PLOT: What is memory? A pulp fiction writer thinks of his past and his former lovers as he attempts to rewrite his life story, in a way, via a futuristic tale of his own creation.
2046 is a hotel room number as well as a year in the future and it's also the date when Hong Kong's last 50 years of being Hong Kong are finally over.
Wong Kar-Wai's 2046 is a film that purports to pick up where his In The Mood For Love left off. The story is narrated and begins with the introduction of a tale set in the future. In the future, explains our narrator, people travel to 2046 to recapture old memories -- but nobody ever came back before except me." Hmnnn ...
All memories are traces of tears, you understand, and now we are back in the year 1966. Chow Mo Wan (Tony Leung) explains that he was a newspaper writer then and a womanizer; here he is in Hong Kong running into a woman he knew in Singapore, and she is staying at a hotel, in room 2046.
A succession of other women enter the narrative. He revisits the gambler (Gong Li); his landlord's beautiful daughter is involved in a forbidden romance with a Japanese man; his new neighbour (Ziyi Zhang) rejects his advances but eventually seems to fall for him -- though he doesn't love her.
His memories of these women involve mirrors, single tear drops, close-ups of high heeled shoes and repeated musical motifs.
This is a visually stunning but melancholy undertaking; events in 2046 are sorted out around various Christmas Eves and around Nat King Cole singing A Christmas Song.
All the while, our narrator is writing a story set in 2046 in which beautiful female androids figure prominently. "I made it up," he says, "but some of my experiences found their way into it."
Indeed they did. At a certain point, 2046 seems to be a spoof of something from Philip K. Dick. The part of the film set within our narrator's futuristic novel really drags, mostly because it is difficult to sort out the very convoluted notions of love and memory. Maybe the writer's gift is his ability to re-imagine the past the way he prefers it? He can keep writing it until he gets it right.
Anyway, what we seem to have here in 2046 is a meditation on past loves, not to mention missed communication, bad love affairs, bad timing, roads not taken and the passage of time itself. It all sucks, doesn't it? Great soundtrack, though.
(This film is rated 14-A)
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