August 1st, 2009
“2046.”
If you fell in love with Mr. Chow (Tony Leung) and Mrs. Chan (Maggie Cheung) — who, along with Zhang Ziyi, was in Zhang Yimou’s “Hero” — in Wong Kar Wai’s “In the Mood for Love,” you shouldn’t miss this wonderful masterpiece of a sequel!
If you haven’t seen “In the Mood for Love,” you’d still appreciate the great film that is “2046″ (just like some people must have seen “Before Sunset” without seeing “Before Sunrise”). But I think the weight of our empathy with the travails of Mr. Chow stems from having known what he has gone through in the previous film.
It’s now a toss-up between Claude I-forgot-this-french-canadian’s-surname’s “Leolo” and Wong Kar Wai’s “2046″ as my favorite movie of all time.
Incidentally, doesn’t Tony Leung bear an uncanny resemblance to the late R.J. Leyran?
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Non Sequitur (A Reflection on Wong Kar Wai’s “2046″ and “In the Mood for Love”)
by Michael Ian Lomongo
(For the late R.J. Leyran, who bears an uncanny resemblance to Tony Leung)
—
I do think that “2046″ is a very worthy sequel to “In the Mood for Love.” At first, it doesn’t appear to be that way. The only connection with the latter film seemed to be that it was the same Mr. Chow (the erstwhile writer of martial arts stories but moved on to writing sci-fi…) and his adventures in love and loving after the ill-fated affair with Mrs. Chan (Maggie Cheung).
After seeing “2046,” I’ve reached these conclusions:
2046 is the number of the room that Mr. Chow and Mrs. Chan stayed in the night she didn’t want to go home. This scene wasn’t shown in both films but Mr. Chow mentioned it in “2046.”
Mrs. Chan probably separated with her husband. The child she was with when she moved to the apartment that used to be occupied by her landlady was the fruit of that one night tryst with Mr. Chow. She went back with the vain of hope of somehow meeting up with Mr. Chow again. When she called up the office of Mr. Chow when he was in Singapore, it was because she was with child. But she couldn’t bear to speak because she didn’t want to be a “bother” to Mr. Chow.
In “In the Mood for Love,” it was Mrs. Chan’s husband that was the figure of absence. (Absence as negative, abandonment, the absent father, the absent husband, the absent government, the absent God…)
In “2046,” it was Mrs. Chan’s turn to be the figure of absence that lingers, that remains present… through the years and lesser loves that have come and go. But this time, not as a “chosen” absence, as the giving up of responsibility… But as the puzzling, metaphysical absence of the good that one with a good heart desires and imagines to be rightfully his.
The genius of Wong Kar Wai is precisely in the intricacy of the details that mesh and interweave. Not everything is explained. Not everything is shown. There are loose ends. The audience creates and imagines the story with the absent scenes.
Consider this: the central clue to the central theme of the story, the gambling lady in black (played by Gong Li). In the beginning, I thought she was playing the character that Maggie Cheung played. (Remember, in the Matrix Revolutions, the Oracle was played by a different actress because Gloria Fraser died.) But I knew that Maggie Cheung appears in the film. So, why choose another actress to play Maggie Cheung’s character?
Mr. Chow was asking her to leave with him. (I thought for Singapore.) She said “no.”
It turns out later that Mr. Chow was in fact asking her to leave Singapore. And we discover that Gong Li’s character had the same name as Mrs. Chan. “Suezen” something. She was Mrs. Chan’s doppelganger. When she refused his love, it was because she knew that his heart truly belonged to another.
Mr. Chow realizes this in the end.
In “2047,” the story that Mr. Chow wrote for the daughter of his landlord (played by Faye Wong) in “2046,” there is this female android (still Faye Wong) that the passenger leaving 2046 wanted to bring along with him. He asked her, but she wouldn’t reply.
She wouldn’t reply not because she couldn’t love. She wouldn’t reply because she was already in love with another.
The landlord’s daughter was already in love with her Japanese boyfriend. Mr. Chow was still in love with Mrs. Chan.
When the character of Zhang Ziyi (who has fallen in love with Mr. Chow) asks whether she can “borrow” Mr. Chow before she leaves for Singapore, he says that’s the one thing that he has realized that he can never lend.
All his little loves, adventures, and misadventures have always pointed to a glaring absence.
An absence whose presence is more palpable than all the “presents…”
Mrs. Chan.
Memory?
Regret?
Obsession?
True Love?
April 21st, 2010 at 7:23 pm
I do not go along each of the details spelled out by you, but you do complete a strong case!