Happy Together
By Jonathan Rosenbaum
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There are plenty of interesting aspects to this epileptic fresco. There’s the passionate treatment of gay sex and romance by a straight director, featuring two of the hottest stars of Hong Kong cinema (Tony Leung and Leslie Cheung, both of whom have worked with Wong before). There’s the charged and ambiguous friendship between Lai (Leung) and Chang (Chang Chen, the 14-year-old hero of Edward Yang’s 1991 film A Brighter Summer Day, who’s since become a big pop star in Taiwan). There’s an oblique but pungent response to the end of colonial rule in Hong Kong, a sense that the characters aren’t sure where or who they are as they approach the uncertainty of millennial crossover with fretful wanderlust. (A key phrase recurring in the narration and dialogue is, “We could start over.”) There’s also a sidelong glance at the way a particular subculture (Chinese) can reduce a dominant local culture (Buenos Aires) to a few pop staples: tangos and milongas by Astor Piazzolla, tunes by Frank Zappa, cigarettes, two sleazy bars, one lurid lava lamp. Ironically, what prevents Happy Together from becoming anything more than the sum of these parts is the same thing that keeps it alive: Wong Kar-wai’s cult status.
It’s not clear whether any director consciously sets out to attract a cult, but once he has one, several choices are possible. Like Quentin Tarantino–who served as distributor of Chungking Express, and who became a cult figure himself after only one feature–he can shed his skin, redirect his audience’s expectations, and alter his constituency. Tarantino’s new film Jackie Brown reconfigures him for friend and foe alike; after training his audience to expect certain things from his movies–cross-references to his previous films, his presence as an actor, jokey treatments of gore and violence, repeated use of the word “nigger,” and unorthodox treatments of narrative chronology–Tarantino made good on only the last two, and even then he shifted the rules somewhat by allowing “nigger” to be spoken only by a black character, and by repeating a narrative sequence from different viewpoints much as Stanley Kubrick had in The Killing. (A sadder example of a filmmaker disappointing expectations is George Romero, who went from being a revered cult director to a failed mainstream director and then retreated into silence.) A less calculated redirection of expectations can be found in the last two features of David Lynch–another cult figure who became so overhyped that a critical backlash became inevitable. In contrast, cult favorites like Woody Allen and John Waters, whatever their ups and downs, usually manage to satisfy or at least placate their most ardent fans, perhaps because in their cases personality counts for more than invention.
Like its characters, Happy Together is less a film with a subject than a film about not being able to find one. At best it’s a movie about being at loose ends, though it seems to mean something more for some Chinese viewers. Asian film specialist Tony Rayns, who subtitled the film, claims that it’s “one of the most searing accounts ever made of doomed and destructive love, but also a strong and very moving affirmation of romantic folly.” Presumably Wong hopes so, if only to justify all this lurching around. For me Happy Together is more like a striking mannerist style in search of content, made poignant only by the homesickness and emotional confusion underlying the effort.
