Andrew Worsdale
Very infrequently does a movie stick to the top of my mouth. I’ve become inured to seeing mad-ass Hollywood rubbish, that our dear distributors launch on the stupefied public with as many as 37 prints, to satisfy movie mall “taste”.
Happy Together is made by Hong Kong wunderkind Wong Kar-Wai and is released on Friday June 12 with only one print that will travel from one plush arty mall to another, while forgettable trash like Deep Rising gets 51 prints, in the hope that the faceless masses will gobble it up.
One of the reasons is that Wong deservedly won the best director award at last year’s Cannes film festival. The other is that it is a gay movie, so Ster-Kinekor is confident of that niche market and hopes its single print will travel across the country for a long time. (If I’ve got anything to do with it, it will. Happy Together is by far my favourite movie of the year so far.)
The film is almost without dialogue and incredibly melancholic, infused with dazzling camerawork that alternates between murky black and white and high-contrast lurid colours. The story involves two lovers from Hong Kong who take a holiday in Argentina to breathe new life into their relationship. Tony Leung plays the stable Lai who takes menial jobs as a dishwasher, a doorman at a tango bar and even one in a slaughterhouse. His more erratic partner Ho, played by Leslie Cheung, goes to work as a rent boy, putting their decidedly shaky relationship in more jeopardy. When he arrives at his lover’s one-room apartment one day, beaten up by queer- bashers, the characteristically tender Lai nurses him back to health.
Not a whole lot else happens in this movie – there are no guns, no bad guys, no temptresses, no inane plotting … It is simply a tale of two men who shout at each other, make love and fall in and out of love, incapable of being together and unable to stay apart.
That it’s a gay story is of no real consequence. No matter which way you lean, you’ve had romances that are both intolerable and intoxicating. As Wong said, “This is just a love story.”
But the director infuses the basic narrative with a wondrous style. Using his regular cameraman Christopher Doyle, he mixes film- stocks and places Dutch tilts next to time- lapse photography. The lustrous score includes moody tango music from Astor Piazolla and Thomas Mendez, then Frank Zappa’s Chunga’s Revenge and I Have Been in You (You Have Been in Me), and ends up with the film’s title song, Happy Together, by the Turtles. It is a mesmerising mlange of styles – flashy, but never style just for style’s sake.
The film’s original title, incidentally, translates as “Spring Brilliance Suddenly Pours Out” and is the perfect indication of Wong’s sensitive style. He studied graphic design at the Hong Kong polytechnic where he developed an obsession with photography and adored the works of Robert Frank, Henri Cartier-Bresson and Richard Avedon.
Combining this style influence with melodrama, he worked for the Hong Kong Television Broadcast Company as a scriptwriter and production assistant on daily soap operas, then moved to writing features.
Wong finally made his directorial debut in 1988 with the feature As Tears Go By. Since then he’s delved in different genres – a gangster pic and a love-lorn cop romance (Chung King Express).
“To me each film is only a postcard. Not a book,” says Wong. And each one is perfectly illustrated. See it now before the single print becomes scratched beyond repair. And take note that movies are not about good guys and bad guys, but about visual poetry.