade bombs caused panic”—unscrupulous brutes like him come to be seen as well stocked with “homemade bombs.” Finally at ease with public idiocy, there is for Chow a faded, dream-like taxi ride (in black and white) with a vacant-looking Mrs. Chan, who could be a hooker who resembles her. There is a cut back to a no-longer- girl-like android, determination-personified Lulu, in fact, and he declares, “When you don’t take ‘no’ for an answer, you might get what you want,” in her case picturesque misery. (He has learned to take ‘no’ for an answer; and he has also learned to eschew the negativity of resentment.)
In the final moments, he bids adieu to promising women. “No problem,” he tells Bai Ling, in acting as guarantor for her emigration to Singapore. “You’re right,” she says. “We’re drinking pals.” There had been, at the very beginning of the film, a scene in Singapore (at the time of his pilgrimage to Angkor Wat) in which he fixed upon a beautiful and melancholy lady in black, a professional gambler with the same name (“Su Li Zhen”) as Mrs. Chan. Now we see where that affair went. He’s at the Singapore Casino, trying to win enough to get him back to Hong Kong. She tells him, like the critically wounded Sibyl she is, “You should never set foot in a casino when you’re in a bad mood” (sensual timbre being crucial for weathering the many pitfalls). She wins back for him all the money he had lost. He tells her about Mrs. Chan. She (also having lost someone, and not being able to let go) rushes in with, “You loved her dearly.” Chow, not only instinctively diffident but on track to beat his habit, says, “It’s history.” Before parting ways she tells him, “You’ve been the best friend I’ve known… Hold me!” On a dark, deserted street, like those permeating In the Mood for Love, they share a kiss sustained to surreal, protracted intensity. He says, “Maybe one day you’ll escape your past. If you do, call me.” Her crying is as haunting as her kisses. Su Li Zhen recalls a gambler, “Jackie” (all in white, with futurist-tending platinum blonde hair), played by Jeanne Moreau, with sad, tired eyes and an aggrieved, pouting mouth—a face never seen again, until this so-called “Black Spider,” embodied by actress, Li Gong—the puzzle in Demy’s Bay of Angels (1963), who has very successfully escaped her past, only to fall prey to the bathos-satisfying sinkholes of the roulette table. At this point, we could caution Mr. Chow, “It’s even tougher than that!” (He did, though, well see that her past, as perversely sanctified, was “a mystery with no solution.”) But, back to real time, he now knows all that. And so, running into Bai Ling, who has struck it rich with a sugar daddy—“too old for me”—and heads (alone) for greener pastures, Chow gets into a send-off taking him to the heart of love and solitude. Her plane leaves early in the morning, and so for that night she recommends, “Let’s drink as much as we can.” (He had once remarked, “I thought I was pretty wild. But you’re much wilder.”) At her hotel, she pleads, “Stay with me tonight. Let me borrow you!” (This after musing, “Why can’t it be like before?”) That doesn’t even act as a shot in the dark for his navigations. “By now I knew there’s one thing I’ll never lend again.” We then see him on a sombre walk (smiling wryly—and sadly—on recalling his own desperation about permanence), moving along a dark street, a noir figure facing heavy odds, but having reached a level of formidable competence, compatible with recognition that the future is already here. We last see him, therefore, as solitary and thereby prone to engulfment in another fatigue-highlighted cavity. This is not easy.
On three consecutive Christmas Eves, between 1966 and 1968, Chow dines with, in this order, Lulu, Bai Ling and Wang Jing, the express purpose being to observe the exigency of loving warmth on this notable date. Each time, the restaurant’s sound system plays the all-is-well voice of Nat King Cole, singing “The Christmas Song”—“Chestnuts roasting on an open fire…” Through these years, Chow’s motive becomes less and less about himself and more and more about warming another’s heart. That could be construed as getting into the true spirit of Christmas. But in fact what increasingly floods this narrative is its purchase upon a sensibility galactically remote from the routine comforts of mainstream domesticity. The visual design, redolent of Demy’s high saturation color for decor and costuming, presents the players amongst residential and commercial features engulfing their impasses in strikingly incongruous lifts, and it has been deposited as such with a view to likewise replacing humdrum dynamics with something special. Chow has installed in his story for Wang Jing her father, who exploits there the questionable dynamics to the effect that the androids are in fact gods, subject to “the five decays of celestial beings.” As a final note, regarding devices to kick-start the impetus of interest here, there is Bai Ling’s theme-song, “Siboney,” a sizzling rumba about a dream lover, performed by Connie Francis, at her do-or-die best.
The final shots are prefaced by the vaguely disconcerting, “He didn’t turn back. It was as if he’d boarded a very long train heading for a drowsy future, through the unfathomable night.” They are: Chow, looking wasted, alone and in black and white, in the back seat of a cab; and the tempting, crippling hole in the tree trunk he substituted for Angkor Wat (as a repository for sentimental secrets and hopes), in his unappreciated love poem to Wang Jing.
This is a breathtakingly ambitious movie, and its rewards are indescribably enriching. But for those same reasons it is a film with a very difficult relationship to its audience.
I have always wondered why Wong Kar Wai chose fractured renditions of the two love songs in ITMFL and 2046, viz Nat King Cole’s version of Que Sas, and Connie Francis’ Siboney respectively. Both songs suffer from the vocalist’s poor pronunciation of the Spanish lyrics. Is it a commentary on the compromise such songs represent: a de-ethnicisation of the originals to appeal to a WASP demographic, and by corollary that the Oriental can only be understood by the mediation of an alien set of runes? Hong Kong and Singapore are such ‘false’ places, where riddles of identity are played out in a carriage of the local metro running forever on a continuous loop. Last train to Marienbad.
Tony,
Why is it we both can sit through two hours of cinematic genius, only to come away preoccupied with and trying to sing some seemingly tossed off pop tune? As you well remark, the “compromise” dripping from these offerings goes to the heart of the work. “Siboney,” for all its calculated pizazz, carries to us in a special way Bai Ling’s crudeness in putting into play her hunger for love. We are in for a surprise that such grubbiness is what Chow and we need. (The touching rune of the cavity of secrets, so pretty and cogent, comes to bear as something to get over.) As an investigator into the torments of divided energies–apropos of which, I’ll be looking at Bergman’s “Persona” next–Wong Kar Wai well knew pop music gems (in tandem with smashing visuals) could reach his audience with surprising sharpness.
Best,
Jim
Dazzling images from a futuristic society where train networks cover the globe opens 2046, which immediately suggests to the audience that this is a science fiction film. These trains have the capability to bring people to the year of 2046 where nothing ever changes and from where nobody has ever returned, except for the story’s hero. However, the science fictional opening is merely a novel with an intriguing allegorical portrayal of the main character, Chow Mo Wan (Tony Leung), who exists in the 1960’s Hong Kong upheaval where he worked as low-paid journalist while womanizing between jobs. This is the same Chow who the audience recognizes from the brilliant In the Mood for Love (2000) who still seems to be caught in a similar restlessness, but the difference in 2046 is his perspective of women.
On a Christmas Eve Chow bumps into an old friend, Lulu (Carina Lau), who he helped out in Singapore many years ago. Together they get drunk, which leads Chow to bring her home, a cheap room, 2046, at the Oriental Hotel. Later Chow returns Lulu’s key, but finds out that she has moved out. This event triggers an internal fixation in Chow who generates a bizarre interest in the room 2046, as he wants to move into the room. However, the room is under construction and Chow moves into 2047 instead where he begins the construction of his novel. When Chow moves into his new hotel room he learns that Lulu was murdered in 2046, which also becomes the title of his novel. Through the process of writing Chow drifts into his past containing several women and other emotional memories including Lulu. This is as visual a film as we’ve ever had in the cinema, and again you posed some convincing parallels in regards to the cinema of Lynch, Cocteau and Demy. Outstanding work.
Bil,
Thanks for the remarks on 2046, and your kind assessment of the interpretation.
2046 was the number of Chow’s studio where he did his preliminary work on martial arts (warfare), in “In the Mood for Love.” On bringing Lulu to her hotel room of the same number, he sees in it a perfect spot from which to graduate beyond that first abortive skirmish. 2046 emphasizes that he has enrolled in a School of Hard Knocks.
Best,
Jim
Yes, it is disconcerting. And it’s poetic and visually sumptuous. And surrealistic. Time may vault this ahead of In the Mood For Love in the general regard. You bring many, many reference to the table. It’s a great piece.
Thanks, Peter. We both share a respect for Wong Kar Wai’s bringing such matters into films impressively pleasurable and painful.
Best,
Jim
I guess what sets this film apart from the director’s previous work is that science-fiction is worked into the narrative. It is like the others in that it is episodic and fragmented. It stands apart with the lavish production design and the best camerawork Christopher Doyle has ever done. (and that includes his work for Yimou) The most compelling theme in the film the matter of memory. I do see the strong Lynchian elements in this remarkable essay.
Frank,
You touch upon many important factors of 2046.
The resource of “memory,” so vital and so corruptible, flashes through the film with such intensity that it can almost be mistaken for something on another planet and at another time. Many of the players are almost swallowed up by it, as if by some strange disease. (That extremity has inspired, as you say, marvelous sensuous effects.) As such, Wong Kar Wai spotlights a very strange (a surreal) struggle for wellness (for equilibrium). Such a dramatic situation calls out for the context of science fiction. And so we have the “other world” of the year 2046, a supposed memory resort afflicted as hopelessly as 1960s Hong Kong. It stands, therefore, as not simply a futurist scene but a dead end, a somnolent and strangely beautiful episode of horror and noir. The presences of David Lynch films (and their Surrealist edge) help the director nudge along his daring illuminations.
Best,
Jim
I am on the bandwagon with this film too. I think Frank made some fabulous additions, which were accepted by Mr. Clark. The film is poetry in motion. The comparisons are at least worth serious consideration.
Frederick,
Great to hear your standing up for such a challenging film! Its daring and touching twists and turns could reward dozens of viewings.
Best,
Jim
Jim Clark has again raised the temperature in an exhaustive examination of a connecting style that has attempted to transform the movie going experience into something wholly cinematic, that engages the senses in a cascade of abstract ideas (that as suggested here) are suffused with poetry and an underpinning of sadness. There is much I can add and/or corroborate to this discussion (and I do see and appreciate all the remarkable scholarly work thatwent into establishing the cinematic and artistic influences -or influencing- and again salute Mr. Clark for opening up so much for those who are willing to invest time in this most worthy and enriching enterprise) but I will defer here to our friend Tony d’Ambra, who months ago lit up the movie (and literary) landscape with a poetic account of the film’s underlining pervasive melancholy and sense of loss and regret. At the time (and still now) it had me floored.
2046
A hotel room
I write dreams
A train to nowhere
The rambling commuter tracks
An empty highway of voluptuous dreams
Exotic visions
An elusive stringed symphonia of a future present already gone
Four women, three sirens
The hotel neon illumines our sordid fantasies
We embrace then kiss
Sweet poison
Red lampshade, red lips
Red rooms, red curtains
Red shadows
Unfaithful erotic pose
Defiant gaze
The aching solitude of knowing
In your arms I am no longer there
A chimera of future timelessness
Platform shoes
Heels that glow
Strut and trample the hallowed tar from my shattered soul
Wanton abandon a mirror for Innocence lost
My words shattered
Shards of fallen glass
In pools of liquid gaze
Your naked thighs thrust in ecstasy
A trap of lost hope and stolen bliss
As far as the film, 2046, it has not yet appeared on Allan’s countdown, and he loves the film deeply. While it’s appearance in the remaining numbers is a certainty, no one can be sure exactly where.
I am going to make a prediction that could well be wrong of course, but 2046 will be Allan’s Number 1 film of the new millenium, which in the end would be toasted to the heavens by Jim Clark and Tony d’Ambra. And if that happened I’d be smiling. But at the very least a Top 10 finish seems definite.
Sam,
Thanks so much for including Tony’s poem, which wonderfully embraces the necessities and the impossibilities of love, coursing through 2046.
That is a film that will never become outdated.
Best,
Jim
Hey Sam, I am touched you consider my scribblings worthy of reference here. I can’t match Jim’s intellectual depth but I can agree that this film is as brilliant and puzzling as he paints it.
Only three movies have inspired me poetically: 2046, In the Mood For Love, and Tokyo Story. In this sense they are films that have affected me profoundly.
My affection for In The Mood For love is such that I would place it as my no.1 for the 2000’s – of course with the caveat that I have seen a lot fewer films from this decade than most others here.
Tony, you are an ever modest man, but your poetic ‘feel’ pieces for this film, TOKYO STORY and IN THE MOOD FOR LOVE have captured the essence of these works as compellingly as any lengthy essay. (as Jim’s superlative piece is) Too many have voiced their uncompromised love at Films Noir.net and at your second blogg, as well as here at WitD. When it comes to sensory description negotiated in poetry, you can’t be touched. It’s really a talent.
Incidentally, I love all three films as well, and consider TOKYO STORY as one of the greatest films ever made. The final scenes really open the tear ducts.
Also, as the thrust of Jim’s essay was not especially ‘component based’ but rather a consideration of visual styles and themes, I would pose to add here the work of composer extraordinaire Shigeru Umebayashi, whose work here in blending dynamic orchestral motifs, operatic aris and moody jazz add give this film a sublime, elegiac and exquisite aural underpinning. The evocative use of opera’s most celebrated aria, the bel-canto “Casta Diva” from NORMA (Vincenzo Bellini) is magnificent, especially with the attempt by Angela Gheorghiu to emulate iconic diva Maria Callas.
Sam,
Again, thanks for splendidly bringing to light the important feature of musical pulse in this film. An instinctive associate like Umebayashi has been so vital for linking the viewer/listener to the timbres of intent in the actions of the players.
Best,
Jim
Right on here Sam. Umebayashi’s score is intricately weaved into the fabric of the film: the evocative 2046 Main Theme and variations are infused with the visuals. For those who haven’t seen the movie, I posted this video on my blogs:
Ah Tony, I well remember this great post and your place, and think it’s fantastic you encored it here on this thread. I just submitted to it again! The score and visuals are sublimity incarnate!
Tony, Sam,
I can’t help popping into the course of your splendid dialogue (with that great video!), to add my name to the fans of The Tokyo Story and Ozu in general. When it comes to Ozu, for me, it especially comes to Setsuko Hara, one of the truly great film actresses. That, on Ozu’s death, she disappeared from the film world, going into seclusion in order to reflect on things, strikes me as an indicator of the seriousness with which she approached his and her art.
Jim
Jim, yes Setsuko Hara was simply exquisite in Tokyo Story. I dedicated my poem to her character, her mother-in-law, and sister-in-law:
For Fumiko, Noriko, and Kyoko
A loving daughter’s gaze
Another day lost in time
forever gone and ever-present
The departing train leaves a dissolving black cloud
Both gone
The mother and the sister she never had
On forged rails of steel that offer no return
the other daughter gifted by fate
holds the mother’s watch
In anguished reminiscence the time-piece ticks away in eternity
as she smiles the smile of loss and regret
Why did she leave us?
Three women in boundless love blossomed
in cruel obscurity and exquisite meaninglessness
The mother is gone forever
and the daughters lost to each other in Time’s imperative
The towers of industry billow their smoke
to the boundless indifferent sky
while the agony and the ecstasy of aloneness and sweet regret
fade into the abyss of the past
The ships ply the harbour their engines rhythmically echoing
the aching heartbeat of a lonely old man
Tony,
“…she smiles the smile of loss and regret”
Well done!!
Jim
I preferred ‘In the Mood For Love’ over this film. There was a clearer mise en scene, and less of a reliance on the abstract. Maybe it’s me.
Maria,
In the Mood for Love is a subtle and acute presentation of individuals regaining self-respect in having the strength to reach out to each other; and suffering a loss of self-respect in not trusting that strength far enough. As such, it launches a sea of compelling sensibility.
2046 pursues that wellspring to its dimension of surreal difficulties.
Both are, to me, utterly fascinating.
Best,
Jim
Aye, Jim, Hara’s disappearance did indeed denote the austerity that informed her work. She is perhaps the most luminous presence in screen history, and one of the cinema’s greatest actresses.
Another masterful Tony d’Ambra feel piece on the girls!
Sam,
Her instinct for film expression was unique. She could bowl you over with the slightest touches.
It’s perfect we’ve got around to talking about her, in a context of other supernal players, like Faye Wong and Maggie Cheung.
Jim
awesome article
[…] (2010). Finding the Future: Wong Kar-Wai’s 2046.Available: https://wondersinthedark.wordpress.com/2010/06/23/finding-the-future-wong-kar-wais-2046/. Last accessed 22nd Jan […]
[…] (2010). Finding the Future: Wong Kar-Wai’s 2046.Available:https://wondersinthedark.wordpress.com/2010/06/23/finding-the-future-wong-kar-wais-2046/. Last accessed 22nd Jan […]