But what will it look like.. in the future?

Go EEEAAAASSST
Years ago the Pet Shop Boys captured the spirit of my parent's generation, that the West was where the future is. Times have tumbled through countless clocks and has landed on its back, like a struggling cockroach. If the sins of the Eastern fathers were visited on their Western sons about ten years ago, then today the streets of the future will be visited in the East.

In Code 46, Shanghai is made to look like the future (and is that already true?) made up of surreal locations and exquisitely coloured moments. Unlike Lost in Translation whose entire premise is that the non-West world is alienating to the lost Caucasian until they find another like themselves, Code 46 is in some strange way like London. It is already a multicultural world where difference is now part of life, several races crowded together in a tube rocking occasionally against each other in casual, but rarely intimate contact. A multiracial world where the free newspaper screams in all the faces about a murder of a white boy by a Muslim, who is going to jail that day. We are shocked, appalled by the reality of racism, and then again .. look at those 2 Asian girls (about 18) sitting opposite me. One with an acute pimple problem with her head resting on the other girl’s shoulder, who is transfixed by her own flawless brown gorgeousness, her gaze rarely shifting to the stations and walls visible behind her faint reflection in the tube windows.

Code 46 takes that world ahead... intimate relations remain intact within races, but some boundaries are shattered. Language is exchanged to the point where accents travel with words. Maria Gonzales' Ni Hao is as perfect as William's Khuda Hafiz. Strange words exit from lips that shouldn't know these words. If this movie is anything to go by, the future solves terrorism by embracing Urdu and maybe Islam. The entire movie revolves around 'papal' and it is a lesson in how easily we communicate.. what do we know about 'papal' - not what it means, what language the word is borrowed from. We just know you need a papal to travel from one place to another. In that way the future reflects an older slightly familiar past, where travel was restricted by economics.

There are rules but very few explanations of the future in the city in which this movie lives ..
We cannot travel easily, borders are difficult
There is an ordered world (it is definitely Chinese and Japanese), and Europe is in houses but there is nothing else that you need to see of it
There is an anarchic world to occupy (it is an Indian landscape, with camels, purdahs and sahab ko padmini de do - so the padmini fiat still exists)
We cannot go out in the sun
We cannot live where we choose
And ofcourse.. what the movie is based on.. we cannot fuck whom we choose. From which obviously it becomes we cannot love whom we choose.

If Damien did not die on the fake papal, then William's Khudha Hafiz to Maria would have been final, and he would have gone back to his chiko. Instead they went to Jabul Ali.

But more than anything else (including the strange language), the cleverness of the movie lies in how it makes the future look. If the success of movies like City of God and the Constant Gardener, are indicative of the shift in the pleasures of gazing from the West to the East, then this movie in a completely different way explores the Third-World metropolis as a symbol of the “new”.

This is all the more thrilling for its utter improbability: surely those suffocating piles of slums and desperation are too exhausted, too moribund, to bring forth futures? But it seems to me this is exactly what is happening. If, for the better part of the 20th century, it was New York and its glistening imitations that symbolised the future, it is now the stacked-up, sprawling, impromptu city-countries of the third world. The idea of the total, centralised, maximally efficient city plan has long since lost its futuristic appeal.... desires flee the West’s surveillance cameras and bureaucratised consumption to find in the Third World metropolis a scope, a speed, a more fecund ecology. .... Rana Dasgupta

The locations in Code 46 are now.. nothing made in any CGI lab. It takes charming Indian men, sexy Japanese women lisping Urdu words, white people eating Chinese food, and instead of standing in Times Square, their desolation is reflected in the larger than life red Chinese neon signs behind them. Somewhere between Bladerunner and now, perfect homogenized robots and human beings…

There are many things wrong with this movie, the lead couple have barely any chemistry, which is where the love story fails. And yet it never fails to be a treat to watch and rewatch, and to listen for the different languages (Hindi, Chinese, Spanish), quirky moments of humour like a conversation about freckles and Anne of Green Gables as an erotic classic… a conversation with Nabib selling sherbet fountains at the check points.. and ending with Warning Sign by Coldplay slipping into the movie’s background soundtrack that has to be the best I’ve ever heard.