|
Kar-wai Wong (China, 1958) debuted with
Wong Gok Ka Moon/ As Tears Go By (1988).
Abandoning the linear narrative structure,
A Fei Jingjyuhn/ Days of Being Wild (1991), his first collaboration with
Australian cinematographer Christopher Doyle, is a rambling one-man odyssey whose
characters are all obsessed with love or the negation of love in all its forms,
whether erotic, filial or friendly. It hints an entire nation that
searches for love while trying not to fall in love.
Sex is a curse that makes everybody unhappy.
There are clocks everywhere (almost a fetishistic obsession with time keeping),
and the story takes place in
desolate environments: people don't change, the landscape does not change,
time keeps flowing senselessly.
The style oscillates from film noir to soap opera, from
documentary to expressionist.
Several narrating voices pop up during the film, usually just to represent
someone's stream of consciousness.
Doyle's cinematography would define Hong Kong cinema for an entire generation.
The first scene shows a jungle that is obviously not in Hong Kong, the
location of the story.
In 1960 an aggressive and arrogant young man, Yuddy/Tork,
seduces a girl he casually met while she was cleaning up at the stadium's
box office,
So Lai-Chun/ Su Lizhen. She is initially hostile to him but falls for an odd
pick-up line: Yuddy tells her that they are already friends for a few seconds,
so remember the date and time, April 16 at 3pm.
They slowly become lovers, meeting daily at his place.
When she asks him whether he'd ever marry her and he says no, she breaks up and disappears.
He coldly ignores her. Instead
he goes to visit his mother and finds her unconscious in the bathroom.
She's probably on drugs. He helps her to the bed than beats the hell out
of her lover, who also took two of her earrings.
His friend, the showgirl Leung Fung-Ying, better known under the monikers Mimi
and Lulu, takes the earrings and he lets her get them if she goes out on
a date with him. He takes her straight to his place, implying that he only
went out with her to have sex. She pretends she's not that kind of girl,
but then starts laughing when he uses violence.
By the end of the sex, she's the one who wants to keep in touch and meet again.
Again, he's callously cold and indifferent.
His mother comes to talk to him while he's having dinner with friends.
She's made at him for beating up her young lover. She is fully aware that
her lover only wants her money, but he makes her happy.
He is the one being moralistic.
She is not his real mother and refuses to help him find his biological mother
because she has nothing to gain from it. A former high-class prostitute,
she is
cynical and selfish, but at least honest and blunt.
So comes to see him: she wants to get back together. Yuddy is honest with her:
he's just not the marrying kind. Moreover, Mimi is in the other room and
makes a scene. So leaves quietly. Then Mimi yells at Yuddy and pretends she's
leaving. He coldly tells her that she won't be able to come back if she walks
out of the door; and she stays, justifying it to herself as "i'm not going to
be as stupid as the other one who left quietly". They make love.
It is raining in the street. A police officer, Tide, finds the desperate
So standing against a wall, sobbing and staring at the pools of water.
He lends her some money to get home. The following night she finds him
and returns the money, but mostly she needs someone to talk to.
They walk around the dark streets and she taks to him about her life.
The police officer spends several nights going back to the same place
where they met, hoping to see her again, but she's gone forever.
Yuddy's mom now wants to move to the USA with one of her old lovers.
Yuddy, again the moralizing one, thinks it's a stupid idea.
He needs her more than he's willing to admit.
She's practical: she'll be old soon and this could be her last chance.
Who's going to take care of her once she's too old to attract lovers?
Obviously, she doesn't trust that Yuddy will.
Since he insists, she tells him that his mom lives in the
Philippines.
Determined to find his biological mother, Yuddy decides to travel there,
no matter what. He leaves his car to his best friend Zeb.
When she cannot find him, a jealous Mimi assumes that Yuddy has gone back
to So and breaks into So's flat to make a scene, and So pities her.
He treated both of them like furniture. Mimi is truly devastated. She also
visits Yuddy's mom hoping to find out where Yuddy is.
Mimi finally learns the truth from Yuddy's best friend Zeb.
Zeb has always been in love with Mimi and now tries harder. She has no
interest in him. They even fight under the rain when he wants to gives her
a ride. She just wants to go to the Philippines. She is really in love.
Ashamed that he is driving in Yuddy's flashy car without being as cool as
Yuddy, Zeb sells the car and offers the money to Mimi to pay for a ticket to
the Philippines.
Meanwhile, Yuddy arrives at his mother's mansion only to be turned away:
she doesn't want to see him. He takes a room at a hotel where she meets
a Caucasian prostitute who later steals his money when he, drunk, falls
asleep on a sidewalk. His downfall continued with a
shootout in a train station where he is trying to buy a passport of the USA.
He and a new friend manage to jump on a train but one of the gangsters finds
them and kills Yuddy. The train is riding through the
jungle of the first scene. As a narrating voiceover, the new friend talks to
Yuddy's dead body: he is the police officer who loved So in vain. So told
used to ask him what he did on April 16 at 3pm. Yuddy replies that he remembers
nothing.
Mimi arrives in the Philippines;
So is at work at the stadium's box office;
the phone rings at the phone booth where So and the police officer first met;
the police officer wakes up in his humble flat with a low ceiling
and gets ready to go to work.
Dung che sai duk/ Ashes of Time (1994), reedited years later,
is the satori of Chris Doyle's
cinematography. The film is a container of interconnected stories borrowed from
Jin Yong's martial arts classic "The Eagle-Shooting Heroes".
They are set in an anarchic medieval society in which swordsmen administer
justice and revenge. Most of the action takes place
in or around a desert cave where the enigmantic protagonist (whose thoughts
delivered as voiceover "are" most of the action) lives and hides.
The visual style and the atmosphere often evokes Sergio Leone's western movies,
but often the oneiric element takes scenes to an extremely cryptic dimension
while minimizing the actual action.
The first episode explores morbid homosexual and incestuous themes, the others
toy with chronology, but the whole still feels fragmented and self-indulgent.
The best part of the film could arguably be the first minute, a metaphysical
purely visual introduction to the theme of deconstruction of heroism.
The protagonist is Ouyang Feng, a seasoned middleman who moved from the
mountains to the desert. He finds swordsmen for his customers.
In the first proper scene he is talking to a 40-year man (we don't see the
face), who is basically his typical customer: someone who can't bring
himself to kill but desperately wants to kill.
Ouyang's friend Huang visits him once a year. This time he brought a gift:
a drink that makes you forget. Huang drinks from it and does lose his memory.
Ouyang refuses to drink from it.
Huang has been haunted by twins, the girl Yin and the man Yang. Once Huang told
the effeminate Yang that he'd marry his sister. Yang wants
Huang dead because he did not go through with the wedding, but Yin has a
different version of the facts: she wants her brother Yin killed because he
disrupted the wedding. He offers money to Ouyang, she doubles the amount.
The brother eventually admits that he wants his sister all for himself.
Huang has no interest in either of them: his only love is his best friend's
wife. When Yang tells Ouyang how he met Huang, he implies that Yin and Yang
are actually the same: a young woman in disguise. Ouyang admits he cannot
tell Yin from Yang anymore.
At night he/she moves closer to Ouyang and touches him sensually.
She is imagining that he is Huang. Then she disappears. Later she becomes a
legendary female sword master.
One day a beautiful woman comes to ask for revenge against bandits who killed
her little bother but only has eggs and a mule to offer. Ouyang tells her that
swordsmen want money. She doesn't have the money to pay for a swordsman and
refuses to prostitute herself.
She camps outside Ouyang's tavern and wait for someone to help her.
An aging swordsman comes to ask Ouyang for help fighting the same bandits
that terrorize his village. He is going blind and is not sure he can fight
them himself.
Abandoned by his wife, who is in love with his best friend (Huang?), he
falls in love with the poor woman who is camped outside, knowing that he is
sealing his fate. He
then confronts the army of bandits by himself until he is killed.
Ouyang tells the story of how he discovered
Hong Qi as a young barefoot swordsman and turned him into a rich man
before he took off on his own with his wife.
We also learn that the Ouyang was himself a swordsman who left his love
back home and later discovered she had fallen in love with his own brother.
Hong Qi fights the bandits for the girl who wants revenge. He
loses a finger.
The woman begs Ouyang to save his life, but
Ouyang refuses to call a doctor because it's expensive.
Ouyang is testing if she's willing to prostitute herself to save Hong Qi.
A title tells us that in later life Hong Qi and Ouyang duelled and killed each other.
The fourth episode tells the story of the Ouyang himself.
He left the mountains the day his love married his brother.
She told Huang how she regrets her choice
and asked Huang to visit Ouyang yearly to bring her news.
That's why Huang visits Ouyang every year.
Huang appears to be in love with her himself, a secret he keeps from Ouyang.
Before dying of unhappiness she gives Huang the bottle he brought to Ouyang
that Ouyang refused to drink.
We are back to the beginning of the film.
After her death Huang withdraws to live like a hermit.
Ouyang receives the news that his love died and decide to
return to the mountains.
|
If English is your first language and you could translate my old Italian text, please contact me.
Scroll down for recent reviews in english.
|
The real protagonist of Chungking Express (1994) is solitude.
The film tells two stories, both centered on
lovesick lonely young
cops who have been dumped by their girlfriends, and creates two unlikely and somewhat comical couples:
a romantic cop with a cynical despondent gangster, and a
boring cop with an exuberant waitress.
The cinematography (by Andrew Lau and Christopher Doyle) is
a frenzied, breathtaking mix of
handheld shots and start-stop editing. The
vertigo-inducing camera movement, with
scenes filmed from twisted angles,
blurred backgrounds,
flashing distorted images, create a
sense of disorder but also a sense of unbound energy.
While indulging in a virtuosism of anti-virtuoso shots and
displaying unlimited visual creativity, Wong depicts
the eccentricity of loneliness.
The humor of the first part peaks with an inept seduction scene.
The second part occasionally borders on screwball comedy (with the two actors reminiscent of Cary Grant and Katharine Hepburn) but ends in surrealism and absurd theater and a funny version of psychological thriller, as each of the two lovers (who never consumed their love) become obsessed with each other in a senseless game to never live together.
The four main actors were Asian celebrities: pop idols Takeshi Kaneshiro and Faye Wong, actress Brigitte Lin Ching-hsia and actor Tony Leung Chiu-wai.
A woman wearing sunglasses and a blond wig walks through a chaotic building.
The narrating voice introduces himself, a plainclothes cop named Qiwu, badge
number 223. He chases a thief inside the same building and runs past the woman.
Later he mades a call to a couple of friends, who are also friends with his
ex-girlfriend May, but pretends not to be interested in her. He then receives
a page from his friend Ming and assumes he has a message for him from May, but
Ming just wanted to say "hi". He is using the public phone of a fast-food stall.
The owner sees how melancholic he looks and invites him to go out with his
server.
Meanwhile the mysterious woman of the first scene is instructing a group of
Indian men on how to smuggle drugs. She takes them to the airport but somehow
loses them. The narrating voice is now the woman who notices the expiration date on a can of sardine and tells us that time is running out for her and she'll
be in trouble if she doesn't find the Indians soon.
Then the cop tells us that he is buying cans of pineapple that will expire
on his birthday (the same expiration date): if his girlfriend doesn't call him
by then, he will severe all ties with her.
This is not easy because his birthday is the following day and most shops
already sold the cans with that expiration day.
Meanwhile,
the woman returns to the chaotic building full of Indians and looks for her men. When a shopowner refuses to help her, she even kidnaps his little daughter, but
in vain.
We see a fast chase in a narrow alley and the cop tells us that he just nabbed somebody.
He sits down on the steps of a shop and meditates that everything has an expiration date.
Meanwhile, the woman is followed in a basement by a crowd of Indians who try to kill her but she is a faster shooter and runner and jumps into a subway train.
Meanwhile, Qiwu is eating his 30 cans of pineapple and even offers some to his dog. He then walks to the food stall and uses its phone to call girls he has known for years but they are either not interested in going out with him or are already married. And then he throws up all the pineapple in a bar's restroom.
It's just past midnight and it is his birthday: his patience for his ex has expired.
He decides to sleep with the first woman he meets.
In that bar he sees the drug smuggler who is drinking alone. His pick-up line is to ask her whether she likes pineapple... He thinks she's lonely and heartbroken when in fact she's worried for her life.
They drink until closing time. Then they take a hotel room but she falls asleep and he simply eats and watches television. At dawn he takes off her shoes,
polishes them and leaves the room.
When the woman wakes up, she walks to a bar and kills a Caucasian man who has
just slept with a woman who was also wearing a blond wig (and the man dies next to a can of sardine with the expiration date of that very day, the usual expiration date).
Qiwu is back at the food stall and the owner introduces him to a new server, Faye.
This ends the story of Qiwu because he tells us that
six hours later Faye fell in love with another man and the film shifts to this
man, uniformed cop #663.
He comes to get some food and she serves him while listening
and dancing to loud music ("California Dreamin'").
When he comes back, she stares at him while washing the surfaces.
He tells the shopowner that his girlfriend left him.
He tells us that she was a flight attendant and we see a flashback of them
making love.
The flight attendant actually comes looking for him at the food stall and leaves
an envelope for him. The curious shopowner secretly opens it with steam
and reads it. She is curious too: when she opens it she finds his apartment
keys and his address.
When #663 returns to the stall, Faye tells him that the flight attendant
left him a letter but he doesn't want to read it so she leaves it there.
One day she hears that #633 took a day off because he's sick.
He's actually just miserable and pitying himself.
He meets him at a food market and he helps her carry a heavy basket of vegetables.
She tells him that she's saving money to travel to California.
She dreams that she was in his apartment. He is actually thinking of when
his girlfriend used to hide in his apartment. And we see the crazy Faye hiding in it.
Faye is using his house keys to visit his apartment when he's out.
She tells her boss that she's out paying the electricity bill when in fact
she's at the cop's home, cleaning his shower, washing his dishes,
and playing like a child in his bedroom.
She comes back to the cop's apartment to dust off, tidy up and organize
all sorts of items.
Comically, she cries when she finds a long hair on his pillow and analyzes it
with a magnifying lense.
Somehow he doesn't realize that someone is doing all of this inside his
apartment.
One day he finds the apartment flooded although he doesn't remember leaving
the faucet running.
She is coming in when he opens the door and she gets scared seeing him,
so scared that she gets a cramp on her leg. He brings her in and massages her
leg.
He plays a CD dor here and it's her favorite song ("California Dreamin'"):
he claims it was his ex-girlfriend's favorite song but Faye knows that he's
lying because... she's the one who left that CD there.
He is totally clueless that his entire apartment has been reorganized.
Distracted by her secret errands, she forgets to pay the electricity bill and the food stall has to light candles when the electricity goes off.
The cop's narrating voice tells us that he started noticing differences but
can't quite grasp what. He even finds a picture of Faye as a child posted
on a mirror but can't quite remember who that is.
The problem is that, when he's home, he is still consumed by memories of his ex.
He doesn't even realize that the teddy bear left by his ex has mutated into
a big cat (left by Faye).
One day finally he catches her as she's walking out of his apartment.
Panicking, she locks herself in, hides in a closet, and sneaks outside.
He confronts her at the food stall. She is scared but he simply asks her for a date: he has finally found out what happened.
She gets super-excited.
However, she doesn't show up for their date: the shopowner tells him that
she quit her job and left for California (their date was at a club called
"California").
One day he meets his ex but she's with someone else and he watches them
leave on a motorcycle.
He tells us that Faye's farewell letter only contained a boarding pass dated one year later and the destination wasn't readable.
Faye tells us that she did show up for the date but it was raining and she decided to go and checkout sunny California instead for one year.
The boarding pass was her cryptic way to say that she'd be back in one year.
One year later, crazy Faye returns from California, wearing the uniform of
a flight attendant, and finds out that the food stall has a new owner:
#663 himself, and he's playing her favorite song, as loud as she used to.
He invites her to stay but she tells him that she has an early flight.
She was so obsessed with the cop's private life
that she became a flight attendant like his former girlfriend, and he became
so obsessed with Faye that he bought the food stall where she used to work
and plays the music that she used to play.
She is leaving again but she wants to leave him another boarding pass and asks
him where he'd like to go, and he replies that he'd like to go wherever she will take him.
Il poliziotto #223 vive un'esistenza solitaria, convinto di poter riconquistare
la donna che l'ha appena lasciato. Le uniche conversazioni le ha con il padrone
di un food stall che vorrebbe presentargli la sguattera.
Ha deciso di aspettare il ritorno della sua ex fino al giorno del suo compleanno, e compra scatole di ananas che scadranno quel giorno.
Una gangster che porta sempre gli occhiali scuri e una parrucca bionda sta intanto istruendo un gruppo di Indiani su come contrabbandare droga.
Li accompagna all'aeroporto,
ma li` scompaiono, con la droga. Comincia cosi` a vagare per le strade della
citta` alla loro ricerca.
#223 decide di sedurla, ma piu` che altro si
ubriacano insieme. Prendono una camera d'hotel, lei si addormenta e lui non la sveglia. La mattina lui le
pulisce le scarpe e se ne va.
La donna non ha pieta` nel liquidare chi si mette sulla sua
strada, ne' nel prendere in ostaggio una bambina per ricattare un amico degli
Indiani. Ma alla fine viene altrettanto brutalmente liquidata dagli Indiani.
Nel frattempo il food stall ha assunto una nuova sguattera, l'energetica Faye
(che ascolta sempre ad alto volume la canzone "California Dreamin'").
Faye si innamora del poliziotto #663, reduce da
un'avventura con una hostess. La hostess lascia proprio a Faye una busta per
il poliziotto, e Faye la legge gelosa e ci trova la chiavi del suo appartamento.
Avendo l'indirizzo del poliziotto e le sue chiavi di casa,
penetra di nascosto in casa sua, gliela riordina e pulisce.
Gli cambia persino il teddy bear lasciatogli dalla sua ex con un gatto.
Lui non si accorge di nulla
finche' un
giorno non la sorprende in flagrante. Il flirt fra i due finisce presto, perche'
alla prima "date" Faye non si presenta, e #663 scopre che e` partita per
la California, dove intende diventare un'hostess.
Anni dopo Faye ritorna al vecchio food stall, e scopre che e` stato rilevato
proprio da #663.
Fallen Angels (1995)
Il film segue cinque personaggi.
Una donna delle pulizie.
Ming e` un killer a pagamento, freddo e spietato. Massacra un gruppo di persone,
poi sull'autobus incontra un vecchio compagno di scuola che lo invita al suo
matrimonio.
In un bar una chanteuse nevrotica suona il juke-box.
Una ragazza fuma e si masturba vestita su un letto .
La polizia cerca un uomo che si nasconde in uno sgabuzzino.
He e` un barista che si diverte a penetrare illegalmente nei negozi di altri
e si diverte a gestirli. Costringe gli avventori a pagare per essere lasciati
in pace. He e` il comico della situazione, il giullare della tragedia.
Sequestra persino un'intera famiglia in un van di gelataio e li costringe
a mangiare un gelato dopo l'altro. Vive con il padre in un appartamento
angusto.
Il killer compie un altro massacro a pagamento, evitando la trappola che
gli hanno teso. Rimane pero` ferito.
Una canzone del juke-box e` un messaggio alla sua ex-partner.
Una bionda prostituta un po' isterica lo convince a riposarsi a casa sua.
La bionda e` una pazza scatenata che si innamora subito di lui. E` in realta`
una sua ex, di cui lui non si ricorda.
La donna vestita si masturba di nuovo sul letto e piange.
Il muto consola Charlie, che e` stata abbadonata da Johnny ed e` disperatamente
alla ricerca della donna con cui questi sta per sposarsi, Blondie.
La porta in moto sfrecciando nel tunnel alla ricerca di Blondie.
Non la trovano, perche' Charlie non sa dove vive. Ma lui le offre una bambola
gonfiabile su cui sfogare la sua ira.
Quando finalmente trovano Blondie, e` una vecchia megera odiata da tutti e
nel locale si scatena una rissa.
Alla fine rimangono soli a guardare nel vuoto, lei assorta e lui teneramente
tentato, ripresi in bianco e nero.
Di nuovo in moto sfrecciano nel tunnel.
Ming cena al ristorante gestito da He.oHe fa un videotape del padre
perseguitandolo giorno e notte. E` il suo modo di scrivere una lettera.
Era il compleanno del padre, morto da qualche tempo. Adesso He non resiste
alla tentazione di guardare quel video in continuazione.
Charlie e` impazzita di dolore, gioca con la carta igienica.
Ming va incontro al suo destino: sono pigro, non mi piace prendere decisioni,
lascio che gli altri le prendano per me. Questa volta viene ucciso.
E` passato del tempo. Il padre e` morto. He vede una hostess che e` Charlie,
ma lei neppure lo riconosce.
La chanteuse medita in un locale in cui si e` scatenata una rissa, indifferente
a tutto.
Il muto viene picchiato, ma e` sempre allegro.
Il muto prende la chanteuse sulla moto e si avvia nel tunnel.
La cronologia degli eventi non e` chiara. Alcune scene sono flashback.
I personaggi raccontano la loro storia, per cui tutto il film e` un gigantesco
flashback non sequenziale.
Tutti sono infelici e aspettano soltanto un'occasione per morire.
Gran parte delle scene sono interni, sia del metro o delle abitazioni o
dei negozi o dei tunnel.
|
|
Chun Gwong Cha Sit/ Happy Together (1997)
In the Mood For Love (2000) is a "Rohmer-ian" comedy that deals with the
feelings of a couple of ordinary people. It is a more ordinary
film than his previous ones, but shaken by a more violent emotion.
Mr Chow and Mrs Chan relocate to the same apartment building on the same day
and can't help meeting. We never see his wife and her husband, but they are
both happily married. She is a secretary and he is a writer. Their social life
is limited to their landlords and landladies. Mr Chow has a friend, Ping.
Mrs Chan takes care of her boss Ho's private life.
They are both polite and diligent.
One day Chan guesses that her husband's "business trips" hide an adulterous
relationship and that her lover is Mrs Chow. Mr Chow does not suspect yet,
but soon is estranged from his wife following a quarrel. One day the two
betrayed meet and reveal each other's truths and feelings: Mrs Chan has noticed
that Mr Chow wears the same tie her husband wears and Mr Chow has noticed that
Mrs Chan has the same purse his wife has: they all come from the same source.
So both have guessed. They start seeing each other discreetly and most of their
conversation is really about the other couple. They are especially curious to
find out how it starts.
They find out because it slowly starts happening to them.
But they can't be like the others. He is soon sent to Singapore and then
to Cambodia by his newspaper. When Mr Chow finally returns to Hong Kong,
he finds that everything has changed.
|
(Translation by/ Tradotto da Betty)
In the mood for love è una commedia "Rohmeriana" a proposito
dei sentimenti di una coppia di persone comuni. È inoltre un
film molto più ordinario dei suoi precedenti e la tecnica narrativa diretta non regge bene la fragile storia. Il sig. Chow e la sig.ra Chan si trasferiscono nello stesso giorno in diversi appartamenti dello stesso piano di un palazzo e non possono evitare di incontrarsi. Non si vedono apparire i relativi moglie e marito, ma sono entrambi sposati felicemente. Lei e’ una segretaria e lui
è uno scrittore. La loro vita sociale è limitata ai relativi
padrona e padrone di casa. Il sig. Chow ha un amico, Ping.
La sig.ra Chan si prende cura della vita privata del suo capo Ho. Sono entrambi gentili e diligenti. Un giorno Chan pensa che i viaggi di affari di suo marito nascondano una relazione extraconiugale e che l’amante sia la sig.ra Chow. Il sig. Chow non ha ancora il sospetto ma ben presto e’ stranito dalla moglie in seguito a una discussione. Un giorno i due traditi si incontrano e si rivelano l’un l’altro sentimenti e verità: La sig.ra Chan ha notato che il sig. Chow porta la stessa cravatta di suo marito ed il sig. Chow ha notato che la sig.ra Chan ha la stessa borsa che ha anche sua moglie: tutti provengono dallo stesso luogo. Così entrambi si rendono conto. Cominciano vedersi discretamente e la maggior parte della loro conversazione e’ sinceramente rispetto all’altra coppia. Sono particolarmente curiosi di scoprire come il tutto sia cominciato. E lo scoprono, perché lentamente comincia a succedere anche a loro. Ma non possono essere come gli altri. Ben presto lui viene trasferito a Singapore e poi in Cambogia dal suo giornale. Quando il sig. Chow infine ritorna ad Hong Kong, nota che tutto è cambiato.
|
2046 (2004), ostensibly a continuation of Mood, is actually
a sophisticated hybrid of quotations:
the Proust-ian theme of melancholy memory,
Josef von Sternberg' baroque visual style,
the stereotypes of the pulp science-fiction novel,
the doomed atmosphere of the film noir of the 1950s,
replete with a brilliantined hero and femme fatales,
and Wedekind's expressionist theater.
It is particularly striking how differently he visualizes women and men.
The psychology of men is only superfically sketched, and mainly summarized in
traditional stereotypes (the young ones want sex, the older ones want morality).
In fact, we learn almost nothing about the putative male protagonist: we don't
even learn why he is writing the novel (which, in any case, feels more like
the subconscious of one of the girls who talks to herself all the time).
The women, instead, are elaborate masterpieces of long atmospheric takes
drenched in oneiric colors. Wong is a distracted passer-by when it comes to
men, but a voyeur and fetishist when it comes to women.
It is only after we have followed his adventures for two hours (mostly inside
hotel rooms) that we begin to know the protagonist.
Wong is masterful in shifting the mood of the story: the life of the libertine,
through the girl who devotes herself to an impossible love story, is
suddenly permeated by a sense of loneliness. Then we learn of how he lost the
woman he loved, and became immune to the love of other women.
Wong toys with the number 2046, which is,
coincidentally, the year mandated by the government of China for full
assimilation of the former British territory of Hong Kong.
There are also frequent, documentary-style references to the riots that
consumed the colony in the 1960s, contrasted with the lazy, languid,
decadent lifestyle of the hotel.
The voiceover of a young Japanese man
explains that
people travel by bullet train to 2046 in order to retrieve their memories.
He is the first one to ever come back, so he is the only person who knows
what truly happens in 2046...
Chow Mo-wan, a middle-age man, used to
live in Singapore, where he fell in love with a sexy gambler, Li-zhen,
who one
day played a card game with him and won, her victory meaning that he had to
leave her behind. Mo-wan moved to Hong Kong in 1966, at the time of the
student riots. Indifferent to the social revolution, Mo-wan took on the life of
a committed libertine while working as a humble journalist.
He meets again a woman he used to date in Singapore, Lulu, who doesn't even
remember him, although he was one of the friends who paid for her passage to
Hong Kong. She gets drunk and, when she passes out, Mo-wan carries her to her
hotel. As a real gentleman, he simply takes her shoes off and then he leaves her
alone. On the way out he notices that she is staying in room 2046, which
happens to be a familiar number (the year when Hong Kong will be fully
assimilated into China). The narrating voiceover explains that 2046 became the
title of the book that he is currently writing (hence the science-fiction
beginning was just the beginning of the book that he is writing).
Mo-wan comes back two days later but there is no trace of Lulu, who was
actually registered as Mimi.
Mo-wan takes the room next door, 2047, because the owner does not want to rent
2046. Later, Mo-wan learns that
Lulu was stabbed to death by a jealous boyfriend.
Nonetheless, Mo-wan decides to stay. He is intrigued by the daughter of the
owner, Jing, another beautiful woman but of a completely different kind: she
was forced by her Japanese-hating father to break up with her Japanese boyfriend (the one who
introduced the sci-fi story "2046") and now she
spends her days talking to herself loud enough that Mo-wan can hear her from
his room. Mo-wan also meets the younger daughter, a precocious teenager
who repeatedly tried to seduce him in his room. Eventually this one runs
away with another man, and Mo-wan learns that the older one is at the
hospital for mysterious reasons. Meanwhile, Mo-wan keeps writing his sci-fi
tales titled "2046" in which he casts some of his old flames as sexy androids
in scenes probably reminiscent of his own sexual escapades with those girls
(and Jing's Japanese boyfriend Tak as the time traveler).
Mo-wan even reimagines the stabbing and cries thinking about it.
All the time he keeps womanizing around. One day a new guest moves into
room 2046, a sexy woman, Bai. At first he hears her when she bangs against the
wall complaining that he is making too much noise during one of his sex tour
de forces.
Mo-wan guesses correctly that she must be a call girl and even tries to sell her
to his best friend even before having met her.
Then he meets her and falls for her sophisticated manners.
They spend a tender Christmas day together. She has just been dumped by a
boyfriend who had promised to take her to Singapore. He thinks she is now
his girlfriend but she does not show up at the fancy dinner he throws for her
with his friends. Later, however, they have wild sex. Mo-wan insists on
paying for it, even if just a token amount, and this becomes a tradition:
they have the most passionate sex but he always pays for it, and no sex when
he is broke. When he travels to Macao for business, his best friend warns
Bai not to fall in love with Mo-wan because he is never serious with women.
Instead she falls in love. So far both of them have been having sex with
other people (she for business and he for pleasure) but now she wants
a monogamous relationship. Mo-wan smiles and politely rejects the offer.
Hurt, she cries. Indifferent to her tears, he simply tells her that she's
always welcome to come to his room when she's in the mood. He is perfectly
happy with the status quo, not surprised a bit that she would like to upgrade
it to a real relationship, but also not interested at all in it.
The wall that separates room 2046 and room 2047 is thin.
She tries to make him jealous by having very loud sex with other men, but
instead it's her who suffers when she hears the orgasmic moaning of his many
girlfriends. Eventually, she moves out and continues her career of call girl.
At the same time the owner's daughter Jing moves back in after her mysterious
disappearance. She resumes her talking aloud and her arguments with her
father about the Japanese boy. Mo-wan offers to help her: let the Japanese boy
send the letters to him so her father will not know anymore. He also helps her
find a job so she can move out. They become good friends. She's also an
aspiring writer and Mo-wan realizes she's actually better than him. She begins
to ghost write his stories when he's sick or tired. He begins to write stories
in which she is a character, an attractive android attendant on the train to
2046. Her father is the train's conductor. The Japanese boy chats amicably
with her father and makes love to her. (These stories, of course, feel more like
the subconscious of Jing, the girl who used to talk to herself all the time and
now is becoming a writer).
Mo-wan invites her to dinner on Christmas Eve. Jing is unhappy: she has decided
to break up with the Japanese boy, feeling that it's an impossible story.
Mo-wan keeps writing more and more melancholy stories about the android and the
Japanese time traveler, now part of a book titled "2047".
Instead, a few days later the hotel owner tells Mo-wan that he's going to Japan
to attend... Jing's wedding.
The man also tells Mo-wan that Jing likes "2047" but would like a happy ending.
Trouble is, Mo-wan doesn't know how to write happy endings. He meditates that
he wasted the happy ending with Bai.
Fate makes him encounter again both Lulu, who is still the same jealous bitch,
and Bai, who needs references to be hired in a night-club.
A flashback shows what happened in Singapore in the old days. He was gambling
in the hope to win enough money to travel back to Hong Kong.
He was fascinated by the female professional gambler of the
casino who always wore black, nicknamed "Black Spider". She took pity of him
and helped him win the money he needed. He had told her of another woman also
called Li-zhen whom he had loved: unfortunately she was married, and only
briefly they lived together in a hotel room, number 2046. The black spider
Li-zhen understood that Mo-wan was in love with that ghost, not with her,
and refused to tell him her own past. Whatever the reason, she refused to
follow him to Hong Kong, despite crying bitterly when they parted.
He went back years later looking for her at the casino, but nobody knew what
happened of her.
Now he is having a melancholy goodbye dinner with Bai. She is the one leaving:
she got enough money to move to Singapore after selling herself to an old man.
She timidly tries one more time to invite him to her place but he simply
wishes her a nice life and walks away, still indifferent to her love.
She cries again.
Mo-wan takes a taxi home, alone again.
My Blueberry Nights (2007) is his worst film ever.
Yi Dai Zong Shi/ Grandmaster (2013)
|
|
