I first saw Wong Kar Wai’s 2046 at the Collins St Dendy in 2005 immediately after going to see a friend’s film play in the St Kilda Film Festival. Although twin star was filmed-out and exhausted, I insisted that this was an experience not to be missed, and dragged his weary eyes up to the city. Big screen, 2046 is superb. The mind blowingly wide frame and lush colour were like falling in lust in a monsoon – all wet and hot and skin tingling, heart achingly good. Since then, I have watched 2046 many times, but recently I have noticed a strange pattern to my watching of it. This film has begun and ended all the relationships I have had in the past three years. At the start of a relationship it’s a bit of a litmus test – ’sit through this and love it and I’m yours,’ I seem to say, as I force the object of my affections through 129 minutes of green walls and slow motion tears. So far, no one has failed.
It’s a good start to a relationship, but 2046 is perhaps even more apt as a breakup film. With its decaying streets, monsoonal rains, peeling wallpaper and endless melancholy tangos, it revels in disconnections and aching memories. Even Wong Kar Wai himself is looking back on his past relationships with Days of Being Wild and In the Mood for Love. The same characters re-appear, marked by the passage of time but still looking for their heart’s desire. Lulu/Mimi (Carina Lau) chases after the memory of her legless bird (Yuddy (Leslie Cheung) in Days of Being Wild is the first legless bird and her big love) by falling for wildly unhinged men, Chow whittles his time away with a string of women while remaining true to the memory of Su Lizhen (Maggie Cheung in In the Mood for Love). Both the women who he might be able to love, another Su Lizhen (Gong Li) and Wang Jingwen (Faye Wong) are unavailable. The film is a minefield of missed encounters and possibilities that arise at the wrong time. ‘Love,’ Chow muses, ‘is all a matter of timing. It’s no good meeting the right person too soon or too late.’ And so, Tak, (Takuya Kimura) the traveller on the train hurtling away from 2046 realises that his android not only has delayed reactions, but already loves someone else. Bai Ling (Ziyi Zang) falls for Chow, but her eagerness automatically makes their togetherness impossible. Chow seems to have a thing for women he can’t have.
In his book Conditions of Love, John Armstrong observes that in romantic literature, ‘unreciprocated and thwarted love play an important part because […] they maintain it at its highest pitch. They are seen not as failures of love but as the most perfect instances of love.’ 2046 breathes unrequited love, which gives life to the film’s most beautiful images. The women all cry unbearably large tears before resolutely walking away (in slow motion of course) from their messy love lives. Faye Wong’s android, unable to respond to the affections of her passenger finds tears seeping from her impassive eyes. After rejecting Chow, Su Lizhen sobs desperately into a decaying wall. When Chow and Su Lizhen part ways, the scene cuts from a shot of Chow walking away to the right of screen to a shot of Su Lizhen walking away to the left. In both shots their faces are positioned roughly in the middle, but toward the edge of the screen so that the empty space (and it’s a wide frame, the film has an aspect ratio of 2.40:1) stretches out behind them. Even though the shots happen one after the other the slow tracking is so perfectly symmetrical that it creates the feeling of being pulled in opposite directions. This use of the wide screen, where the characters are pushed to the edges of the frame is used a lot in 2046, and it helps to evoke the distance between the characters. When Chow runs into Lulu, she is positioned on the very edge of the screen and a red curtain blocks the rest of the space. When the scene reverse cuts from Chow to Lulu, Chow is behind the curtain and all we see is Lulu’s hesitant face as she pretends not to recognise him.
At the end of the film, when Chow sees Bai Ling for the last time and leaves her weeping in her bottle green doorway, an intertitle intrudes, saying: ‘He didn’t turn back. It was as if he had boarded a very long train, heading for a drowsy future through the unfathomable night.’ The characters in 2046 wallow in this unfathomable night, endlessly streaming away from one another, taking what love they can as they pass. It’s hardly a usable template for one’s real life relationships, but gosh, it’s romantic alright.
