Lonely boys
Wong Kar-Wai gets down to basics
by Gary Susman
HAPPY TOGETHER. Written and directed by Wong Kar-Wai. With Tony Leung, Leslie Cheung, and Chang
Chen. A Kino International release. Opens Friday at the Avon.
What's so great about Wong Kar-Wai? That's what I wondered when the Hong Kong
filmmaker's Chungking Express reached these shores two years ago, when
everyone from movie populist Quentin Tarantino (who shepherded the film's US
release) to the academics at Film Comment hailed Wong as the next
Godard. Sure, Wong and cinematographer Christopher Doyle had style to burn, and
Wong was capable of blending gritty film noir conventions with more rarefied
art-film philosophizing (though I found his mix used the most inconsequential
elements of both). Most of all, Wong had a feeling for the rhythms of city
life, especially the all-night metropolis of Hong Kong. But when a city is your
protagonist, the human characters can get lost. Wong's follow-up film,
Fallen Angels (to be released in America next spring), is essentially
Chungking Express all over again, with all the good and bad that
implies.
Now comes Happy Together, which finds Wong in self-imposed exile in
Buenos Aires and his focus narrowed down to just two (sometimes three)
characters. His theme of loneliness and missed connections is distilled down to
its bitterest, most human essence. It's a wrenching movie, and a good one.
The film is narrated by Lai Yiu-Fai (Tony Leung), who's musing over his
break-up with Ho Po-Wing (Leslie Cheung). The two men had moved from Hong Kong
to Argentina, only to find that the alien land exacerbated their differences.
When their car broke down on a trip to Iguazu Falls, the resulting argument
found Po-Wing storming off for good.
Yiu-Fai finds a job as a doorman at a seedy tango bar in Buenos Aires;
meanwhile Po-Wing becomes a street hustler, occasionally reappearing in
Yiu-Fai's life and taunting him with his conquests. But when Po-Wing shows up
at Yiu-Fai's tiny room after being badly beaten by a client, Yiu-Fai nurses him
back to health. Despite his constant squabbling amid the squalor with the
prima-donna-ish Po-Wing, the obsessed Yiu-Fai will look back on this time with
fondness.
Later, after Po-Wing walks out on him again, Yiu-Fai befriends a straight,
younger man named Chang (Chang Chen), who is traveling to the so-called
lighthouse at the end of the world (in Tierra del Fuego) before returning to
Taipei. Chang inspires Yiu-Fai as a model of emotional self-sufficiency; by the
end, Yiu-Fai's future is uncertain, but Chang's lesson gives him some small
measure of hope.
Wong has given his actors a real challenge, not just because the script is
largely improvised, but because there are great, long stretches where nothing
of consequence happens, where Yiu-Fai and Po-Wing simply pass the time, cooking
breakfast or playing soccer in the street or waiting around in vain for each
other to show. As the more serious of the two, the stoic Leung (Chungking
Express, Hard Boiled) makes his obsession credible without seeming
foolish. Cheung (Farewell My Concubine) makes his character, for all his
flightiness, a worthy object of desire. Chang is touching as the unworldly but
perceptive young man who senses Yiu-Fai's broken heart without fathoming the
cause.
If Wong is short on plot, he's long on atmosphere. (And I do mean long; shots
and sequences go on forever, as if his editor had fallen asleep. There is
little point to the lugubrious pace, except the director's own endless
fascination with whatever he's watching at the time.) There are a few shots of
Buenos Aires that suggest the neon-lit urban frenzy of Wong's Hong Kong work,
but most of the film is shot in a grimy slum on streets whose only life comes
from the occasional bouncing soccer ball. The celebrated Doyle switches from a
grainy black-and-white stock during flashback sequences to a high-contrast
color stock during the present-day sequences, and the joke is, one can barely
tell the difference. The sense of dislocation, solitude, and desolation is
profound, whether in Yiu-Fai's claustrophobic room or at the spectacular Iguazu
Falls or at the lighthouse at the end of the world.
Wong also deserves credit for creating a gay couple without resorting to
stereotyping. His story is universally resonant. As Yiu-Fai notes -- and as
Wong's whole body of work testifies -- "Turns out that lonely people are all
the same."