In pursuit of gay happiness

Happy Together (1997)
Language: Cantonese with English subtitles
Price: 399
DVD released by: Palador

Wong Kar-Wai’s Happy Together is perhaps his boldest movie to date — a dysfunctional and ultimately doomed gay relationship between two Hong Kong expatriates living in Argentina. However, the biggest irony is in the movie’s title itself because neither is anyone happy in the relationship between the two characters Lai Yiu Fai (Tony Leung) and Ho Po Wing (Leslie Cheung), nor are they always together. Their relationship is a continuous process of breaking up and making up.

Getting away from Hong Kong, the duo ends up in Buenos Aires, Argentina. While searching for a waterfall they anger each other and go their separate ways. Fai takes up a job at a bar and Wing turns to a life of hustling. Their paths cross again and when Fai sees Wing’s new lifestyle, he is destroyed. Somehow they still find themselves back together, but their relationship fails to stand the test of time and falls apart again.

Fai finds a new job at a restaurant and befriends Chang, a fellow Chinese from Taiwan. Chang’s sincerity helps Lai out of depression. However, Chang soon leaves Buenos Aires and this makes Fai sink into depression again. To combat the loneliness, he starts having sex in anonymous bathrooms and movie theatres.

After a few months, Wing contacts Fai to restart the relationship again. But this time Fai refuses. Eventually, Fai decides to return to Hong Kong. On his way back, he visits Chang’s family. He steals a picture of Chang as a remembrance.

This is the film that cemented Wong Kar-Wai’s reputation as one of the leading film-makers of our time. Christopher Doyle shoots the film in lovely shades of rich, lurid colour. Though set in Buenos Aires, the duo is hardly shown to interact with the Argentines thus reinstating their sense of isolation and emotional estrangement from homeland. Summing up, this is a story of two people who don’t belong and don’t want to belong, and yet are sad at not belonging. Though they could have been happy together, it was never to be.