When the Mood Strikes

Wong Kar-Wai Requites His Earlier Work

BY CHLOE MALLE

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With his latest film 2046, Cantonese director Wong Kar-Wai offers an intentionally fruitless response to the recurrent themes of solitude, loneliness, and unrequited love that haunt the body of his work. These themes appear most dauntingly in In the Mood for Love, the 2000 prequel to 2046, which is now in theatres in the US, and coming soon to the Avon.

In the Mood for Love is a stylized and sensual pas de deux in which one partner is always looking beyond the gaze of the other. Wong creates a montage of two alienated lovers in 1962 Hong Kong. Neighbors linked by the discovery of an affair between their respective spouses, Chow Mo-Wan (Tony Leung) and Su Li Chen (Maggie Cheung) develop a relationship inspired by their shared secret, but stifled by restrictive codes of shyness and proper conduct. Chow explains to his colleague, "In the old days, if someone had a secret they didn't want to share... you know what they did? They went up a mountain, found a tree, carved a hole in it, and whispered the secret into the hole. Then they covered it with mud. And left the secret there forever." These themes of concealment and the unspoken reverberates in the loneliness that plagues the protagonists. When Chow finally risks the safety of silence and reveals his secret to Chen, asking her to come away with him to Singapore, she declines his offer and as quietly and hypnotically as it began their love affair sifts away into the rapturous score.

"Mood is an erotic depth charge; 2046 is the pattern made by its aftershocks," summarizes critic Nathan Lee. 2046 offers an escape from the constant, all-consuming quality of time and Chow's memories of a love that was not returned. In this escape is the potential comfort of company and the familiar - a comfort only provided by the malleability of memory that allows our loneliness to momentarily dissipate through the manipulation of what was. This escape is created by Chow in the form of the novel he writes, 2046; the sporadic, 3D-like shots of a science fiction set that punctuate the film are excerpts from this novel. The film and novel begin with Chow's narrative:

"Every passenger who goes to 2046 has the same intention. They want to recapture lost memories because nothing ever changes in 2046. Nobody knows if that's true because nobody's ever come back."

The film moves on to blend the science fiction narrative of Chow's novel into a series of love affairs taking place in 1966 Hong Kong. 2046, the novel, is sparked when Chow returns with an old girlfriend to her hotel and discovers a familiar room number, 2046. The same number of the room where he did or did not consummate his affair with Chen, four years earlier. That this memory, this clear cut back to the subtle prequel, is the inspiration for Chow's novel speaks to the idea that Chow's novel is his attempt to evade chronological time and address the subjectivity of memory:

"I once fell in love with someone. After a while, she wasn't there. I went to 2046. I thought she might be waiting for me there. But I couldn't find her. I can't stop wondering if she loved me or not."

The opening of 2046 is both foreign and familiar. While the eerie luminescence and warped Times Square quality of the science fiction set unnerves us, Chow's narrative voiceover is bitterly relatable as it attempts and fails to outwit loneliness through memory. The hope of returning to another time through memory, of freezing what is, without the fear of what will become, is familiar to us all. It is the only hope at escaping from an often impenetrable solitude.

"They want to recapture lost memories because nothing ever changes in 2046."

"Why can't it be like it was before?"

There is an innate and obvious desire to return to the memory, to rely on it. Because in the memory there is still the hope that our love will be returned, the bubbling uncertainty of what our love will become and whether it will be shared: that moment when we search for the answer, because we are in constant search for answers, for the finality of what this love might become. However, when things become certain and it is clear that our love will not be returned, we reach back for that translucent time, the moment when love could have been. Because in the after hours of bitter but requested certainty, memory is the only companion we will endure.

Chow is our representative, the mascot of all lovers sickened by lonely abandon, and most likely an incarnation of Wong himself, as he appears the tortured protagonist of three of the writer/director's films. Chow is first seen in the mysterious finale of Days of Being Wild (1991) preparing for a night on the town while smoking a cigarette. A decade later, we will see him again as he emerges on the town in In the Mood for Love. Now, while plunging ahead into the year 2046, he also returns to an earlier self.

Ground Control To Major Wong

Themes recurrent in Wong's oeuvre are addressed in 2046 but come to little resolution. In the film, 2046 represents the number of a hotel room, a place, a novel, and a distant time. Within all these manifestations it, above all, represents the attempt and the failure to manipulate time. Wong's other films pivot on the omnipresence of expiration dates while 2046 tries to evade them. In Chungking Express, Cop 223 buys thirty cans of pineapple with the expiration date of May 1. When he eats all these cans the night of April 30 he knows his love affair has, like the pineapple, expired. In In the Mood for Love, the dominant presence of time commands the love affairs and loneliness of Chow and Chen. The large, stark Siemens clock in Chen's office overwhelms most of the screen during phone conversations which provoke loneliness—such as her boss' extra-marital affair, and Chow's subtly desperate pleas to rescue him.

2046 also focuses on time and expiration dates, but it addresses how to avoid them, not how they guide our lives. 2046 is without time or space because both Chow's science fiction novel and his 1966 life in Hong Kong fuse into each other, making chronological time irrelevant. However, this lack of time and space does not deliver the freedom Chow envisions in his novel but rather confines and traps him in a pattern of not-quite-the-right-woman and lovelorn isolation. Memory is no longer an escape but rather a suction that swallows time and order. While Mood describes a masochistic relationship with time, which the protagonists both reject and depend upon, 2046 makes time its central theme and loses all clarity and order it ever provided.

Human control over time is the inspiration for the film's title and so the theme is appropriately continued throughout the narrative. 2046 searches for answers for unresolved lovers but it also seeks to understand unresolved political promises. Its title is drawn from the political anxiety caused by China's 1997 promise that nothing would change in the free-market zone of Hong Kong for 50 years. 2046 alludes not to the Hong Kong where nothing has changed in the form of a stagnant market but rather explores the notion of changelessness and how change contains and preserves memory.

The stylistic parallels between Mood and 2046 suggest the continuation of certain themes from one film to the next but a change of tone in 2046 conveys that it is also the labored and confused attempt at solving a complicated trigonometry equation. Mood presents the unsolved equation, with a lean and confined plot forcing our focus on two characters, while 2046 follows the extensive scratch work done to find the solution to the equation, using multiple characters fleeting in and out of the plot.

It is the scratch work that constitutes the fabric of the film, not the solution. The answer to the equation is left as a question to the audience, with the suggestion that this answer will not be found. The solution is not found and a deep anxiety rises from this and pervades the film, there is a feeling that an inevitable doom awaits us and Chow; a doom that Maggie Cheung could remedy, that reciprocated love could prevent but does not. Susan Sontag wrote, "Science fiction films are not about science, they are about disaster." In this case the disaster is the discovery that we cannot solve our loneliness. It cannot be solved by the pursuit of a substitute, or the creation of a timeless world; loneliness is a condition whose resolution is dependent on that other whose attention is both the cause and solution to this desperate and unsolicited isolation.

CHLOE MALLE B'08 is seldom in the mood.

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