2046
I watched Wong Kar Wai’s film 2046 again tonight, the third time I watched it.
It’s a nice movie, I’d mentioned it before. I like the way Wong put the issue of love and loss and loss of memory together. And while watching me and my mom can’t help comparing 2046 with Haruki Murakami’s novel Norwegian Wood…it just happened that I brought a book about Murakami, “Haruki Murakami and the Music of Words”
The story of 2046 took place in the late 1960's HK, the narrator is a lone novelist who wrote random things for newspaper for a living. Before he returned to HK, he had had an affair with a married woman in Singapore, they even rented a hotel room(Rm.2046) for their affair but soon people began to gossiping about them and they had to end the relationship. And the man ended up not knowing whether the woman had ever truly loved him or not.
Well, it’s the whole point of the story, to solve one of the greatest mysteries of love: to find out whether he or she had ever loved you truthfully or not…but the answer…usually there will be no answer.^^;
Soon after the narrator settled in HK and rented a hotel room(Rm. 2047) to stay, he started playing around with women, the film worn on to describe his relationship with one of his playmates, but the affair screwed up after the girl fell for him and he was unable to return her feeling…
Later the narrator secretly took a liking for the daughter of the hotel’s owner, whom is in love with a Japanese boy, but the hotel’s owner hate Japanese and forbid the girl from seeing the boy. Before the boy left HK, he asked the girl to leave with him, but she couldn’t and unable to even answer the boy’s last question.” How do you truly feel about me? Have your feeling for me changed already?” So the boy ended up leaving without even knowing whether she still loved him or not.
What the boy didn’t know is, the girl did love him but she was too slow to come up to this conclusion. She befriended the narrator and with his help she continued to write to her lover(behind her father's back). And at that point the narrator began to write an SF called “2047” based on the romance of the boy and the girl. (but because the narrator had fallen for the girl, so soon he began to imagine himself to be the Japanese boy.^^;)
In the SF settle of “2047”, there was a mysterious place called 2046 where people could get back their lost memories, there was only a special train could bring you to this place. No one knew whether the story of 2046 is true or not because no one had ever returned from 2046 before. In the story ‘the boy’ stared as the only visitor who had visited 2046 and DID leave from that mysterious place, he left because he originally wanted to find his lover in 2046 but sadly, she wasn’t there. But in the train leaving 2046 he fell in love with a robot girl servant (the hotel owner’s daughter) on the train, but the problem was, the robot girl was very VERY slow on reacting to the feeling of the others and her own feeling, as a result of staying on that special train for too long.^^;
So the boy tried to tell the robot girl he loved her and asked her countless of times whether she could leave with him (just like the narrator once did with his lover once in Singapore), but she never response. And in the story, sadly the boy began to doubt she didn’t make any response not because she was slow on reaction, but because she didn’t like him or she had someone else in her mind. Eventually he gave up and left the train.
Man! It’s my favorite part of the film!!>O<
Back into the reality world, the hotel owner’s daughter eventually did go to Japan for her lover and soon the narrator learned that they’re getting marry, and after the girl read “2047” in Japan, she loved the story but thought the ending was too sad and urged the narrator to re-write the ending. For hours he sat in front of some blank papers trying to re-write the ending but found he couldn’t do it.
The reason? Because he still hadn’t escaped from 2046 and moved forward to 2047 yet.u__u
Afterward I told my mom how the film reminds me of Norwegian Wood, goodies, Wong Kar Wai is truly THE Haruki Murakami on film-making! Then we moved on to the narrator of 2046 and tried to solve out did he really be unable to forget his lost love and why…but my mom insisted she doesn’t believe a person could miss someone else for that long, what the narrator truly misses may not only be the woman he’d lost, but also his own past, the old self he could never be again who once loved someone else so deeply like this. Well, it makes sense.^^;
Conclusion: having a love affair with a novelist is scary, coz u never know when will he or she decide to write the history you had with them into his or her novels.+_+