My favorite film*
2046 – All Memories Are Traces of Tears
It is awesome so I cannot really summarised it and you got to watch to appreciate that, it basically goes like:
From the Internet know-it-all, the wikipedia:
"The main character Chow Mo-Wan, ( Played by Tony Leung ), is an emotionally wrecked man writes science fiction stories, in which 2046 is a popular year and place to which people travel through time. The stories are titled 2046 and later 2047 (a collaboration with Faye Wong's character). Chow Mo-Wan still struggling to get over the loss of his idealized love, Su Li-Zhen. He returns to Hong Kong after being in Singapore for a number of years to try to forget his pain. To cover up his pain, he becomes a suave ladies man. Chow attends many lavish parties and beds many women. At the start of the movie, unable to get over his lost love. Chow was a prisoner of both the room and tried fruitlessly to recapture his past through the present by trying to play back those memories."
Therefore, 2046 is actually about the many impressions of repeated variations of the same theme: the pointlessness of returning to the past.
In the end, he realizes that these women will never be the same to his most beloved. The events and emotions displayed in this film help to reinforce the director's thesis that people cannot remain in their 2046s forever and need to some how find the courage to leave them. As Chow finally discovers, the notion of a mystical 2046 where nothing ever changes is, in reality, simply fictional.
*
*
I came to realized that maybe unknowingly, I seem to be trapped living in the present moment but leaving part of me somewhere just like many people. I am not sure why. Sometimes, we hope so to take the train to 2046 like Wong Kar-wai's movie to reach a mysterious place called 2046 in order to recapture lost loves and attachment to their past. In the world of 2046 nothing ever changes, so there is never loss or sadness.
But does time turn back when we hope so and have time turn back and return to what it was? Perhaps it lies and that certain slight comfort brings a bit of a hope and human cannot take much of a reality.
*
*
Sources, notes and external links:
For more information you can go to: The offical 2046 site
A review of 2046 from www.lovehkfilm.com
*The year 2046 has its own significance for Hong Kong. It is 49 years after the handover of Hong Kong by the British on July 1, 1997. At the time of handover, the Mainland government promised fifty years of self-regulation for the former British colony. The year 2046, then, references the moment before Hong Kong's special, self-regulated status ends.
Typical of Wong Kar-wai films, the arcs are presented in pieces and in non-chronological order with many scenes in the film involve characters conversing back and forth in different languages ( Japanese, Cantonese, Mandarin ). It is assumed that each character, while only speaking one primary language, is more-or-less fluent in the other languages.
*Wong Kar-wai’s movie is one of the few filmmakers working in commercial cinema who refuse to be enslaved by traditional storytelling, his avant-garde style create meaning through visual images, not just words.
