2046
2004
Dir. Wong Kar Wai
Cast: Tony Leung, Maggie Cheung, Zhang Ziyi, Takuya Kimura,
Gong Li, Faye Wong, Bird Thongchai McIntyre, Carina Lau
HONG KONG

This has to be one of my favorite movies. I felt bad that it was one of the best films screened at the 2004 Cannes Film Festival yet it didn't garner any award at all. Once again the autuer Wong Kar Wai creates a spectacle of pure beauty and sophisticated style.

The main themes of the movie are Morality and Reality. There is that carefully put and conceptualized character put into each segment of the film. There is a non-conformist and there is an android.



The two most striking characters for me were the android (Faye Wong) and the aging Don Juan stereotype writer Chow Wo Man (Tony Leung). The android which was beautifully protrayed by Faye Wong could not feel, yet there was this guy who made her feel something. They had sexual contact. It took the android a hundred years or more before she actually remembered that before she used to love another man. What came to my mind was how reality takes time to fully occur to oneself. All that we see are shadows and often just mere representations of things thus we are deceived. The loss of innocence will let one travel the realm where the reality is extant. The moment she made out with the passenger in the train, only then did she begin to realize something beyond the confines of what she was, a mere being, incomplete in that sense. She was barely a human being then. She already had knowledge about love yet all she needed was an experience to rekindle it. It reminded her of it that it led to her full understanding of what she has for long, ceased to see. An awakening to reality starts from the loss of innocence and knowledge alone is never complete without experience.



Chow Mo-Wan is an aging Don Juan who in the end loses his wanting of women. He had also lost memories. And in this movie people ride a train called 2046 to recover lsot memories. It is a bit complex with all the inter weaved storytelling yet the main character is Leung. I really love this character for he exemplifies the Overman or the Ubermensch of Nietzsche. He is a strong individual who is not weakened by
his bodily whims.

This is a visually stunning film, with the mis-en-scene well thought of and teh actors only Asia's best. Wong delivers the age old question of morality into simple looking ideas like love and existence with a complex subtext. With all that, seeing 2046 made me realize how one is delusionized by reclaiming lost memories without even thinking whether it would still be relevant to your existence. With Chow, he chooses to live in his solitude and it is nothing that compares to love. Solitude is the magnum of one's life; a heightened aloneness as Rilke calls it. It defines our individuality and ability to choose. All that we do is a choice. Chow may be a Don Juan but what makes him compelling both visually and contextually is that he challenges the human emotion and goes beyond it in pursuit of proper reason.