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#5:
Mystery Train
Kristi Mitsuda on 2046
“If someone wants to leave
2046
How long will it take?
Some people get away fairly easily.
Others find that it takes them much longer.
I forget how long I’ve been on this train.
I’m starting to feel very lonely.”
Given that Wong Kar-wai so thoroughly inhabits
cinema with a uniquely expressive visual vocabulary
(thanks, in part, to cinematographer Christopher
Doyle), I’m surprised to now realize 2046
is the only one of his films I’ve managed
to see on the big screen. That this theatrical
viewing coincided with the apotheosis of a
brilliant career I consider a stroke of happy
serendipity which perhaps partially explains
why the filmmaker’s latest looms so large
for me amongst my cluttered remembrance of
movies—already fading—of 2005. Like Before
Sunset last year, this continuation of
characters from In the Mood for Love
rejuvenates and deepens the possibilities
of the oft-scorned term “sequel,” which typically
indicates nothing more than a passionless
cashing-in on an established brand, worlds
away from the glorious expansions proved possible
by Linklater and now, Wong.
The number 2046 represents certain concrete
facts: the hotel room where Chow (Tony Leung)
spent so much time writing martial arts serials
with true love Su Li Zhen (Maggie Cheung);
the Oriental Hotel apartment next to his which
paramours Lulu (Carina Lau), Bai Ling (Zhang
Ziyi), and Jing Wen (Faye Wong) variously
occupy; the year before Hong Kong’s special
self-regulated status as a former British
colony ends. From the stolidity of that simple
number, Wong abstracts and spins one of the
most searingly beautiful evocations of lost
love ever put to celluloid.
A film about memory structured as such, with
an unordered and impressionistic mimicry of
the fragmentary and heightened quality of
recall built into its organization, 2046
causes confusion upon an initial viewing,
and no wonder. Seemingly shrouded in layers
of unknowable mystery, it becomes, after a
second look, stunningly lucid though still
as exhilaratingly hazy as human recollection;
Wong’s poetical style has never found so perfect
a match in subject matter.
2046 opens with a refrain—later to
be meaningfully reiterated—that suggests the
following unfolding will be Chow’s journey
towards emotional recovery:
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“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
n
obody’s ever come back.
Except me.”
Envisioned by the writer—now dabbling in science
fiction—as a place where haunted lovers go,
the setting becomes an ideal metaphor for
that faraway mental zone each of us enters
when newly broken-hearted. The underlying
suggestion is that those who remain too long
in 2046 transform over time into unresponsive
creatures, delayed-response androids impervious
to emotions. A perpetual red cast colors 2046
with an enveloping warmth far different from
the usual descriptions of the futuristic,
often reliant upon stark-white or blue-tinged
auras to communicate coldness. Conjuring numbness
but also filled with the heat of consuming
passion, 2046 becomes a purgatory for the
love-wounded, a place where you arrive either
to come to terms with the past or remain eternally
trapped unable to progress beyond memories
of the long-lost. And is there any among us
who hasn’t dwelled for a period of time in
2046?
Though Wong is always such an eloquent dealer
in the minutiae of modern alienation, his
pageantries of loneliness have heretofore
been laced with traces of humorous whimsy,
evident even in the sexual turmoil of In
the Mood for Love as Chow and Su at first
coyly try to put themselves in their respective
wife’s and husband’s philandering shoes. This
sensibility finds itself curtailed in 2046,
and its lack effectively demonstrates the
severe changes undergone by Chow, and the
more profoundly pessimistic vision Wong has
in store.
Stuck in an emotional torpor which has him
treating his mistresses with an almost sadistic
indifference, Chow can’t stop wondering whether
Su returned his love. This uncertainty sparks
our extratextual memories of 2046’s
precursor: We long to tell him of how she
followed him when he first left Hong Kong
for Singapore, visited his empty room, caressed
his cigarettes and lit one up for herself,
sank slowly down into his armchair, touched
what she imagined he’d touched—the banister
in the hallway, the floorboards—with a supreme
tenderness that bore the incontrovertible
mark of love. But he doesn’t know what we
know, and not knowing tortures him; so he
remains in 2046.
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And he is far from alone here. From another
Su Li Zhen (Gong Li) he meets in Singapore—her
eyes nakedly bearing the sorrow of permanent
emotional scar tissue—to Lulu (or is it Mimi?),
still mourning the love of her life who died
young, to Bai Ling, whom Chow himself sends
on an express train to 2046, this film is
populated with the broken-hearted. Projecting
encounters with these women into the fictional
future, Chow wrestles with his demons, and
the resultant work is 2046 itself,
which chronicles piecemeal his slow journey
back to the present. Or does it? It seems
he’s on his way back when he begins collaborating
with Jing Wen, as with Su before her—whom
she resembles—on martial-arts serials. Herself
lost in the limbo of 2046, after being separated
from her Japanese boyfriend upon pressure
from her father, Jing Wen heralds the first
stirrings of reawakening: Though harboring
feelings for her, Chow, in a small, selfless
act, allows Jing Wen to use his newspaper’s
telephone to make a long-distance call to
her boyfriend on Christmas Eve.
He told us upfront that no one ever returns
from 2046. But he also claimed that he did.
Come the conclusion, we realize this final
detail may have been strictly fictional. He
is a writer after all, and as free to fabricate
as he is to draw from his own experiences.
The introductory phrase is repeated—with the
noteworthy “except me” left off—and it becomes
apparent in the final scenes that he is no
exception to the rule either. As Chow sits
in the backseat of a cab alone, his head leaning
against the window, rhyming images from earlier
sepia-toned scenes come to mind, shared rides
home with Bai and, separately, Su, his head
lightly resting upon their shoulders. The
movie begins as it ends, with identical shots
of that silvery “tree” hole into which you
whisper your secrets in 2046:
“Before,
When people had secrets they didn’t want to
share
They’d climb a mountain,
Find a tree and carve a hole in it,
And whisper the secret in the hole.
Then cover it over with mud.
That way, nobody else would ever discover
it.”
You realize maybe you’ve been the vessel,
that this unraveling has been Chow whispering
his secrets, and now you’re left harboring
them forever.
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