happy together (wong kar-wai)

In between Fallen Angels and Happy Together, according to Imdb, the prolific director only made one film, a ten minute short where: “A Japanese-Chinese couple hangs out and shoots each other.” If this short feels like standard Kar Wai material, the subsequent film must have come as a shock. Firstly in that the director abandoned South East Asia for Argentina, of all places, and secondly because in his next film no-one dies and there’s very little violence. Instead it’s a doomed gay love story. It was a smart move, as Happy Together won him best director at Cannes. Again the film blooms with cinematographic fecundity. The grade flips from washed out black and white, perfect for a tango-vision of Buenos Aires, to washed out colour, which is equally perfect. The play of light and shade which was so integral to the lighting of In The Mood for Love, is investigated with a severity which means that sometimes Tony Leung’s face is almost entirely cast in shadow. The director seems to revel in the Rioplatense winter, that dank, monochrome fever dream which I am presently inhabiting, which gives the lie to any notion of a tropical continent. However, beyond the aesthetic joys, this film is also a fierce investigation of both love and home. By filming abroad, in a society so remote from his own, Wong Kar Wai finds himself investigating the meaning of exile, the lure of the return. The last sequences, in Taipei and Hong Kong, act as a bookend and give Leung’s journey an uplift after all the grief his lost lover has bestowed on him.

The examination of a fierce, doomed, romantic love is peerless. The attraction between the two protagonists Ho Po-Wing and Lai Yiu-Fai is indisputable, and rendered with wit and grace. They dance like a couple, they fuck like a couple and they bicker like a couple. It’s perhaps in the final part of this equation that the director’s portrayal of romantic love comes into its own, because he is prepared to even dwell on the tedium of love, as Autumn turns to Summer and the sun comes out of the Bonaerense gloom, but the two men remain trapped in their room and their torpor, unable to escape the knot of their hopeless dependency on each other.

Another notable aspect of the film, seen from this side of the world, is the way in which it evokes Buenos Aires so effectively. The musical score is spot on, but so is the identification of a place which can seem, from the point of a fixed camera pointed at the Obelisco, like a teeming metropolitan world, but is also a place of lonely streets with warm corners, where people dance as much to keep the cold at bay as out of desperate passion. Seen through an exile’s eyes, the peeling beauty of a faded Boca pension possesses a tragic charm, even if the reality of living there has less than zero glamour. The way the Argentine characters react to Po-Wing and Yiu-Fai, just two more characters in the barrio, where the exotic has no great premium, also seems spot on. It’s a land which seems rooted in a Borgesian timelessness, impervious to change, a place to play out elemental human dramas in peace, isolated from the rest of the world and its teeming chaos.