In Buddhism, there is a common saying that attachment leads to suffering, and one must learn to let go of all material and emotional connections in order to gain peace. Throughout his films, Wong Kar-wai explores this universal need to connect emotionally and at times carnally with another person, and the inability for us to ever truly become satisfied as a result of these amorous pursuits. From Maggie Cheung's thwarted love for Leslie Cheung in Days of Being Wild, through the now almost iconic unconsummated relationship of Faye Wong and Tony Leung in Chungking Express, and up to the melancholic yearnings of Maggie Cheung and Tony Leung again in the swooningly atmospheric In the Mood for Love, Wong Kar-wai has become the cinematic master of missed connections. While he took a detour into the wu xia genre with his impressionistic martial arts films Ashes of Time and The Grandmaster, Wong Kar-wai has explored characters haunted by lost loves throughout his filmography. After making seven increasingly accomplished films, Wong reached an aesthetic and emotional peak with 2046 (2004), a masterfully rendered, dream-like meditation on romantic longing.
2046 is a direct sequel to In the Mood for Love, as it explores the troubled life of the writer Chow Mo-wan (played by Wong Kar-wai's regular leading man Tony Leung) after he leaves Su Li-shen (Maggie Cheung), a married woman that he fell deeply in love with. To compensate for his grief, Chow has a series of amorous encounters with various women, most notably with Su Li-shen (Gong Li), Wang Jing-wen (Faye Wong), and Bai Ling (Zhang Ziyi), some of whom turn up as characters in his own stories. Freely flowing back and forth through time, and also into the narratives of Chow's own writing, 2046 is an impressionistic portrait of unfulfilled desire.
Wong's films are very much a visual experience, with astonishing cinematography from the brilliant Christopher Doyle, and 2046, along with In the Mood for Love, represent the apotheosis of Wong's and Doyle's collaboration. 2046 is filled with images of beautiful decay, as characters are framed against decrepit, worn-out buildings bathed in luxurious colors. These dilapidated backdrops represent the fading memories of Wong's characters, who are mourning for a dying past that can never be truly reclaimed. Like Marcel Proust's Remembrance of Things Past, Wong's films, and in particular 2046, are about protagonists who spend their days haunted by the many lives and loves they destroyed.
2046 begins and ends with the image of a large tunnel that is framed by an elegant shell-like structure, against a futuristic backdrop. With this baroque tunnel, Wong is collapsing all time, from the past, present, and future, into a single image. This tunnel recalls the hole that Chow whispered his secret love for Su into from In the Mood for Love, while it also represents the present day of Chow as he is writing about the tunnel in a science fiction story set in the future. For Wong, the various time periods that he references throughout 2046, from the past affair of Su and Chow explored in In the Mood for Love, to the current sometimes cruel relationships Chow has with a series of women in the present day of 2046, along with the imaginary loves of Chow's fictional characters in his story set in the future, are tied together by an unfulfilled yearning to connect deeply with another person who can never fully reciprocate the same feelings.
The significance of 2046 as a number is that it is the year mainland China will officially reclaim Hong Kong. No one can yet predict how this will affect Hong Kong once it rejoins China completely, but it is this sense of the past being reclaimed by an unknown future that permeates all of Wong's films. 2046 is both the room number that Chow lives in, and also a destination in his fictional story where characters go to reclaim lost loves. In this sense, Wong uses the number 2046 to symbolize his characters' constant yearning to reclaim a more romanticized past that they can never truly recover, just as Hong Kong is in a temporary sovereign state of being which will disappear in the year 2046. Once the year 2046 occurs, Hong Kong will have to let go of its British influenced colonial past and enter into an unknown future; this is why Chow notes that when the characters in his story reach 2046, they can never return again.
Indeed, throughout all his films, the handover of Hong Kong to China in the year 2046 is referenced repeatedly with the motif of time as being fleeting and elusive. The concept of an expiration date occurs in Chungking Express, with He Qiwu (Takeshi Kaneshiro) obsessing about finding a can of pineapples with the same expiration date as the date his ex-girlfriend broke up with him. In Fallen Angels, Takeshi Kaneshiro plays another character who muses about if relationships have expiration dates. There's also the symbolism of clocks and time periods in Wong's films, most notably in Days of Being Wild, as Maggie Cheung's character Li-zhen mourns over the one minute period given to her by Yuddy (Leslie Cheung), which delineates the time frame for their relationship's length. In As Tears Go By, In the Mood for Love, and Happy Together, characters are unable to fulfill their longing to be together due to temporal disconnects and lapses. Wong's characters are both enamored by time as a means to consummate a relationship, and mournful over its inherent nature of bringing things to an end.
If we all had the ability to go back in time to either fix or reclaim a lost love, can we ever truly be the same person again? Our entire lives would be changed, and we essentially would be entering into a parallel track of our existence, one predicated on changing the course of our own personal life story. Wong explores this dilemma in 2046 by sometimes replaying the same scenario again but from different perspectives, such as having a flash forward to the future of Su Li-shen walking with a black dress during the film's earlier scene of Chow walking with Bai Ling after a dinner date with her. Wong does this to emphasize how Chow's relationship with Bai Ling is essentially a parallel reflection of his future relationship with Su Li-shen, which in itself is a mirror image of his brief affair with the Su Li-shen character from In the Mood for Love.
In essence, Wong is showing how we can never truly go back in time to change our lives because we are essentially repeating all our past behaviors and relationships throughout our lifetimes, just with seemingly different people. This goes with another Buddhist saying that each lifetime is essentially a repeat of our past lives-- we must experience the same scenarios and have the same relationships with people until we learn how to let go and enter the next stage of existence. At one point, Wong references Buddhism directly by ending his film In the Mood for Love at a Buddhist monastery, with Chow trying to let go of his past by whispering his secret love affair into a hole (the same hole which is referenced by the tunnel in the opening and ending scenes of 2046). By ending 2046 with an image of the tunnel fading to black, Wong is allowing all his characters to let go of their haunted pasts by whispering their secrets into this enigmatic symbol of salvation.
The most exhilarating moments of 2046 occur during the sequences set in the future of Chow's imaginary world from his writing. In these scenes, Wong explores the budding love a passenger on a train bound for 2046 (Takuya Kimura) develops for a hostess (Faye Wong) who can't reciprocate his feelings because she's a robot. This relationship parallels Chow's own relationship with Wang Jing-wen, the daughter of his landlord. The neon-lit colors of these scenes, along with their moody and operatic music and long, slow-motion panning shots, recall both Fallen Angels' futuristic scenery, and In the Mood for Love's mise en scene, but brought to a whole new genre of the science fiction film. The movements of Carina Lau as another robot hostess slowly tilting forward to reach for something on the train recalls the similar shot of the stewardess in Stanley Kubrick's 2001 reaching over to push a button in zero gravity on a spaceship. Science fiction elements, most notably with the use of futuristic, neon-like colors and Art Deco-inspired sets, have always infused some of Wong's previous films, so it's quite a delight to see Wong expand his toolbox by actually making a science fiction film sequence. Wong even dips into film noir in 2046 with Gong Li's "Black Spider" character, a dangerously alluring woman who always dresses in black and tempts Chow into a forbidden relationship like an archetypal femme fatalle.
As Wong's characters in 2046 brood and walk slowly through sometimes foreboding settings that imprison them, with even exterior scenes looking like they are closing them in, one recalls the similarly haunting film Last Year at Marienbad by Alain Resnais. Like Resnais' film, 2046 envelopes his characters within their surroundings, which consist of enclosed, claustrophobic rooms, and long, mysterious hallways seemingly leading to nowhere. Also like Resnais' film, Wong's characters in 2046 are bound together and haunted by mysterious pasts, and are never fully to connect with each other despite their desire to do so. Both films portray the fragmented and multi-layered nature of time, as the past, present, and future continuously collapse into each other, entrapping their characters in an elusive labyrinth where the center is always beyond their grasps.
Similar to Resnais in Last Year at Marienbad, Wong uses his actors as sort of pantomimes to convey their interior states of mind; at one point, we even see Bai Ling with strings attached to her, as Wong tries to mold a popular Chinese actress to fit into his particular methodology of filmmaking. The way a character walks down a hallway, or up and down a flight of stairs, is just as important to Wong as the way they express themselves through dialogue. Like Resnais, what Wong is concerned with in 2046 and his other films is to have his actors' entire performances, from the way they move to the way they speak, convey a certain mood in a more subtle manner, rather than give traditional theatrical displays of obviously stated emotion. Although at times Gong Li, Zhang Ziyi, and Takuya Kimura give in to more melodramatic tendencies, Wong is able to for the most part fit them into his more subdued brand of acting that Maggie Cheung and Tony Leung have mastered already.
With its complex mise en scene and multiple layers of thematic elements, 2046 is Wong and Doyle working at the height of their powers. 2046 expands upon In the Mood for Love's more condensed narrative to tell a complex narrative which truly conveys the long and foreboding passage of time throughout one lifetime. While In the Mood for Love focuses on Chow's relationship with one woman, 2046 explores Chow's multiple affairs with various women, as well as his vibrant creative life by visualizing the science fiction narrative of his own novel. It will be interesting to see where Wong takes his artistic evolution next, as he needs to find a way to avoid the trap of repeating himself with each subsequent work. With The Grandmaster, a masterful mixture of traditional wu xia tropes with Wong's own distinctive voice, it's reassuring to see that Wong is expanding upon his previous filmmaking methods. Either way, as an artist, Wong has developed into a master of developing mood and tone through an almost purely visual and auditory level, and making films that explore what makes us most human-- the longing for an ethereal past that may forever be erased by an unknown future.
