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2046: The Past, the Future, and the Painful Impermanence of Human Connection
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Science Fiction Film Club
2046: The Past, the Future, and the Painful Impermanence of Human Connection
Exploring love, longing, and the purpose of science fiction in ’60s Hong Kong.
By Kali Wallace
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Published on June 25, 2025
Credit: 20th Century Fox
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Credit: 20th Century Fox
2046 (2004). Written and directed by Wong Kar-wai. Starring Tony Leung Chiu-wai, Gong Li, Faye Wong, and Zhang Ziyi.
Let’s start with some historical context. You know I love to start with a history lesson.
Cast yourselves back to the spring of 1966, when the Transport Advisory Committee of the British colonial government in Hong Kong approved a fare increase for the Star Ferry, which connected the island of Hong Kong with the Kowloon Peninsula. Elsie Elliot, a British-born colonial official, spoke out and arranged a petition against the fare increase. Two men, So Sau-chung and Lo Kei, began to protest in person at the Star Ferry terminal.
Exhibiting the dubious wisdom of all police forces around the world, the Hong Kong Police arrested So and swiftly sentenced him to two months in prison. This had the effect of turning a two-man protest into a much larger demonstration, which quickly escalated into violence. Protesters continued to gather for a few nights in spite of both the riot police and British soldiers enforcing a curfew. The unrest calmed down within a week, after hundreds of people were arrested and sentenced to jail time.
A fare increase on a single transportation line might not seem like a big deal in the grand scheme of things, but it’s never just about the ticket prices. Nothing happens in a vacuum. Tensions were already high in Hong Kong, following years of economic upheaval that included rapid industrialization, the collapse of several banks, and growing public dissatisfaction with government corruption. Those four days in April of 1966 were the first time there were widespread public protests in Hong Kong—but they certainly weren’t the last.
There was a lot going on at this time, of course, but just to put a few pieces together: Over in mainland China, the Cultural Revolution began in 1966. Among the many, many impacts of the revolution were the late 1966 political protests in the Portuguese colony of Macau. After those protests, the Portuguese government more or less lost control of Macau to the People’s Republic of China, although it would be several decades before the official handover. The people of Hong Kong took notice, and in 1967 there were massive anti-colonial protests, which escalated to include riots and bombings throughout the year. By the end of 1967, at least 51 people had been killed and thousands had been arrested.
But Hong Kong remained a British colony. That wouldn’t start changing until the ’80s, when China and the United Kingdom began negotiations over Hong Kong’s governance. The matter wouldn’t be settled until 1997, when Hong Kong was officially handed over to China as an autonomous “special administrative region.”
According to the Chinese law enacted at the time, Hong Kong was supposed to be able to maintain its autonomous governance under the “one country, two systems” agreement for fifty years from the date of the handover. That would make the year 2046 the last year of Hong Kong’s autonomy within China. Now, even if you have only briefly skimmed news headlines, you know that the political situation in Hong Kong has been increasingly fraught since 1997, and it’s abundantly clear that agreement was basically a pinkie-promise made with fingers crossed behind the back rather than a statement of true intent.
Director Wong Kar-wai was a child in the ’60s. He was born in Shanghai but his family moved to Hong Kong just a few years later, as his parents, like many others, were wary of the growing agitation leading up to the Cultural Revolution. Wong and his parents successfully made the move, but his two older siblings were stuck in mainland China when the borders closed, separating the family for a full decade. He turned nine years old in 1967, old enough to be aware of the months of unrest and danger, but probably not quite old enough to fully grasp the larger political situation until later. Wong has spoken about how he struggled to learn Cantonese after the move, so he grew up a lonely child who spent much of his time watching martial arts movies with his mom.
And there were a lot of those. Hong Kong has historically had a huge and prolific film industry. For a long time, it benefited from the combination of being a British colony and a dense population center for the Chinese-speaking world, which made it the ideal place for filmmakers who wanted to make movies for Chinese audiences, both in Asia and in diaspora around the globe, without all the censorship concerns of mainland China. Things shifted during the ’90s when Hong Kong’s film industry went through some economic troubles and a lot of the biggest directors and stars—including Jackie Chan and John Woo—hopped over to make movies in Hollywood instead. Things have further changed significantly (and alarmingly) in recent years with China’s introduction and enforcement of censorship laws. It remains to be seen what the future holds for Hong Kong cinema, but it’s still a city that loves movies.
Wong Kar-wai has always occupied a bit of an oddball spot in Hong Kong cinema. His childhood love of martial arts movies led to him working in film and TV as an adult. He did start out in a mainstream, popular genre with the crime film As Tears Go By (1988). But he didn’t stay there long. In the ’90s, when the Hong Kong film industry was slumping and bleeding action-movie talent to Hollywood, Wong pivoted to making deliberately artsy, highly stylized emotional dramas that don’t care much about being accessible to audiences who want rapid-fire action and excitement. The first was Days of Being Wild (1990), which caught people’s attention. Then he followed it up with Chunking Express (1994), which critics worldwide noticed and loved, setting him firmly on the path to becoming one of Hong Kong’s most admired directors—the kind of arthouse auteur whose work cinephiles and critics love to discuss and dissect.
That finally brings us to 2046.
Which is, I’m sure you have already noted, not actually a science fiction movie.
Well, sort of. Maybe? It’s complicated.
2046 is also not not a sci fi film, because it all depends on where you draw the lines between fiction and meta-commentary, or between stories about a genre and the genre itself, or between the layers of storytelling connecting what a filmmaker is doing and what the characters are doing.
It’s a film about a man telling the story of how he processed the events of a period of his own life by imagining them as a sci fi story. Or maybe it’s about a filmmaker telling the story of how he processed the events of his nation’s past by telling a story of a period of a man’s life in which the man imagines it as a sci fi story.
Or maybe all of those layers are meaningless and it’s just a story about the failed relationships of sleazy womanizer who fantasizes about fucking androids.
Or all of the above.
I think it’s all of the above. I think it’s not completely one thing or another. In fact, it deliberately resists being one thing or another, and that makes it all the more interesting.
2046 is narrated by the character Chow Mo-wan (played by the always brilliant Tony Leung Chiu-wai), a journalist and writer who has just returned to Hong Kong after spending some time in Singapore. If you want to know why he went to Singapore in the first place, you have to watch In the Mood For Love (2000), which tells the story of his relationship with a woman named Su Li-zhen (Maggie Cheung), which Chow references at the end of 2046. And if you want the story of Su Li-zhen’s younger days, that’s when you watch Days of Being Wild (1990). The three films are connected in a loose trilogy, and watching them all does provide additional depth to the stories. They also don’t all tell the same stories in the same ways, so the extra context only adds to the sense that events are a lot more malleable that we might wish them to be.
They are brilliant movies and you should watch them! But I don’t think they are necessary to understand 2046. We don’t need to know how Chow got to where he is at the start of 2046 to know that he’s adrift, disconnected, and deeply lonely in spite of being surrounded by hard-drinking friends and an endless parade of sex workers. We don’t need to know the details to know he’s wallowing in lost love, missed changes, and endless regrets.
Upon parting ways with a second woman named Su Li-zhen (Gong Li) and returning to Hong Kong in 1966, Chow moves into a seedy and run-down hotel, which is where nearly all of the film takes place. The atmosphere of the hotel is claustrophobic and dense—and perfectly crafted for the story. The walls are a rich, suffocating, and mottled green. The sounds of whispered conversations and creaking beds carry easily through every flimsy wall. Even when the characters escape to the rooftop to smoke it still feels like they are trapped. Everybody is looking at everybody else around corners, through screens, from shadows. This is not a place where happy people end up; it’s a place where people either pass through quickly or become stuck for years.
The camera work was done by Wong’s longtime collaborator and frequent director of photography Christopher Doyle, along with cinematographers Kwan Pun Leung and Lai Yiu-fai. Every scene is a picture-perfect example of the gorgeous, distinctive, and often-imitated style Wong and Doyle are known for. In this case it leaves the viewer with the feeling that it’s always too late at night and we’ve had too much to drink, because we’re always chasing stimulating highs but stumbling into isolating lows when the party is over. There are scenes in the movie that take place in daytime, but never outside, never in the sunlight, never with more than filtered daylight glimpsed through the windows. Everything about the way 2046 is structured, framed, and filmed is a mood, the kind of mood that wraps around you and doesn’t let go.
The oppressive green weight of the interior is interrupted at times by flashes of brightness and color that make us want to grab and hold on—especially because so many of those flashes come in the form of human bodies, whether naked in bed or clad in the most beautiful clothing you’ve ever seen. Costume designer William Chang, another of Wong’s frequent collaborators, deserves so much credit for bringing those elements into the scenes, particularly with the stunning dresses worn by the female characters. It’s a reminder that for all its seedy darkness, there is vibrancy in this place, there is a love of beauty, and there are remnants of pride even for these struggling, drifting people.
That slow, melancholy atmosphere remains unchanged as Chow interacts with the hotel’s owner (played by Wang Sum) and his daughter, Wang Jing-wen (Faye Wong), who is yearning for the Japanese boyfriend (Takuya Kimura) her father forbids her from seeing. It remains unchanged as Chow becomes involved with Bai Ling (Zhang Ziyi), the sex worker who lives in room 2046 next door. It remains unchanged when characters pass in the corridors or meet at the shared telephone, when they venture out to the streets and nightclubs, when they fight and flirt and have sex. It remains unchanged even when Chow’s narration casually mentions riots in 1966 and in 1967. He makes no political commentary; the character is too self-involved for that. His newspaper work is described as being tawdry and exploitative rather than legitimate journalism. He uses the unstable time of the protests to hole up in his room and write a novel instead.
That’s where the futuristic sci fi imagery comes in, but even when the screen is filled with the kaleidoscope of movement and light representing the future, the languid feel of the film doesn’t change. The future that Chow imagines—the story into which he writes the people and events in his life—is one in which people travel continuously on a train in a potentially impossible attempt to reach a destination called 2046, which is undescribed but implied to be perfect in some way because nothing ever changes.
Chow, the fictional character writing in the last few years of the 1960s, is not making a statement with that choice of destination; for him, the destination represents an idealized time and place that he desperately wants to regain. But for Wong, the film director making a movie in the first few years of the 21st century—after having lived through decades of rapid industrialization and technological advancements that turned Hong Kong into science fiction’s idea of a futuristic city, and after the 1997 handover that placed a time limit on that future—it certainly carries layers of meaning.
I love how the futuristic characters are styled: the clothes are messy cyberpunk clichés, and the wigs are terrible. Considering the absolutely impeccable hair and clothing of the characters in the ’60s, it’s obviously intentional. They aren’t meant to represent a serious attempt at visualizing a possible future. They are dolls for Chow to play with.
He realizes he’s putting people and events from his life into the story, but he doesn’t notice that he’s using this story to work through his own issues until the end. He figures it out eventually, however, and understands that he’s casting his mind into an imaginary future to deal with unresolved events from his past.
In the sci fi story it happens when it becomes clear that Wang Jing-wen (in both her android and the human versions) is not hiding, malfunctioning, or failing to react, but instead has a whole interior life, with desires and dreams of her own, that have absolutely nothing to do with the man in front of her. His failure to see that is not her fault and really has nothing to do with her. She’s known what she wants all along and has never hidden that. Chow may feel their bond differently—and it’s a real bond, because they are friends—but Jing-wen is not a replacement for any other women from his past. She gets her happy ending by going to Japan and finally marrying the man she has loved for years.
It’s almost a cliché, I suppose, but it’s still worth repeating: life only goes forward. No matter how much we wallow in the past, there is only ever the future before us. It doesn’t matter if we are constantly trying to retell the story of our past, remixing and reshaping it, which Chow does in his novel and Wong does across the three movies in the trilogy. We’re still moving irrevocably toward the future.
There are so many reasons why this is the kind of movie I’m inclined to dislike. It’s all about the sad feelings of a sad man who treats women poorly, a subject matter I don’t find terribly interesting in either real life or fiction. But I don’t dislike this movie. I quite like it, but even more than that, I find it captivating and thought-provoking. For one thing, it’s beautiful and sumptuous and unique, and that’s reason enough for me to pay attention. Well-made art doesn’t have to justify itself to me; I am happy to go along for the ride. For another, the acting is phenomenal across the board, so I am happy to watch these characters having all the complicated emotions they need to have. Zhang Ziyi is particularly wonderful as Bai Ling; in every scene she showcases so many conflicting and heartbreaking emotions.
But there’s more to it, I think. Another reason I find the film so captivating, and the reason I’m going to be turning it over in my mind for a long while, is because of the questions it makes me ask both while I was watching and after: What is science fiction for? What are we doing when we write sci fi stories? What are we doing when we play with the parameters of reality in order to convey some aspect of reality? What’s going on in the conversation between artist and audience when some people relate best to stories filtered through a sci fi lens while others can’t relate to them at all? What does that particular storytelling lens mean for both the big ideas of existing as a part of humanity and the intimate experiences of being a person?
I write sci fi and I write about sci fi, and I am well aware that the answers to those questions are complex and varied. That means they are questions worth asking. I certainly don’t have all the answers.
But it’s more than that: I don’t want all the answers, at least not declarative, definitive answers that are presumed to apply to all people in all situations. I know that embracing such ambiguity is verboten in today’s online pop culture, the place where all nuance goes to die, but I don’t much care. I don’t think pretending we have definitive answers does us any favors. There’s much more to be gained from asking the questions over and over again, through different stories and different experiences, choosing each time to leave room for the full breadth and diversity of human experience.
So, what do you think of 2046? Or Wong Kar-wai’s work in general? Tell me what it makes you think and feel! Or just tell me which of the amazing outfits is your favorite. I’m not even a fashion person and I am completely enamored of William Chang’s wardrobe work. The style simply oozes off the screen in a way that leaves me (sitting at home in a pair of flannel pajama pants decorated with Christmas gnomes) crushingly envious.[end-mark]
Welcome to the Summer of Silliness
It’s time to switch gears for July. I did not purposefully choose films that all came out within a few years of each other. The goal was a selection of sci fi comedies and parodies from around the world. It just so happens that the ’80s (and a bit into the early ’90s) was a time when everybody wanted to laugh at sci fi.
July 2 — The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the 8th Dimension (1984), directed by W.D. Richter
Some people tried to capitalize on the success of the earnest and epic Star Wars trilogy by imitating it. The screenwriter of 1978’s masterpiece Invasion of the Body Snatchers did this instead.Watch: Amazon, Fandango, Apple, Microsoft.View the trailer.
July 9 — Mr. India (1987), directed by Shekhar Kapur
You have to understand that deep in my heart I believe all superhero films should have song and dance elements.Watch: Amazon. You can also find uploads on YouTube, but not all of them have English subtitles. (Some do.) In some regions it seems to be available on BiliBili, if you or your VPN have access to that.View the trailer (but there are no English subtitles).
July 16 — Delicatessen (1991), directed by Jean-Pierre Jeunet and Marc Caro
I have previously refrained from making jokes about cannibalism. Now I am going to do nothing but make jokes about cannibalism.Watch: Kanopy, Hoopla, Amazon, and others.View the trailer.
July 23 — Kin-dza-dza! (1986), directed by Georgiy Daneliya
This is what we would get if Monty Python made The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy as Soviet social satire.Watch: Amazon, Hoopla, several streaming services I’ve never heard of, and the Mosfilm YouTube channel.View the trailer.
July 30 — Spaceballs (1987), directed by Mel Brooks
Let’s go to ludicrous speed with this classic Star Wars parody.Watch: MAX, Amazon, and more.View the trailer.
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