Whenever someone asked why I left 2046, I always gave them some vague answer. It was easier.
So began 2046, the new film written and directed by Kar Wai Wong.
It continually amazes me when I watch a subtitled film, particularly at the cinema, how quickly you begin to ‘hear’ the actors saying the words in English. Films that draw you in, like 2046, with it complex, interwoven relationships between reality and the text the main character writes, quickly become as easy to follow (in the dialog sense, not necessarily the plot sense!) as a film in your native language.
And 2046 was certainly a film that you had to work to follow. Beginning in (what we later find to be) the fictional world (/place/time?) of 2046, we see a Japanese man, on a train, counting incessantly. This quickly returns to when Chow, the main character and journalist/writer, was preparing to leave Singapore. The bulk of the story takes place in the hotel in Hong Kong where Chow lives throughout the second half of the 1960s.
