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.In a different context, Vera Dika qualifies the represented past in a 1970snostalgia film, American Graffiti, as a simulacral image, referring to a losttime, to past images, and to its own status as a commodity sign.What smore, comments Dika, [t]hrough this particular re-creation of the past,and the undeniable pleasure of reexperiencing it, [the film] subtly con-fronts a generation with its moment in history.43 Dika s observationalso illuminates the kind of nostalgia evoked in 2046.If ChowMoWan sfictional 2046 is a symptom of a present stasis, Hong Kong s 2046 is notnecessarily a blessing of any given sort.Although the 1984 Joint Dec-laration stipulates Hong Kong s previous capitalist system and life-styleshall remain unchanged for 50 years , the neutralizing vocabulary usedin the official document, such as inhabitants and residents instead of people and citizens , has raised critical concerns.On the ambiguity ofthe term life-style , Matthew Turner writes,What is the Hong Kong life-style?.does life-style suggest.the sub-jective texture of identity?.Or is life-style like fashion, changingfrom moment to moment? Since no society could remain unchangedfor fifty years, how will social change be legitimized? At the heartof the agreements on Hong Kong s future lies a slippery neologismwhich may be interpreted to mean almost anything.44 40 Time and MemoryIn a fantastic twist, Wong s film poses a related question in kindredspirit:Every passenger who goes to 2046 has the same intention.They wantto recapture lost memories because nothing ever changes in 2046.Nobody knows if that s true because nobody s ever come back.This line by Chow Mo Wan s fictional narrator is a direct comment onChina s promise to the Hong Kong inhabitants.To the extent that recovering lost memories in the future is a fiction, 2046 alludes to apolitical myth that legitimizes a condition of stasis (wushinian bubian).This, I believe, is the fiction/myth that the film s critical engagementwith nostalgia seeks to demystify, displace, and resist by reworkingfamiliar referential frameworks through which conventional meaningsare destabilized and transformed into something else.In Mood, as we have seen, what Rey Chow calls ethnologicalreminders are replicas of historical artefacts; in 2046, two or more ref-erential frameworks the textual and the extra-textual, or the fictionaland the meta-fictional are mobilized to create an internal montagethat rupture[s] an established coded system, the sign itself.45 This inpart is achieved by the multiple register embedded in the number 2046(a film, a novel, a place, a room number, and a time in future).Thisdensity of meaning is complemented by another aesthetic indulgence,the resounding musical notes from Bellini s opera, Norma, which addsallegorical weight to Shigeru Umebayashi s heart-rending original score.Amy Taubin notes that the opera tells the tale of a high princess whois torn between her loyalty to her people and her love for a leaderof the occupying Roman army , which parallels the political tensionsbetween Hong Kong and China.46 This is not to say that 2046 is a polit-ical film; rather, politics is a catalyst for deeper reflections on personaland collective destiny.The internal montage of parallel times and paral-lel universes functions like a distorted mirror held up to the smoothsurface of reality: Chow Mo Wan s affected tranquility and noncha-lance, the evasiveness and detachment of the film s narrating/viewingpresent, and a mythical future stasis.Ironically, that future, like thecanned pineapples in Chungking Express, has an expiry date, renderingwhat may happen afterwards even less promising.Perhaps this is whyChow s fiction necessitates a sequel, 2047 (Chow s room number), inwhich Kimura s lone traveller and Faye Wang s android are able to findshort-lived comfort in a passionate embrace before the android s fate-ful decline.This is another instance of love at last sight similar to Post-nostalgia 41the fin-de-siècle condition in the pre-handover years.In 2046, time isexperienced in a loop: past, present, and future are entwined and con-voluted in their respective stasis, as history threatens to repeat itself, arepetition (Wong s favourite visual and narrative schematic) that ironi-cally reminds us of the danger of changeless time.Arguably, the film streatment of nostalgia is diametrically opposed to that in Mood: theearlier film is presented as a self-conscious artefact to create a nostal-gic effect in the audience, arousing both critical and uncritical pleasureat the same time.The memory at stake belongs virtually to no onenot the characters, and not exactly the viewers, but an assemblage anddisassemblage of past codes and style that exposes the artificiality, andvulnerability, of nostalgia
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