Happy Together

The various filters, speeds and exposures through which Wong Kar-Wai presents his films would for most other directors seem little more than affectations. Indeed, on a purely aesthetic level, Wong’s films might not look so out of place when stacked next to a Tony Scott feature. But the ends to which Wong uses his stylistic touches separate him from the more flash-oriented players. His is the cinema of the broken heart, defined by elliptical structures and vibrant cinematography courtesy of Christopher Doyle (one wonders if his absence on Wong’s latest feature, My Blueberry Nights, was as much to blame for the director’s first stumble in nearly 15 years as his decision to make it his first English-language film). One of the most visible and most-beloved figures in contemporary art cinema, Wong’s precisely framed pictures stand out because of the universality of their emotion: when a shot freezes on an action as innocuous as a handshake or speeds into a blur as masses swarm around central characters in bustling urban areas, we do not see these effects but feel them.

Wong is a postmodernist of the heart, breaking up the narrative to get inside the memories of characters in a way that stresses the emotional, not intellectual, nature of metaphysics. It’s an approach that’s never been equaled, and the only time any other film managed to tap into that same emotional vein of fractured narrative, it took two auteurs – Michael Gondry and Charlie Kaufman – to approach the level of lonely ol’ Wong. His characters, whether located in the past (the anti-wuxia film Ashes of Time, the “Chinese Graffiti” throwback Days of Being Wild), the present or even the future (2046), search for love against vast backdrops. In most of his films, Wong places his characters in the middle of swarming urban environments, sweltering working class slums that are always the poorest financial and the richest cultural area of any metropolis.

Chungking Express took place in the titular, multinational sector of Hong Kong that erased cultural borders to make the tales of pain, loss, and vague, necessary hope look as universal as they felt, and Happy Together takes matters one step further. The story of two quarreling gay lovers, Happy Together whisks its Chinese leads to Argentina, using natural wonders (Iguazu Falls) and rundown cities (Buenos Aires) as a fitting background for the deteriorating relationship between the calm, gentle Lai Yiu-fai (Tony Leung) and the dynamo Ho Po-Wing (Leslie Cheung).

Opening with a splash of color as the couple leaves Hong Kong for Argentina, the film cuts harshly to black-and-white as the two enter into what we learn is but the latest of a series of devastating breakups instigated by Ho’s adulterous, abusive behavior and reconciled by his ability to win back Lai each time by sheepishly begging, “Let’s start over.” Mirroring Lai’s despair, the monochrome captures Ho’s almost psychopathic torture of his lover in crisp detail; unwilling to return immediately to Hong Kong, Lai gets a job at a local nightclub, where Ho routinely visits with a new man in tow each time. Some of these moments are almost too much to bear, watching the look on Leung’s face turn to pure agony as his love mocks him. Just as Lai nears the breaking point, Ho shows up at his doorstep, battered, bloodied and barely conscious.

At this stage, Happy Together reverts to full color, using the wide variety of canted angles, odd focal lenses and splashes of color to communicate both Lai’s excitement of nursing his ex, whose mangled hands are bandaged in place, back to health, as well as the stomach-churning undercurrent of understanding Lai won’t let himself recognize, a knowledge that Ho will still manipulate and coerce him back into misery. Wong’s precise casting allows the audience to better understand the divide between these two characters: Cheung, who appeared in Wong’s Days of Being Wild, where he also toyed with his image as a founding member of Cantopop, plays Ho like a rock star without the stardom, a balls-out loon with thirsts incapable of being slaked. Leung, on the other hand, is one of the most subdued and affecting of any actor of any nationality (or generation, for that mater). His strength lies not in the explosive movements that Cheung brilliantly unleashes but in the internalization of his feelings and thoughts until they bubble into his eyes, where they become unmistakable and devastating. To see Lai hurt is to see Leung hurt, which only compounds the effect of the poor man’s tribulations on the audience. Lai attempts to shield himself, resisting Ho’s physical and emotional teases, but his desires get the best of himself and he reenters into a romance with Ho, restarting the cycle.

Though the situation rapidly deteriorates, Wong maintains the use of color stock, revealing that the depressing starkness of black-and-white actually protected us somewhat from facing the full brunt of the realities of heartbreak. Yet the director softens Lai’s misery when he has the protagonist leave the nightclub to get work at a Chinese restaurant. There he meets Chang (Chang Chen), a Chinese ex-pat whom he befriends. Chang is everything that Ho isn’t: like Lai, he is calm and measured, a placid individual just looking for normalcy. So tuned to Lai’s frequency is he that Chang gets his own voiceover lines, in which he discusses his life and his budding friendship with Lai. He might even be gay: an attractive female co-worker makes a pass at him, but Chang lightly rebuffs her, explaining his actions to Lai with the excuse that he dislikes her voice. Chang prefers women’s voices to be “deep and low,” and when Lai sets down the phone to quickly perform and errand, Chang sees this and rushes to the phone as if checking the line just so Lai can brush against him when he returns to grab the receiver.

As Ho continues to push his relationship with Lai to its latest breaking point, Lai’s bond with Chang strengthens. Chang relates how he got exceptional hearing from an eye problem he suffered as a child that strengthened his other senses. “”I couldn’t see,” he says, “so I listened.” Thus, he is more empathetic and understanding of Lai, who’d long ago been blinded by the supernova of Ho’s diva-like radiance. Though their relationship never progresses to the romantic stage — at least so far as Wong shows us — the intimacy between the two, at last fully reciprocated for Lai, gives the beleaguered lover the courage to finally break from Ho for the last time. Once he does, however, he finds that Chang has left Buenos Aires, off to see another Argentine landmark.

Now alone after closing one door and having the other closed on him, Lai spirals into his darkest depression yet, stooping to meaningless sex in bathrooms and theaters to dull the pain. The sex in Happy Together constantly degenerates, from the passionate intercourse that opens the film to the loathing — much of it self-directed — in Lai’s later tryst with Ho. Finally, it becomes anonymous, something that Lai, once the person who longed for love, engages in for the visceral kick. The like-minded Chang’s “rejection” of him edges Lai closer to Ho’s characteristics, and his usage of cheap sex without stakes gives Lai an insight into Ho’s behavior. Lai’s shift toward Ho’s mannerisms is contrasted with Ho himself, who rails against his ex for the break-up but, secreted away from prying eyes, bursts into uncontrollable sobs of regret. Perhaps Ho’s flaw was not Machiavellian evil but an inability to properly express his feelings, which we can plainly see in private hem much closer to Lai’s typical mindset.

It’s tempting, and oh-so facile, to compare the film to Midnight Cowboy, that other story of the perils of gay love in society. Yet that film relied on naturalistic acting to tell an otherwise oversimplified and unrealistic story, while Wong uses poetic aestheticism to spin a believable tale. Too, Midnight Cowboy forced one of its characters to die for the film’s homoeroticism, a sort of false redemption that spoke more to its pulled punches and attempt to play to more conservative audiences. Wong, on the other hand, uses the physical pain inflicted upon one his gay characters to examine the emotional, even existential, plights of the pair. Furthermore, Wong presents this tumultuous love affair as the sort of turbulent romance that couples of any sexual preference could experience. Schlesinger condemned his latent homosexuals for their sin, while Wong, without ever breaking out a soapbox, demonstrates how gay love should not be separated from what some obsolete members of society consider to be “true” love. Ho and Chang could easily be two ladies vying, whether they know it or not, for Lai’s attention — in fact, the structure of an exploding, id-driven hedonist and the supportive, empathetic emotional rock standing at polar ends from a confused but ultimately affable protagonist somewhat prefigures an equally devastating account of broken love, Two Lovers.

However, as enthralling as the narrative is, Wong uses his characters for more than a mere love story. One of the film’s first shots, of Lai and Ho heading out to Argentina, shows a customs official stamping a passport. The dated stamps recall the expiration dates used in Chungking Express, a thinly-veiled reference to Hong Kong’s looming “expiration date” as a British colony before its handover to China three years later. Here, however, the characters openly come to symbolize Hong Kong’s transition. Lai and Ho represent the relationship between Hong Kong and the British power that once controlled it. British rule had its benefits — Wong, after all, is working with considerably more freedom than his contemporaries in the rest of China received — but the crown also exploited and manipulated the colony. It’s possible, then, that the Chang, less adventurous and inspirational but sturdier and more relatable to Lai, represents the China that would reacquisition Hong Kong in the same year. On the flip side is Chang, whose Taiwanese heritage reveals that he has his own unexamined issues dealing with colonization and cultural appropriation, in his case stemming from Chinese aggression.

This subtext might explain why the central idea of Happy Together is displacement, as Hong Kong fits neither with England nor, with its use of Cantonese over Mandarin, much of the rest of China. Lai, the clearest representative of an uncertain Hong Kong, wanders between two partners, weighing his pros and cons when with one and feeling utterly alone when completely separated from both. Lai says that his “happiest days” with Ho occurred when the more careless man got himself attacked and had to rely on Lai, thus forcing the volatile lover to calm down. Following World War II, Hong Kong recovered almost instantly from Japanese occupation as Mao’s Cultural Revolution led many of China’s businesses to relocate their industries to Hong Kong. While Britain was busy waging battles in India to delay the inevitable, Hong Kong enjoyed prosperity and development. But the desire to be a part of their own people must have weighed on the denizens of Hong Kong, and for all the fear of change there is an anxiousness to get away from Britain (Ho) to be with the more similar China (Chang). Hong Kong was one of the last British colonies that the once-mighty empire retained, and its transfer affected both. No wonder, then, that Ho breaks down so completely; he’s crying not only for his own loss but the end of the final chapter of British imperialism as that nation’s avatar.

Though the story occurs in Argentina, Lai’s actions bring him closer and closer to a return to Hong Kong to set aside his feelings of displacement and anomie: first he works as the doorman of the nightclub, always standing outside the club looking in, before moving to the kitchen of a Chinese restaurant and, finally, to a slaughterhouse, where he notes that the odd hours re-tune his body to Hong Kong time. His time with Chang, beside prompting the final split with Ho, also inspire Lai to return home, where he must face penance for stealing his father’s money to finance his trip. The film’s original Chinese title, Chun gwong cha sit, is an idiomatic expression meaning “to expose something indecent,” less a reference to its display of homosexuality and more to its demonstration that indecent love is far more complex and harmful a situation than which genders are involved. The English title, taken from the Turtles hit that appears in the film as a cover by Danny Chung, is more germane to portraying the actual depths of the love story. At first it is a bitter ironic headline above the acrimony between partners, but Lai’s infatuation with Chang and their compatibility suggest that the title really applies more to their relationship. By traveling to the waterfalls before returning to Hong Kong and subsequently stopping in Taipei to take a photo of Chang from his family’s shop, Lai sets up a pursuit of Chang and the possibility for stable love between the two as they reenter China. Lai and Chang, the symbols of Hong Kong and China, respectively, may indeed find happiness together, forming a symbiotic bond that advances them both. Who could have guessed this emotional gut-punch could end with such a hopeful implication?

Happy Together has been released on Blu-Ray by the fine folks at Kino International, and the results are revelatory. Previous home video releases, including Kino’s previous two, flattened and cropped editions, have largely been awful (check out screengrab comparisons at DVD Beaver to see the horrendous quality of so many editions), but Kino’s restoration here is astonishing.

The rich, often surreal color tones are captured in perfect clarity and the soundtrack, though not an essential part of the package, is well-balanced. On its own, the work on the film qualifies Kino’s BD as one of the best Blu-Ray releases of the year, and, frankly, Happy Together isn’t as packed with extras as one might expect from either Criterion or Eureka! However, the two included features, an interview with Wong for the Museum of the Moving Image and Buenos Aires Zero Degree: The Making of Happy Together, a combination behind-the-scenes doc/deleted scenes collection that shows how Wong brought a crew to South America without a script and originally shot a three-hour film with numerous subplots that were dropped, are exemplary. The documentary offers a great insight into Wong’s process of drawing a very specific emotional thread from judiciously editing a jumble of unformed narrative, while the interview provides a fair overview of Wong’s attitudes and influences that feels far shorter than its 45 minutes due to Wong’s disarming, amusing nature. Complete with trailers for the film and Wong’s previous feature, Fallen Angels (also available on a terrific Blu-Ray from Kino), Happy Together belongs in any cinephile’s collection, and it’s a great entry point into Wong’s complicated but visceral, deeply felt style. One of the video highlights of the year.

– Jake Cole is a journalism undergraduate at Auburn University who routinely writes about film, television and music on his blog, Not Just Movies. He aspires to become a critic upon graduation, but nobody’s had the heart to explain to him that criticism is dead. Should be a nasty surprise.

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