A discussion of Wong Kar-wai by Ed Howard and Jason Bellamy tackling five of the director's films (Days of Being Wild, Chungking Express, In The Mood For Love, 2046 and My Blueberry Nights) which I find particularly valuable for the fascinating and in many ways enlightening section devoted to the enormously complex 2046. I found this section particularly important:
Ed Howard: Chow's narrated insistence that he's the one person to ever return from 2046—implying that he's broken free of the past—is contrasted against the fact that we never actually see him breaking free of the past as the voiceover says he does. Instead, the film provides a happy ending for a character whose story parallels Chow's in many ways, and in whose life he intervenes, perhaps sensing a kindred spirit. Jing-wen (Faye Wong), the daughter of the owner of the hotel where Chow lives, has an on/off affair with a Japanese man, an affair that, like Chow's would-be romance with Mrs. Chan [in In The Mood For Love], is frustrated by circumstances. Jing-wen's father, remembering World War II and the often-barbarous Japanese occupation of China, is prejudiced against the Japanese and refuses to allow his daughter to see this man. When Chow moves into his apartment, Jing-wen is trapped, like him, in the past, hung up on a love that she just can't forget. She paces around the empty room next door to Chow—room number 2046, of course—reciting her lover's last words to her and rehearsing the words she could have said but didn't, the words that might have allowed her to avoid this heartbreak: "please take me with you." She's trapped in the past, trapped in 2046, just like Chow is.
Later, Chow will explore Jing-wen's story—and by extension his own—through the sci-fi fiction he writes, in which a man takes a long train ride away from 2046, away from the past, accompanied only by androids, versions of the various women in Chow's life. The android played by Faye Wong, a version of Jing-wen, has delayed reactions and can't express what she feels until long after the moment has passed. It's a very clever metaphor for the inability to connect in the present that leads to the backward-looking obsession with missed opportunities, like Chow's fixation on Mrs. Chan or like Jing-wen pacing around the empty apartment 2046, telling the space, yes I'll leave with you, long after the man she should have said it to had left. These people are out of sync with each other, like androids with faulty programming, like Mr. Chow and Mrs. Chan who could never quite get beyond their circumstances to express their real feelings to one another. Chow invents the concept of delayed reactions in his story ostensibly as a metaphor for Jing-wen and her Japanese boyfriend, but the story becomes about his own life too, reflecting his past with Mrs. Chan. It's also a kind of wish fulfillment for Chow: he sees Jing-wen broken up by her failure to say what she really wanted to say to her boyfriend, and he imagines that the same condition may have afflicted Mrs. Chan, that she too wishes she had said, "take me with you."
Chow's fiction is thus a way of rationalizing these failures to connect. People are out of sync with one another because they're malfunctioning, maintaining stoic, unrevealing expressions in front of those they care about, only smiling and crying later, only later saying the things they'd wanted to say when their loved ones were there. Chow himself, whispering his secret into a hole in the wall at the end of In the Mood for Love, is indulging in this temporal disconnection, expressing his feelings only when it's too late. Chow's sci-fi writing is another way of trying to work out the problems of the past, though again he can only express his feelings indirectly, by constructing androids who stand in for real women. By the end of the film, Chow, in the back of a cab alone, leaning against the door the way he'd once leaned on both Bai Ling and Mrs. Chan, hasn't quite decided to return from 2046 for good, but it's clear that he wants to, very badly, and that his stories are attempts to deal with the past, to close it off into a metaphorical fiction and write a happy ending.
The problem is that he doesn't know what that happy ending could possibly be, and it's telling that the one example of a happy ending that the film provides—Jing-wen finally moving to Japan and marrying her boyfriend, with her father's grudging acquiescence—involves not forgetting about the past but correcting the mistakes made in the past and being reunited with one's true love. Chow still can't imagine a happy ending that's not romantic. He can't imagine the happy ending where the gloomy romantic finally cuts ties with the heartbreak of the past and moves forward into a different life. Maybe that's the answer to your original question: Chow, as much as he might want to escape 2046, still isn't quite ready to do it by the end of the film.
Jason Bellamy:That's pretty much the way I see it, too. In the Mood for Love has an ostensibly heartbreaking conclusion with the scene at the temple wall, because Mr. Chow and Mrs. Chan are alone and, we know, don't need to be, and yet the conviction of Mr. Chow's love, evoked so well by the way he whispers into the wall, is so touching that it adds some sweet to the bitter. It's a textually sad scene that I find subtextually uplifting, suggesting a man who holds onto the past not because of an inability to escape it but out of respect for its significance. The conclusion of 2046, on the other hand, is textually hopeful, because Chow claims to have escaped 2046, but it's subtextually depressing, suggesting a man who has been inside his fantasy for so long that he can't distinguish between it and reality. The actual final shot, coming just after the shot of Chow slumped against the cab door, is a slow zoom toward what Manohla Dargis perfectly described as "a large cavity that looks at once like the amplifying horn of a Victrola and a sexual orifice of unknown provenance." Dargis argued that Wong "never explains the significance of the cavity because, like Kim Novak's blond twist of hair in Hitchcock's Vertigo, the image has a power that renders further explanation superfluous," and she might be right. But to me the zoom suggests a move into darkness, as if leaving reality to reenter the coziness of the womb [colinr0380 note: maybe this could provide a strange linkage to Enter The Void!]
EH:I want to stick with 2046 for a moment, since you brought up the very provocative image of the mysterious horn/hole that appears at both the beginning and the end of 2046. Obviously, that image is connected back to the hole into which Chow whispers his secret at the end of In the Mood for Love, so in that sense it's both a descent into darkness—because Chow has allowed his past to envelop him and overshadow his present—and a repository for passionate emotions. The presence of this mysterious horn suggests that in many ways 2046 is a feature-length expansion of that haunting scene from the end of In the Mood for Love. Throughout 2046, Chow is haunted by the secret he whispered at the end of the previous film, the secret that echoes through the bottomless chamber of that horn. At one point, the Faye Wong android tells the train passenger fleeing from 2046 that she will be his tree, that she'll hold his secrets for him, and this is a potent metaphor for Chow's cavalier treatment of women as a way of holding back the pain of the past.
The androids connect Wong's film to some of the 1960s films of one of his most obvious influences, Jean-Luc Godard, whose Alphaville and Anticipation both end with women—brainwashed, robot-like inhabitants of futuristic societies where emotion has been suppressed—rediscovering love and emotion, relearning how to express one's deepest desires both verbally and physically. Although 2046 ends with several nods in that direction, it doesn't quite strike such an optimistic note. At the end of the film, Chow is still out of sync with his present.
Moreover, Chow often doesn't treat the women in his life as people, but as objects. He'll attach himself to a woman to pass the time or to distract him from his pain, but he intentionally keeps these relationships casual and transitory—which is why he can so easily dehumanize these women by casting them as robots in his fiction. He occasionally connects with a woman at a deeper level, as he arguably does with Jing-wen, but not in a romantic way. In fact, the poetic idea of whispering a secret in a hole actually has vulgar, unpoetic connotations when the repository for the secret is a woman, an alternate meaning that Wong toys with several times here. For all the ways in which Wong is sympathetic to Chow's heartache in 2046, he's also fairly critical of the character's misogyny and self-absorption, his tendency to treat women as interchangeable stand-ins for the one woman who really meant something to him.
The pair then go on to discuss their problems with My Blueberry Nights. While I also find My Blueberry Nights to be a problematic film in some respects, I'm finding that I am really warming to it on repeated viewings and would not see it in quite so harsh terms as talked about in the article (I'd even tentatively try to argue against calling it a 'minor' work!) I particularly liked the use of 'original' and 'translated' music cues being switched up from In The Mood For Love. There is also a theme of being a 'settled foreigner' in a different country (as opposed to being a visitor, where a foreign trip can lead to a potentially liberating/traumatising confrontation with the past as in Days of Being Wild, In The Mood For Love or 2046) which seems to tie in more with Happy Together, which unfortunately is a film not focused on too much in the discussion. I found Norah Jones's rather open central character was used in an interesting manner too, acting as a kind of emotional vessel soaking up knowledge from the flawed but still understandable characters she meets on her long, looping journey, which works well when combined with the structure of her character moving from the fringes of a community to centre stage and being shown confidently applying the previous knowledge she has picked up during each section of the film at the beginning of the next one until she can, to refer back to the quote relating to 2046 above, get the chance to reconfront her own past and create her own happy ending.
In a sense My Blueberry Nights is a discreetly segmented tri-partite film similar to previous Wong Kar-wai films except with a central through line character involved throughout, witnessing and learning, whereas in previous films such as the separate sections of ChungKing Express (and Fallen Angels if we consider this to be the third story given its own release) or in the inter-relationship of characters between Days of Being Wild, In The Mood For Love and 2046 there is a complete break between bunches of characters existing in the same universe (or alternative universes!) but playing out different stories or only a very oblique connection to suggest a character continuing on into a different story - either way the sense of connection is often left in the eye of the beholder/audience to make the connections or see the resonances that the characters within the films cannot. My Blueberry Nights is fascinating for the way that the Norah Jones central character is taking on this role of witness and then using the lessons that she has learnt on her travels and applying them back to her potential relationship with Jude Law's bartender once she returns to New York.
