Feb 11: Happy Together (1997--Wong Kar-Wai)

★★★★★

Second time watching this movie. Really liked it the first time around but thought it was depressing; this time, I just thought it was fantastic and feel like I missed a lot the first time. It’s not depressing at all, actually, though it’s not Hollywood happy. It has a frank, analytical view of psychology and relationships like I’ve been seeing in a lot of films, thinking especially of Techine.

So many things I liked about it. Its technique reminded me of the earlier Chungking Express and Fallen Angels: jump editing; music video cuts, lighting and camera movement; shifting film stock (grainy, normal daylight, b/w). Those two earlier films were mostly style, though, and didn’t seem to have a lot of heart beyond some quirkiness and, ultimately, cuteness.

Happy Together, though, knocked me down with the intensity and truth of Lai Yiu-fai and Ho Po-wing and their relationship. The responsible Lai Yiu-fai is the provider type who nurtures but wants control in exchange; the cute boy Ho Po-wing is an insecure, spoiled kid who needs nurture, in fact demands it, but can’t stand not being the constant center of attention. Both are insecure, and both become jealous of the other because of it. It’s a dysfunctional relationship that causes pain for both of them, and Happy Together documents the dysfunction as if it were Greek tragedy, complete with hubris and the fall. The intense inevitability of what happens to the two men is as riveting as it is painful…and true. This is the type of relationship I saw in good Techine.

That relationship would have been enough for me, but the movie offers so much more. First there’s the way that no setting is left to chance. Buenos Aires is an intensely-realized city seen from the POV of a foreigner who doesn’t have much money and is scraping to get by. The metropolis is a collection of garish clubs, restaurant kitchens and tourist bars with a decrepit boarding house (with its shared facilities) and a slaughter house thrown in. Interesting in itself, the hardscrabble setting also reflects the strife-filled inner life of the two protagonists. No accident that the two men can’t make it to the vast openness of Iguazu Falls; that dynamic, strong, bright setting would not have been the right analog to their relationship even though they constantly long for it while looking at their Iguazu motion lamp.

With setting reflecting inner workings, it’s to be expected that, when Chang takes Lai Yiu-fai’s love to release it at the southern lighthouse, that setting is bright, open and naturally lit, and when he finally breaks free, Lai Yiu-fai is able to make the trip to Iguazu alone (though, he says, still feeling that Ho Po-wing should be there). We last see Lai Yiu-fai in the clear, sunny, clean daylight of Taipei, carrying a photo of Chang an free of the darkness of his relationship with Ho Po-wing; we last see Ho Po-wing alone in Lai Yiu-fai’s old apartment, crying and trying to arrange cigarette packages as reminders of Lai Yiu-fai’s affection. Bittersweet, even heart-rending, stuff.

And there are other cinematic flourishes that I love in this movie. We see Lai Yiu-fai from interiors a couple of times, shots that, along with frequent lens flair, reminded me of the camera and of that shot of Clyde from inside the bank after the first robbery he does with Bonnie. All those scenes take me back to French New Wave and remind me how truly revolutionary that movement was. I wonder if Happy Together could even have been imagined without the editing and self-conscious camera of those films. And then there’s the surfeit in this movie. There’s one whole section that consists of close-ups of Lai Yiu-fai sitting on the back of an open boat as the boat shifts around the industrial docks outside the hotel. Nothing happens, and this segment doesn’t advance the story one iota. It’s a brief moment of impressionist filmmaking that is there simply for mood and inner psychology. Eliot: objective correlative. Like the settings. Like the shots of Iguazu, both the ariel nature shots and the close-up lamp shots.

I remember being impressed with The Kids are All Right and wondering where else a film like that could have been made, a film that talks about the difficulty of families and relationships but uses a gay vocabulary. Here’s an answer: Hong Kong. Happy Together, too, puts a universal truth about human relationships into a gay language, but the real focus here is on the intensity and difficulty of love. Cruising and acting straight are merely gay-specific embellishment on the central concern of this film: the dynamics of a hard relationship and how to deal with them. This film is both beautiful and true.