Chow Mo-Wan (Tony Leung Chiu-Wai) is aware that Wang Jing Wen (Faye Wong) is in love with a Japanese, and perhaps due to his own inadequacies in matters of the heart — he’s never gotten over the loss of his one great love — he takes it upon himself to help her. Subsequently, this perennial ladies man reflects on this newfound burst of emotion, “Feelings can creep up on you unawares... I promised to write a story for her... Something to show her what her boyfriend was thinking... But maybe I was being too oblique. I’d begun to feel that it wasn’t about her boyfriend at all. Rather, it was more about me.”
“So I began imagining myself as a Japanese man on a train for 2046 falling for an android with delayed reaction.” This number is a reference to a story that Chow Mo-Wan was once writing, “A story called 2046. All about men and women looking for love, risking everything to get to a place called 2046.”
It’s odd that he calls 2046 a place, because, earlier, he’s informed us, “In the year 2046... A mysterious train leaves for 2046 every once in a while. Every passenger going to 2046 has the same intention: They want to recapture lost memories... Nobody’s ever come back... except me.” The titular number, therefore, appears to be several things at once — a year in the distant future, a hotel room number from the shadowy past, the name of a story, as well as some sort of sanctuary, an amnion of happy memories that lovesick souls seek to escape to (and, once there, never seek to escape from, as “nobody’s ever come back.”)
We’re now inside the “mysterious train” in the story narrated by Chow Mo-Wan. An
announcement rings forth. “We have a range of cabin attendants... They will serve you
devotedly, like an intimate friend. But you must never fall in love with them... Paragraph 201 in the Passengers’ Guide warns that Area 1224-1225 is especially cold. Passengers are advised to hug each other to keep warm.” Our hero explains, “Since I’m the only passenger, I hug my android cabin attendant.”
The android (again played by Faye Wong) asks, “Why do you want to leave 2046?” The narrator takes over. “Whenever anyone asked why I left 2046, I gave them some vague
answer. I once fell in love with someone. I couldn’t stop wondering whether she loved me or not. I found an android, which looked just like her. I thought the android might give me the answer.”
He refers to the reality that after the loss of his true love, he has never given his heart to anyone — he shares only his bed, his body, and if this makes him something of an
android himself, he also sees women as objects, and therefore they too are inevitably reduced to androids. “I kept on asking. But she never answered.”
It’s time for another announcement, about the cabin attendants. “When they’ve served on so many long journeys, fatigue begins to set in. For example, they might want to laugh, but the smile would be slow to come. They might want to cry but the tear wouldn’t well up till the next day.” Again, this could well be a statement of fact about robotic humans like Chow Mo-Wan, who, after giving up on true love, now face “fatigue,” going through the mechanical motions of life.