Part Of The Picture: Of Machines and Men

OF MACHINES AND MEN

SEP 5, 2009 – CHOW MO-WAN (TONY LEUNG CHIU-WAI) IS AWARE THAT Wang Jing Wen (Faye Wong) is in love with a Japanese, and perhaps due to his own inadequacies in matters of the heart – he’s never gotten over the loss of his one great love – he takes it upon himself to help her. “I got her a job in the cloakroom at a club.” One evening, after work, he walks up to her and observes, “If you’re ready to go, I have a taxi waiting.” She says, “No, thanks.” Subsequently, this perennial ladies man reflects on this newfound burst of emotion, “Feelings can creep up on you unawares… I promised to write a story for her… Something to show her what her boyfriend was thinking… But maybe I was being too oblique. I’d begun to feel that it wasn’t about her boyfriend at all. Rather, it was more about me.”

“So I began imagining myself as a Japanese man on a train for 2046 falling for an android with delayed reaction.” This number is a reference to a story that Chow Mo-Wan was once writing, “A story called 2046. All about men and women looking for love, risking everything to get to a place called 2046.” It’s odd that he calls 2046 a place, because, earlier, he’s informed us, “In the year 2046… A mysterious train leaves for 2046 every once in a while. Every passenger going to 2046 has the same intention: They want to recapture lost memories… Nobody’s ever come back… except me.” The titular number, therefore, appears to be several things at once – a year in the distant future, a hotel room number from the shadowy past, the name of a story, as well as some sort of sanctuary, an amnion of happy memories that lovesick souls seek to escape to (and, once there, never seek to escape from, as “nobody’s ever come back.”)

We’re now inside the “mysterious train” in the story narrated by Chow Mo-Wan. An announcement rings forth. “We have a range of cabin attendants… They will serve you devotedly, like an intimate friend. But you must never fall in love with them.” The fictional Japanese hero – the stand-in for the narrator – wonders, “Who’d ever fall for an android? Who can say?” He then echoes a musing of the narrator’s. “Events can creep up on you without you ever noticing.” A second announcement bursts through his reverie. “Paragraph 201 in the Passengers’ Guide warns that Area 1224-1225 is especially cold. The train heating won’t be strong enough. Passengers are advised to hug each other to keep warm.” Our hero explains, “Since I’m the only passenger, I hug my android cabin attendant. I wonder if it’s her mechanism or just my imagination, but I sense some responsive warmth in her artificial body.”

The android (again played by Faye Wong) asks, “Why do you want to leave 2046?” Flashing back to the devastating conclusion of In the Mood for Love (whose protagonist was none other than Chow Mo-Wan), our fictional hero says, “Do you know what people did in the old days when they had secrets they didn’t want to share? They’d climb a mountain, find a tree, carve a hole in it, whisper the secret into the hole, and cover it up with mud.” The android offers, “I’ll be your tree. Tell me, and nobody else will ever know.” As our hero begins to whisper to her, the narrator takes over. “Whenever anyone asked why I left 2046, I gave them some vague answer. I once fell in love with someone. I couldn’t stop wondering whether she loved me or not. I found an android which looked just like her. I thought the android might give me the answer.”

He refers to the reality that after the loss of his true love, he has never given his heart to anyone – he shares only his bed, his body, and if this makes him something of an android himself, he also sees women as objects, and therefore they too are inevitably reduced to androids. “I kept on asking. But she never answered.” It’s time for another announcement, about the cabin attendants. “When they’ve served on so many long journeys, fatigue begins to set in. For example, they might want to laugh, but the smile would be slow to come. They might want to cry but the tear wouldn’t well up till the next day.” Again, this could well be a statement of fact about robotic humans like Chow Mo-Wan, who, after giving up on true love, now face “fatigue,” going through the mechanical motions of life.

The narrator continues, “Maybe the reason she didn’t answer was not that her reactions were delayed but simply that she didn’t love me… The only thing left for me was to give up.” But he doesn’t give up. The story trails off and we’re back in the real world, with Chow Mo-Wan and Wang Jing Wen, dining together the eve before Christmas. She says, “If you were [my boyfriend], what would you be doing tonight?” He says, “Why don’t you ask him?” And we cut to his office, where she’s on the phone with her boyfriend. Chow Mo-Wan says, “I took her to the newspaper office and let her make a long-distance call to her boyfriend. I was happy to see her so happy.” He knows now what the announcement in the train meant, the one that warned about Area 1224-1225 being especially cold. Those numbers are dates, “Christmas Eve and Christmas Day, [when] “people need more warmth than usual.” The spirit of the season has thawed his heart – and if only for that instant, he’s human from head to toe.

2046 (2004, Cantonese, Japanese, Mandarin). Directed by Kar Wai Wong. Starring Tony Leung Chiu Wai, Li Gong, Ziyi Zhang.

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Posted in: Cinema: Foreign