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Happy Together ? Generic hybridity in 2046 and In the Mood for Love.

This chapter contributes to two burgeoning areas of the discipline – the “puzzle film” as an emergent narrational and genre category, and the contemporary canonisation of Hong Kong director Wong Kar-wai. His In the Mood for Love (2000) and 2046 (2004) exhibit self-conscious and frequently repressive narrations. In both films, episodic narrative foregrounds the “architecture” of the plot and opens up ellipses in the story. Wong exploits this elliptical structure by encouraging the viewer to form misleading inferences, thereby establishing a periodically unreliable narration. This chapter argues that Wong’s complex strategies of narration are partly motivated by genre conventions, and more particularly, by an elaborate interweaving of discrete genres. 2046 continually disorients and misdirects the viewer by evoking the science-fiction genre’s emphasis on doubling to distress character individuation; and In the Mood for Love imbricates the melodrama and the detective story, evolving a narrational tension between melodramatic and detective modes of narration (characterised, respectively, by narrative communicativeness and restrictedness). Its originality derives chiefly from the rigor of its close analyses, the uniqueness of its interpretation (e.g. reading In the Mood for Love, ostensibly a romance-melodrama, as a detective narrative), and its departure from the sort of sociological critique typically applied to Wong’s films in particular and Chinese cinema in general. Its broad significance rests in its contribution to the fledgling study of the “puzzle film” genre. The chapter contributes to an anthology that has made significant impact in the field, inspiring a number of subsequent studies of “puzzle film” narration. The anthology contains contributions from internationally renowned Film scholars, including Thomas Elsaesser and Warren Buckland.