The magic of cinema makes any journey possible. This time the destination is Hong Kong. Your guide is the main poet of modern Asian cinema, Wong Kar-wai.
The film is set in 1960s Hong Kong. Journalist Chow Mo Wan (Tony Leung) and Su Li Zhen (Maggie Cheung) move into two adjacent rooms in an apartment building on the same day. Chow and Su share doubts about the spouses’ fidelity, having guessed that they were cheating on each other. Chow invites Su to reconstruct on their faces what is happening between their spouses-lovers, and little by little the border between game and true romance begins to melt. The number of the room where Mr. Chow lives, 2046, refers to Karwai’s upcoming film.
Chow (Tony Leung) returns to Hong Kong after several years in Singapore. He checks into a cheap hotel, where he first wants to rent room 2046, as this room reminds him of the past, but this turns out to be impossible and Chow moves into the next room, 2047. Most of the film tells of Chow’s relationship with the guests of room 2046. The main character previously worked as a journalist and now makes a living as a writer in Hong Kong. As prototypes for the heroes of his books, a mixture of pulp eroticism and fantasy, he uses real-life people: the hotel owner, all kinds of women, guests of neighboring rooms. In Chow’s books, he describes a fantastic future in which a gigantic transport network extends across the Earth, through which one can travel anywhere and anytime. He designates the year 2046 as a special time that people strive to reach. According to the 1984 Sino-British joint declaration, Hong Kong, where the film is set and where Wong Kar-wai himself spent most of his life, became a special administrative region of the People’s Republic of China as of 1 July 1997, and its citizens were guaranteed the preservation of all their fundamental rights and freedoms for the next 50-year period. 2046 is therefore the last year of “free life” in Hong Kong.
The film focuses on the stories of two police officers: Number 223 He Zhiu (Takeshi Kaneshiro) and Number 663 Wei (Tony Leung Chuwai). Both stories deal with loves lost and found in the neon-lit shopping corridors of Hong Kong at night. The film itself was shot in a record time of three weeks during breaks between filming another movie and became one of Quentin Tarantino’s favorite works. The name is also no coincidence and refers to the Chungking Mansions building complex in Hong Kong’s Tsim Sha Tsui district and the Midnight Express restaurant located there.
The first line tells of a killer (Leon Lai) and an assistant (Michelle Reis) who is unrequitedly in love with him, who clean up the traces of work. For several years of cooperation, they never saw each other. They managed to study each other’s habits well. Another story is about He (Takeshi Kaneshiro), a mute boy who unexpectedly falls in love with a girl he meets by chance. Karwai’s stories are completely different and their heroes are not destined to meet, but there is one detail in common: the scene is the Hong Kong night, which almost slips out of your hands. Conceived as one of the short stories of Chungking Express, the film continues to explore the random lives that collide on the streets of Hong Kong. The plot, consisting of several parallel lines, deals with the same themes as Karvay’s previous films: unrequited love, loneliness and divergent destinies, only in an even more minor tone.
A-Fei seems to have almost everything: he has money, opportunities, and the unconditional love of women. But he finds it difficult to live life in the moment; he is still lost in his past. So A-Fei builds a new coordinate system around himself: no obligations, no attachments, no feelings. This is the first film in which Wong Kar-wai’s signature style was expressed quite clearly and began to form what would later become the director’s signature style. Already in the debut “Until the Tears Dry,” which inherited Scorsese’s “Mean Streets,” Kar-wai’s interest in poetic inserts outside the plot clearly prevailed over predictable crime action. In “Days of Being Wild,” the craving for figurative language and intimate euphemism finally prevailed: this is a film in which the feeling of time slipping away is more important than any problems that befall the restless heroes. It is also here that Karvayev’s permanent accomplices in future projects and future stars of Asian cinema make their first appearance: actors Leslie Cheung, Tony Leung and self-taught cameraman Christopher Doyle.
