Happy Together

Aw-kommon's notes on "Happy Together" are typical of those who cannot approach a film without aligning it with definite paradigms and secure standards. In this case, the paradigm is "Midnight Cowboy" -- a film that belongs to a totally different genre, was written and shot according to "naturalistic" procedures of Hollywood commercial cinema and, most of all, deals with romance from a quite different perspective. In "Midnight Cowboy" redemption of homoeroticism comes through death, a strategy that was quite revealing of the morals that prevailed at the time the movie was produced. "Happy Together", on the other hand, deals with romance as if it could have been homo-, hetero- or whatever, and even though homoeroticism is such an essential element to the narrative, the protagonists'love affair is a pretext for the emergence of their decentered identities, their search for love and friendship and, most important, it ends on a note of hope of future encounters. All that in a poetic tone, one that demands a continuous esthetic reconstruction, hardly understood (or accepted) by those who are encapsulated in a world of conventional filmmaking.

"Happy Together " is essentially a study of a couple falling in and out of love. Their sex - they are a gay couple from Hong Kong - hardly matters: the film could just as well have been about a straight or lesbian couple. The fact that very near the beginning there is as explicit a scene of male anal intercourse as one is likely to encounter in mainstream commercial cinema is far from gratuitously sensational. As the film is meant to start on a passionate high, this is the most convincing way of doing it - so be it. The director has the integrity not to repeat this for the reason that the couple never quite feel the same about each other again - indeed there is a great deal of alienation. Both have arrived in Argentina in search of work. Although the jobs undertaken by one of the pair, Lai, are fairly menial, first as a doorman at a Tango club and then a kitchen worker, he seems more stable than his companion, Ho, who does little but hustle, gets beaten up fairly early on and spends much of his time in an incapacitated state. In the room they share there is a lampshade depicting the Izuazi Falls. The cascade almost becomes a symbol for the relationship they would ideally like to achieve. Early on they hire a car to look for it but lose their way. After their relationship has finally broken Lai finds it, but as he is alone, the landmark seems sadly lacking in excitement. There is a third main character, a straight guy from Taiwan, who works in the kitchen with Lai. With his amiable self-sufficiency he seems to have been introduced to provide a balance to the angst of the main pair, a device that works well as it reinforces our sympathy for them. "Happy Together" looks rough and crude. A hand held camera is used with frenetic nervousness. Sequences of monochrome alternate with scenes that are almost perversely over-coloured. I know it is fashionable to give some films a nightmarish look. Here I found it a distinct stumbling block to be got over for the sake of a work that says so much about loneliness, homesickness and the struggle of people simply to be "happy together".

I didn't think so the first time I saw HAPPY TOGETHER, but I really think this film is a masterpiece. Technically it's amazing - the hand-held camera-work is incredible, and the mindbending shifts from saturated colors to monochrome (which I first felt was a stylish stunt) really underscores the loneliness and alienation of the characters brilliantly - the overall effect by the films' end is devastating.

HAPPY TOGETHER was apparently also - at least partially - inspired by the Argentine novelist Manuel Puig, author of 'Kiss Of The Spider Woman' among many other novels, and Puig's fiction tackles similar issues in a similarly fractured style (filled with footnotes, digressions and sudden shifts in perspective), all to incredibly powerful emotional effect.

If HAPPY TOGETHER is something of an homage to Puig, it's a great one. On it's own it's also a devastating portrait of a disintegrating relationship.

In this Wong Kar Wai production, loneliness takes on the face of 3 Chinese travellers who, after alienating themselves from the society they came from, end up at the end of the world. Argentina, which is the antithesis of HK, may be the farthest place you can get from HK, but still they cannot entangle themselves from the emotional baggage they have been carrying. Loneliness is a state of mind which follows you no matter where you are, and ensnarls you when you are at your most vulnerable.

While the story may be more famous as a film about gay relationship, it is in fact, not so. The lead characters just happen to be gay, and loneliness, with all the jealousy and melancholy that comes with it, takes centrestage.

Happy Together is a throbbing, raw, and profoundly nostalgic lament from two displaced traveling Chinamen yearning for emotional soundness, for their homeland, and for each other. Wong doesn't front us any of the flickering that can still be struck between lovers who fight all the time. There is no deep poetic interpretation of the story itself, but by leaving so much unsaid, writer-director Wong Kar-Wai doesn't make the misstep of suffocating his characters' relationship with trite soap dialogue. That is not to say, however, that the film even remotely knows the meaning of the phrase "less is more."

You don't watch this film as much as seize on to it. Letting it yank you every which way is a raucous yet intriguing excursion, with fertile visual stylizations that trail you long after seeing the film, all with the impact to communicate directly with the heart. The visuals make the film come alive, and make material the displacement, and thus the unhinging, that the main characters feel from their surroundings and each other. Rather than using dialogue, this highly stylized romance chiefly imparts its themes and moods through its images, and Wong fashions an interior audiovisual composition about the mood swings of a love affair. Wong's use of images for purely emotional photogenic value, feverish camera movements, jukebox soundtrack and his improvisation and experimentation with the actors have an effect reminiscent of Scorsese's Mean Streets. In Wong's emotional roller coaster of a film, the characters seem to have a formidable intuitive certainty that their relationship is star- crossed sooner or later, but they follow passionate impulses regardless, giving the film a dreamy texture that it can't shake as its lovers turn-step to and fro during their free-form Argentine spree.

Wong gradually layers the relationship, just like it would happen in real life, and the doubts and obscurities are constant. He extracts powerful performances from his lead actors. While Leslie Cheung gracefully fluctuates his moments between yearning, resentment, and anger, Tony Leung Chiu-Wai is the calm eye of the storm.

Leung acts from the inside. We intuit his feelings through his natural physical subtleties, chiefly through the sensitive eyes. Even purely physical scenes, like the fights he has with Leslie Cheung's character, don't happen suddenly. Leung winds up for these moments instinctively and then defensively underplays them. And when the tears come, they pour without affectation, making me wonder from what part of Leung's soul he quietly unearths these moments from as Wong rolls the camera.