Day 113: 2046

"Everyone who goes to 2046 has the same intention, they want to recapture lost memories."

To me, a Wong Kar-Wai movie is almost a religious experience. I'm not very religious but a film by him is one that thrusts you fully into the scenes. The effort his cinematographer puts into the frames, the choice of the soundtrack, the swing and style of the women, and the comfort to play with chronology is fully engrossing. He's officially become my favorite film director. (Sorry, Scorsese.) Mr. Kar-Wai (would that be his last name, or is Kar his middle name?) makes films the way I see life. A fade of slow motion here and there, a beautiful tint of light to overshadow the scene, sex, and beautiful music. (Sex, the unfulfilled obsession of all boys my age, probably dominates the other areas but you get the idea.)

Mr. Kar-Wai is a filmmaker with a page from the American filmmaker's playbook which, at least I would say, first comes about from Mean Streets where Scorsese makes great use of pop culture music. George Lucas' American Graffiti does the same (wow, that's a movie with pretty good dialog and I think Lucas actually wrote that one.) In addition, Mr. Kar-Wai seems to run into an aspect of obsession with his characters that would make Hitchcock proud. There's either a bird that can't stop flying, an affair that must be remembered, or in this case, the woman that lives nearby. But in 2046 what adds to the perspective of the main character is his fiction. Kar-Wai uses the story Chow writes as parallel to Chow's own relationship struggles. Of course, following the tradition of other films about narrative creation, the story ultimately becomes self-reflexive to the very movie that we're watching.

I'll have to warn you though, don't watch this if you haven't seen Wong Kar-Wai's previous films. 2046 is a sequel to In the Mood for Love. The main character's stories are closely tangled and entwined with what happened in that film (previously reviewed by Munk on here) and other characters in the film arrive from having, apparently, exited his other film, Days of Being Wild. Like In the Mood for Love, 2046 is just like our reviewer, Munk, writes:

"We are given little plot. ... It is not the story that sets the mood: it is the style. The style is the narrative, it is the plot, the exploration, the rising and falling action, the climax. It is the character development and slowly moving poetry at the core of the film. Its style transcends simply being flashy and aesthetically pleasing—it is an integral part, if not the most important, to the entire experience."

It's funny that Munk mentions style and experience because the first paragraph I wrote here was written before I even remembered his use of the word in his review. But that's probably what all audiences should feel. 2046 is a science fiction film that succeeds the tradition of Kubrick's 2001. 2001 is a film that glorifies the very idea of nothingness. That's fitting because after all, the film takes place in space. It's hard to say exactly what this movie is about too. Both movies include overall and general themes of course but it's not really something conventional. Let's put it this way, after seeing 2046 and 2001 try and explain what you saw. You can explain Casablanca to someone (Bogart gets reunited with some hot dame in the middle of WWII and she needs his help, he doesn't want to give it, yaddah, yaddah) but I mean Mr. Chow Mo-wan's heartbreak doesn't necessarily give way to abrupt summarization. Another odd is that to call it a science fiction film would be wrong. True there's a network of travel in the near future but does that really make it science fiction? His own fictions, a world in which he finds comfort, solitude, and ultimately his own kind of misery, are flush with science but I doubt that's enough to deem the film science fiction. It's certainly less science fiction that Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind which followed the embark of a similar treading theme: memory.

[could have sworn someone on here reviewed that one actually...]

Memory is an odd thing because, as I read in a recent book by Charles Yu, How to Live Safely in a Science Fiction Universe (I actually did not enjoy the general story of the book but there are some concepts in it that would make a good story on its own), the distinction between memory and experience are minimal. It's true that we can, in essence, remember what we're experiencing as witnessed in the phenomenon of déjà vu. The feeling of returning to a previous point is essentially the idea that you're reliving a memory. The weird detached feeling of discomfort comes from trying to "remember" the present, and where it came before is here. 2046 includes a moment like that toward the end where Chow engages in a card game of "high-low" with a women (in this case, that bad grammar is purposeful, it's not a misspelling) named Su Li-Zhen.

People only enter 2046 in an attempt to reclaim lost memories. To retrieve an artifact that in their daily lives they attain a certain nostalgia for. The whole concept of reclaiming the past and time travel itself is funny because, as discussed in Charles Yu's novel, it seems that when people get the chance to reclaim lost tokens of the past, when time and space are at their disposal in fiction, they mostly dedicate their time to their own lives and their own past. Instead of adventures on the vast scale of glory that one would naturally expect, it's our own human folly that obsesses us the most. But as Faulkner said, in like the most overused-to-death quote of all time yet I'm about to use it again because it's that good, "the past is never dead. It's not even past."

A cooler quote should be used to describe the experience of watching a film from my favorite director...popularized by the Saint Ronald Reagan (who died for my sins and came back to life to wash, with his blood, the world pure again) is that, like the religious, I can watch a Wong Kar-Wai film and almost feel as if I've "touched the face of God." (not really but I had to throw in that line somewhere...I mean fuck it, when you hear the Gipper say it, it sounds dope.)