A.I. "2046"
Sunday, April 26, 2015 at 9:08PM Who’s ever fallen in love with an android?”
So wonders the train captain, jovially dismissive of his staff of beautiful female robots aboard a train leaving the futuristic district of 2046. The answer, as we know from the annals of cinematic and literary history, is many a man, and Tak (Takuya Kimura) is merely the latest.
Dave continues our artificial intelligence celebration after the jump...
Wong Kar-wai’s contentious, quasi-sequel to his beloved In the Mood for Love wraps this futuristic story up inside a fragmented narrative unfolding in the 1960s, as Chow Mo-wan (Tony Leung) struggles to connect with various different women after the heartbreak of his separation from Su Li-zhen (Maggie Cheung). While the visual depiction of artificial intelligence in 2046 is separate from the majority of the film’s plot, these sequences are in many ways the film’s core, the deepest and most complex iteration of its themes and emotions.
Tak’s story is written by Chow, and is an admitted refraction of both his own romantic woes and those of his landlord’s daughter, Wang Jing Wen (Faye Wong), whose relationship with her Japanese boyfriend is disrupted by her disapproving father. Wong plays the main android within Chow’s futuristic tale, and Kimura is her boyfriend in the main narrative – just two instances of the doubling of character that is so prevalent in the film, reflecting as it does the intense desire to recapture a feeling that has passed.
Glimpses of this futuristic world are strewn throughout the film, but in the film’s second half, it submerges itself in the story thoroughly enough to switch the voiceover from Chow to Tak, fully immersing us in this fiction within fiction. “I’d found an android that looked just like her,” he reveals longingly, but while Wong’s android might revel in sexual encounters with Tak and offer support, she is neither a replacement nor a successor to his lost love. The presence of these androids and the male attitudes towards them reflects the piquancy of the overall narrative in its depiction of female roles, recognising how both Tak and Chow reduce them to figures on which their sorrow can be placed, and on whom their fantasies can be enacted
Faye Wong, along with Carina Lau (who also reprises the role of Mimi/Lulu from Days of Being Wild, part of Wong’s loose trilogy), performs the android with the jerky artificiality you’d expect of robots, eyes and head moving as if in stop-motion, in tiny but obvious degrees. They’re costumed in a punkish take on ‘60s ideas of space travel: shiny fabric and sharp contours, combining an alien angularity with an erotic shimmer. Ultimately, through the narrative’s brief but poignant development of this segment, their appearance disguises their complexity in much the same manner as Chow’s broken heart does to the women in his life: the exterior is a shell created to mask inner pain.
Tak’s beloved android begins to fail, apparently faster than the average android. Far from the “delayed reaction” he initially suspects is delaying her proclamation of love, he ultimately identifies that “she didn’t love me” – “more likely she already loved someone else”. Wong Kar-wai never confirms this, resisting the male insistence that a woman should love – and an android at that. Instead, he depicts the android leaving Japan via another train, gazing out of the window in the same post as intertitles pass incidental time – “100 days later”, “1000 days later”. Christopher Doyle’s typically beautiful photography captures Wong’s unreadable expression both in reality and in reflection, duality continuing into the forever. 
Doyle’s cinematography captures the light and the shadows of the train, red light sexualising the space but also fevering it, especially as Carina Lau’s android approaches down a corridor, her tears wiped away for a bright, false smile. In a future where women seem only to be androids – at least as the world is presented to us – we’re compelled to question what that means, and whether androids, and indeed woman, can exist as affectionate creatures in Chow’s world.
The future becomes something that hangs on this wounded writer’s emotional whims, ostensibly provoked by women like Su Li-zhen and Bai Ling (a fiery Zhang Ziyi, and boy, do I wish I could dedicate another ten paragraphs to that dynamite performance), but really fostered more by his own decisions and failures. Women become imagined as A.I. in Chow’s story because he cannot understand their emotions and thought processes in his own world. Yet he cannot deny their humanity altogether, and so we are presented with A.I. that break down almost as soon as they’re realised in front of our eyes.
Previously on A.I. Week
Metropolis, WALL•E, Robot & Frank, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Ghost in the Shell, and AI afterthoughts
Reader Comments (10)
Awesome article for a gorgeous film.
I think this may be WKW's most devastating movie, partially because we're just like Chow Mo Wan, longing for a love from the past called In the Mood For Love.
Fantastic writing. I love 2046, possibly more than In The Mood For Love. Zhang Ziyi is so extraordinary I became a fan even before the feature was over
Beautiful post. I love this movie so much, and even more so on reflection. In all honesty, this is my favorite complete trilogy!
This is one of those rare films that grows with every rewatch. Thank you for this wonderful analysis!
2046 tops my personal list of Best Picture 2004. And 2004 was a REALLY strong year.
Zheng Ziyi has never been better (though, in fairness, most actresses have never reached this peak even once).
God bless Wong Kar Wai.
ZHANG Ziyi - apologies, good old AutoCorrect in action...
Nice writeup! 2046 was my favorite movie of 2004 as well, although I didn't quite warm to Zhang Ziyi's character. I loved the android subplot, though - it added such a unique shade of melancholy to an already emotionally multilayered film.
I haven't seen this one since the day of release. EReally should rewatch
Hi! good movie! I could download it with Snaptube and great. To do this, I followed the steps I found on the Snaptube for Android APK website. Maybe it'll work for you.
Kisses.