The Hong Kong Connection: Wong Kar-Wai’s 2046 and Japanese as the Language of Desire Rio Otomo Presented at the Imaging Japan Symposium, Monash University, February 2005
I am heavily indebted to Melbourne film critic Adrian Martin whose film reviews are masterful and always inspiring to me. In particular his article on Hong Kong director Wang Kar-Wai’s previous film, In the Mood for Love, which was published in Senses of Cinema, a Melbourne based film journal on the web. In the Mood for Love was released in 2000 and brought a Cannes Best Actor’s prize to Tony Leung who played one of the main protagonists along with Maggie Cheung. The film, 2046, was shot over five years and finally completed just in time for last year’s Cannes Film Festival. To everyone’s surprise, it came out empty-handed, but the strong impressions that the film made on the audience at the festival was overwhelming. For those who are unfamiliar with Wang Kar-Wai’s films, I could summarise that he has been a driving force of quality HK cinema that do not feature Kung Fu or cops and gangsters. His earlier work, Days of Being Wild, is now one of the canonical post-modern films; he also received Cannes Best Director’s prize for Happy Together in 1997. Since many of you would have not seen 2046, I will try not to spoil your first view in this presentation. And in fact, it is the nature of this film that makes it almost impossible to spoil your first view even if I tried to expose its main storylines in details. That is because the stories are unfolded like the heavily coated palimpsest, and we could forever uncover the layers of narratives only to find the empty core of the onion-like structure of this film. 2046 is a film critics’ treasure box; you could discuss it from every aspect of film-making such as script-writing, cinematography, artistic direction, costumes, screen sounds, casting, and the director’s notoriously idiosyncratic ways of shooting. He would shoot so many scenes only to keep editing until the last moment of film release. And he would also experiment by making actors swap their roles and play, and so on. You would find many internet sites that are dedicated to discussions on such topics. My approach today is slightly off the track of such Wang Kar-Wai enthusiasts’ discussion points. I must concede that this paper is at a nascent stage, and therefore, all I could do today is draw your attention to the following two aspects. One is the use of the sound of Japanese language, and the other is the philosophical stance of the film: anti-humanism. And I will try to explain how these two issues intersect. The mirror-images of katakana that appeared in the opening credit of Matrix were simply the mysterious system of signification in which limited groups of audience recognised the film’s subtle Japanese connection. In 2046 however, the film begins with the narrator’s monologue in Japanese performed by Kimura Takuya who is in fact a protagonist of sci-fi novel 2046 written by the real narrator of the film played by Tony Leung. This film, a sequel to In the Mood for Love (2000), is also set in the decadent ambience of 1960’s Hong Kong. The transition between the two narrators is undisruptive with both sustaining the identical masculine tones marked by their emotional control and a touch of resignation. While the difference between Japanese and Chinese is quickly disintegrated from the very beginning, so are the boundaries of Chinese dialects. The film magically carries the audience away to the ‘no man’s land’ between men and women. The daughter of the hotel owner, Jingwen (Faye Wong), practices Japanese, clinging to the faintest hope for her love affair with a Japanese man also played by Kimura: 行ってもいいですか, 行ってもいいですよ, 行こうか, 行ってみようか. The rhythm of her voice conveys the rhythm of her hesitation, her desire and her despair directly to the audience that do not know the language. A non-professional girl in 1960’s Hong Kong could never pursue her love affair with a Japanese business man. As she utters the language of the past enemy with such intensity of suppressed emotions, she paints over the violent history of that language with beautiful shades of feminine vulnerability. On the one hand, the film thus champions the genre of melodrama. But on the other, it deconstructs the humanist approach of melodrama. Adrian Martin correctly notes that melodramas are sustained by the notion that the protagonists are unique (irreplaceable) and always head above others even in the midst of their most intolerable suffering. There is that apparently in 2046. However, reading 2046 only from that perspective would fall short of understanding it. Each character in this film plays this melodramatic type in the hyper-stylish manner, and stories are repeated as characters are repeated. They are in fact repeatable and replaceable, if not disposable. In other words, characters multiply many times over, instead of being condensed like it should in the principles of modern characterisation. In the Lacanian sense the narratives are told metonymically, rather than metaphorically. The character in 2046 is not representing one but instead performing many. The life that the film presents is not a humanist version of our lives, in which case, as someone would too hastily conclude that this film is about memory or remembering the lost time. For example, Mr Chow’s memories of his desire and missed opportunities of love, and Wang Kar-Wai’s recounting of his memories of his childhood culture of Shanghainese community of HK in the 1960s. There is that in the film, but not only that. Using his cinematic technique, Wan Kar-Wai deconstructs the formation of the melodramatic self. In other words, to depict human condition, this film takes anti-humanist approach; it goes beyond the issues of identity such as class, nation, race, or even gender. The title of this film has a few references: the most obvious one being the year 2046 – the fifty-year mark of Hong Kong’s relative freedom that the Basic Law promises to the HK residents (focusing on that political aspects may not be successful, I might add, although tempting to do so); the hotel room number 2046 was the place where Mr Chow (Tony Leung) and Su Lizhen (Maggie Cheung) met for their rendezvous for their extra-marital affair in In the Mood for Love; the room number 2046 in this film is where Lulu (Carina Lau) gets stabbed by her jealous lover (Chang Chan). It is also the title of the SF novel that Mr Chow is writing for Jingwen (Faye Wong) who pursues her love affair with a Japanese business man (Kimura). Placing numbers and giving them significance have been one of the features of post-modern films, probably been inspired by earlier post-modern novels. The name – Su Lizhen – is also used in the same way the number is being used in this film. Maggie Cheung played Su Lizhen in Days of Being Wild (1994), and she also appears as Su Lizhen in In the Mood for Love. This time Su Lizhen was given to Gong Li who plays a mysterious gambler from Phnom Peng. The effect of this on both the Hong Kong audience and other dedicated Wong Kar-Wai enthusiasts of the world including those in the European film establishments would be equally clear; the film offers the audience a joy of referencing back to his previous films. Like postmodern architecture it heavily draws on earlier films and their characters, which is being enhanced by the particular way of casting. Wang Kar-Wai uses six famous female actors for this film, even borrowing some from the usual casts of Zhang Yimou, another Asian director who created Hero and The House of Flying Daggers. Zhang Ziyi, Carina Lau, Faye Wong, Gong Li, and Maggie Cheung who reappears as a flashback from In the Mood for Love, all play the feature heroine role whose intense emotions appeal to the audience as the distilled beauty of vulnerability. Zhang Ziyi, Carina Lau and Faye Wong, all play female androids in the SF version of 2046 where they also show their exquisite beauty that stems from their innate vulnerability. By putting together fragments of narratives Wong Kar-Wai frames each character in a box where no one can become a unique singular whole as a real persona. They instead become part of a large-scaled story which has no beginning or ending. The camera’s use of mise en scene – doors, walls and corridors in many shots imprison each character – gives the effect of enlarged human body parts which are always so fetishised by the camera’s eye and so hyper-real that each character in effect looses the sense of their oneness. The characterisation of these different female roles is not serious in the modernist sense of creation of unique individuals. Although the men appear to be in the seemingly central positions, they, too, lack the singularity. Tony Leung, Kimura Takuya, and also Chang Chan are often indistinguishable as camera catches the parts of their body, hair, hands, back, or shoulders. The difference between them is much harder to see for the Western audience who are not familiar with their faces. As the Western audience follow the subtitles, these Japanese, Taiwanese and Hong Kong actors are swapping places and taking turn to narrate differently without being noticed. The beauty of the film appeals to the audience equally, but the level of understanding can be multiple, which is another interesting point about this film.
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