Director
Wong Kar-wai
Leading Actors/Actresses
Maggie Cheung, Tony Chiu-Wai Leung
Supporting Actors/Actresses
Ping Lam Siu, Rebecca Pan
Genre
Drama, Romance
Language
Cantonese, Shanghainese
Awards
2002 Best Foreign Language Film, National Society of Film Critics; 2001 Best Foreign Film, Cesar Awards; 2001 Best Foreign Film, German Film Awards; 2001 Best Foreign Language Film, New York Film Critics Circle Awards
Date of Release
2001
Producer
Wong Kar-wai
Setting and Context
1960s Hong Kong
Narrator and Point of View
Close focus on the perspectives of Su and Chow
Tone and Mood
Serious, Dramatic
Protagonist and Antagonist
Protagonists are Chow and Su. There are not traditional antagonists; Wong was not interested in villainizing their cheating spouses. If anything is working against the protagonists, it would be traditional values and societal pressures.
Major Conflict
Chow and Su find out that their spouses are carrying on an affair with each other. In the course of working together to try and figure out how it happened, they become dependent on one another for companionship.
Climax
When Chow leaves for Singapore, it seems that for a moment he and Su could really end up leaving together, but they just miss each other.
Foreshadowing
When Chow and Su are directing the moving crews to move their furniture and belongings into their new rooms, the crews keep accidentally bringing Chow's wife's things to Su's and Su's husband's things to Chow, which foreshadows the swap that happens within each of their marriages.
Understatement
N/A
Innovations in Filming or Lighting or Camera Techniques
N/A
Allusions
The number on Chow's second apartment door, 2046, alludes to the agreement between the People's Republic of China and the United Kingdom regarding the governance of Hong Kong, which was set to expire in the year 2046.
Paradox
N/A
Parallelism
An example of parallelism occurs with Su's facilitation of Mr. Ho's extramarital affair. Mr. Ho relies on Su's husband to get his wife and his mistress gifts from Japan. Su notices that his tie is different—it was a gift from his mistress—before he's about to go out with his wife, and she lets him know that she noticed, prompting him to change his tie and avoid suspicion from his wife. The way Su can tell that her own husband is in a relationship with Chow's wife is that her husband starts wearing the same type of Japanese ties that Chow wears, that his wife clearly buys for him.
