When University of California, Irvine professor Jeffrey Wasserstrom was conducting interviews for a report on the 2019 Hong Kong protests, he made a habit of asking people to name a book or a film that spoke to what was happening to the city. Some answered with the 2015 film Ten Years, a dystopian anthology depicting how various elements of Hong Kong life could soon be choked out of existence by political and cultural pressure from the mainland. Others said George Orwell’s 1984. But the most interesting answer he received was not really a political work at all, at least not on the surface: Wong Kar-wai’s In the Mood for Love.
The 2000 film centers on a man and a woman in 1960s Hong Kong, each married to an unfaithful spouse, who slowly fall in love with one another only to drift apart without ever acting on their feelings. In the Mood for Love’s “nostalgia for the future,” one of Wasserstrom’s interviewees explained, is what spoke to Hong Kong’s predicament. For her, the protagonists’ dream of realizing their love, seemingly within reach but forever deferred, mirrored the doomed dream of the city to be free of British rule without having Beijing take the reins as its new colonial overlord.
In the Mood for Love is not the only of the sunglasses-sporting Hong Kong auteur’s films to carry a political subtext unique to the city. Throughout his career, Wong’s exploration of the passage of time and his unrivaled ability to depict silly sentimentality and soul-sick nostalgia alike have reflected the whims, dreams, and anxieties of a place in which time is perpetually running out.
Chungking Express, one of the best films of the ’90s and the work that made Wong famous in the West, is obsessed with expiration dates. It tells two stories, each focusing on a policeman reeling from a breakup who ends up falling in love anew. In the first, Officer 223 informs the viewer that his girlfriend left him on April 1, a month to the day before his birthday. Hoping the April 1 date means the breakup is a joke, he begins a nightly routine of purchasing a can of pineapple, always with the same expiration date of May 1. Only when that day arrives will he accept that their love has also expired. As time inexorably passes and cans with a May 1 date become harder to find, he grows increasingly anxious. His anxiety mirrors that of a city with its own looming expiration date: July 1, 1997, when the United Kingdom’s 99-year lease of Hong Kong is set to end and when the territory will be returned to Chinese control.
The night before his birthday, Officer 223 goes to a bar where he meets a mysterious femme fatale known only as the Woman in the Blonde Wig. He decides to approach her by asking if she likes pineapple. Asking the question in Cantonese and English, the traditional languages of Hong Kong identity, brings silence. Only when he asks in the language of Beijing does he provoke a response: “Your Mandarin’s not bad.”
The Woman in the Blonde Wig personifies the uncertainty about what the future holds for Hong Kong. Justifying her choice to wear sunglasses and a raincoat, she explains, “You never know if it’s going to rain or be sunny.” And musing on the stupidity of Officer 223’s pineapple question, she laments that “people change. A person may like pineapple today and something else tomorrow.” As if to underscore the city’s anxieties, songs with lyrics about “what a difference a day made” and how “it’s not every day we’re going to be the same way” are repeated multiple times throughout the film.
In Happy Together, released a month before the July 1 handover, the subtext of the handover is even more apparent. The plot centers on gay lovers from Hong Kong who decide to take a trip to Argentina. The very first shot of the film shows both characters’ British passports being stamped.
As they settle into life in Buenos Aires, the couple goes through a series of messy breakups, fights, and makeups, and it becomes more and more clear that their relationship is in terminal decline. The most iconic scene of the film involves the two dancing the tango on a decrepit kitchen floor, lamenting a love that was never going to last and a relationship that was flawed from the start. This is clearly in part an exploration of Hong Kong’s mixed feelings about its own impending breakup with the U.K. One of the protagonists later notes that Hong Kong and Argentina are on opposite ends of the Earth, wondering what life is like in Hong Kong upside down. The scene then cuts to upside-down footage of a car driving through Hong Kong streets, with a voice on the radio saying, “You can express your feelings or opinions.” It’s as if the film is asking if Hong Kong’s impending new era will upend life (and freedom) in the city.
In the Mood for Love and its sequel, 2046, are haunted by another expiration date: July 1, 2047, the end of Hong Kong’s 50-year Special Administrative Region status, which was supposed to guarantee a large degree of autonomy for the city and free speech, freedom of the press, and freedom of assembly for its citizens. In the latter half of In the Mood for Love, the two protagonists check into a hotel room numbered 2046 and use the space to collaborate on writing a martial arts serial. By picking a number that signifies the last year before the city’s status ends, Wong seems to be hinting at how the anxiety of such times drives his own creative process. At the beginning of 2046, the male protagonist from the previous film returns to the hotel seeking the same room, but the manager tells him it’s being redecorated. Only room 2047 is available.
With the mainland Chinese Congress now forcing an authoritarian new national security law onto Hong Kong, bringing a premature death to the one country, two systems arrangement that secured the city’s freedoms and autonomy, it’s as if Beijing is now telling the city the same thing: 2046 is no longer available. Only 2047 is vacant.
Nat Brown is a former deputy web editor of Foreign Affairs and former deputy managing editor of National Review Online.
