The year is 2046. Outside, there is a place where
nothing changes. An intergalactic train can take you there, but only one person
has ever returned. Inside are the ghosts of the past. In between exist memory,
melancholia, and myth.
This is Hong Kong, neither past perfect nor the future
progressive, as speculatively rendered in the film 2046 (2004) by Wong Kar-wai. Considered an oblique follow up to his
earlier In the Mood for Love (2000),
which was set in the 1960s, the disjointed stories of the director’s later film circulate betwixt everlasting nostalgia
and the impending unknown.
The year of the film’s title signals when Hong Kong’s
special administrative status ceases. A colony of Britain until its 99-year
lease of the region ended in 1997, Hong Kong’s reversion to Chinese rule was
buffered by an allowance for it to function in semi-autonomy for another 50
years. However, what the last few months have made evident to the world is that
Hong Kong’s youth seek sovereignty.
Long before this year’s pro-democracy protests and the
Umbrella Revolution of 2014, films from Hong Kong have grappled with questions
of cultural and political uncertainty. May Fung’s meditation on these matters
takes on a mystical quality in the short film She Said Why Me (1989). Most
recently screened publicly as part of the exhibition Five Artists: Sites
Encountered (2019) at Kowloon’s M+ Museum, the digital print fossilizes the
grainy quality of the original VHS recording, rendering it even more esoteric. In
it, a woman walks from an ancient temple located in Hong Kong’s countryside to
the towering architecture of the busy city. As she makes her away across the
enclave’s landscape, beginning at a site that is emblematic of tradition and
the past and finishing in the present of urban modernity, her steps are hesitant
despite being upon the familiar terrain of her homeland. She is blindfolded. Arms
outstretched, her sightless perambulation hints at Hong Kong’s indeterminate
future.
Made in the years before Hong Kong’s handover, Fung’s
work captures the anxieties of a land on the precipice of change. At IFFI 2019,
other films similarly portray contemporary angst across the globe. All produced
this year, several of these features make their Asia or India debut here in Goa.
The festival’s opening film, Italy’s Despite the Fog, springs from the
crisis that has brought political refugees to Europe’s shores. Hearts and
Bones is also about refugees, but in Australia. Climate change is the
subject of the eleven short movies that comprise the multi-country Interdependence,
while an environmental apocalypse wreaks havoc in The Halt/Ang Hupa from
the Philippines.
Occurring in 2034, The Halt’s cataclysmic view
telescopes current fears into yonder years, mirroring the unstable narrative of
the futuristic dreamscape that is 2046. These forward-looking films urge
us to look back from the future. As today’s Hong Kong struggles to establish
its political will, the cinematic legacy leading up to this moment envisions
multiple possibilities, even if tentatively. This, not in didactic
storytelling, but in the very form of the films that emerged in this period of
ambiguity.
Writing
about 2046, Roger
Ebert remarked on how the film was late to arrive at Cannes 2003: “[T]he
final reel reportedly arrived at the airport almost as the first was being
shown. It was said to be unfinished … [T]here were skeletal special effects
that now appear in final form, but perhaps it was never really finished in [Kar-wai’s]
mind.”
The future, then, as this may
suggest is uncertain precisely because its past is always present, forever a
time to foresee differently.
From The Peacock.
